Having a bad time with some WD Black 5TB drives

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I bought a pair of WD Black 5TB drives in October 2016.

Starting in April 2017, I began to have problems with one of those drives. It would randomly disappear from my computer after a reboot. Not only would it disappear from Windows, it wasn’t even being recognized under my BIOS. I tried multiple things, such as swapping the SATA data cable, swapping the PSU power cable, but those didn’t help. I had the most success when I would open up the side of my case and hot unplug & replug the SATA data cable, and the drive would magically come back to life. But, once that stopped working, I had to RMA the drive.

I got a replacement drive in May 2017. Now, guess what? My replacement drive is exhibiting the exact same problem right now.

The 2nd drive that I originally bought has been working great this entire time!

Is there anything I can do? Or did I just get a bad drive, as well as a bad replacement? I checked S.M.A.R.T. info and everything looks okay there.

2

You may have already done this but just checking you said you changed the cable, but did you also try different SATA sockets?

Could be that your SATA socket you’re using on your motherboard is faulty?

I had a drive not show up at all on one socket that may have a had some pressure put on it by a graphics card being a bit snugly close to it with a cable attached.

Maybe worth a try if you’ve only changed the SATA cable and not the socket itself.