Caviar Blue - Are they all going to fail?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have had a large quantity of the Caviar Blue 500 Gb drives fail is the last few weeks. Many are from Acer systems but not all.

They include the WD5000AAJS and WD5000AAKS.

They sound like they are resetting and then the motor slows down and it resets. The process starts again.

What is killing these drives?

What part is failing?

Can you swap main boards with a good one to recover data?

Should I replace all of these drives now, before they fail?

Are new WD drive suffering the same problems?

2

When you say large quantity, how many?  Also, have you attempted to contact WD about this?  And, hopefully, you do have all your data backed up, right? 

3

First and foremost you should run WD Data Lifeguard Dignostic to check their condition!

4

in the last month i have had close to 20 fail on us.  i operate a small computer store and have had to return many drives, all caviar blue, majority are 500gb but not all, some 3.5 inch some 2.5 inch, 16mb and 32mb cache.  the only thing that is really in common is the line… caviar blue.  i am shocked to see that western digital has not addressed this issue yet as i know i am not the only store seeing this issue.  when seagate had a manufacture defect, they jumped on it fast and developed a firmware fix, this however has been a problem i have been seeing steadily coming in my door and increasing over the last 3 months.  at first i thought it was a strange coincidence but now i am know it must be a defect.  i switched to selling western digital hard drives because of all the headaches the seagate failure caused me, this however is worse due to all the data recovery i am having to do.  with the seagates i kept a good controller board around and imaged onto something else, this issue is also causing bad sectors and such.  please look into this issue WD and find a solution fast, as i am generating a linch mob outside my store due to data loss and downtime.  you can tell people to make backups incase this kind of issue happens but very few people do and then it becomes my fault which in turn,  ultimately looks like its due to bad manufacturing.