I will not buy any more WD drives. WD = Worst Drives

Since September 2010:

  1. Warranty replacement of 250GB with 250GB Blue. Crashed

  2. Warranty replacement 250GB Blue with 1TB Black. Crashed

  3. Warranty replacement of 1TB Black.

  4. Bought another 1TB Black. Made RAID 1 with the above drive. Crashed yesterday

  5. Bought 2TB Green. Crashed

  6. Warranty replacement of 2TB Green.

  7. Bought 250GB Blue notebook drive. Crashed

  8. Warranty replacement of 250GB Blue.

Can’t blame me that I did not try. No more comments.

Sorry to hear.  I’ve only had one WD drive that was essentially DoA (and that was still after a few months that it died).  May I ask if you buy your drives from a retailer (e.g.: Fry’s), or if you have them shipped to you direct (e.g.: Newegg)?  The reason I ask is that I know a lot of people who get DoA or almost-DoA drives after shipping with UPS.  I’m not sure if this is the case anymore, but UPS used to have a line in the fine print saying that your package could be subject to a drop of up to 6 feet (2m) during shipping.  I buy all of my drives from Newegg, and it is because of the aforementioned fine print that I always use FedEx for shipping.

Also, stay away from the Caviar Green series.  Far, FAR away.  (e.g.: this thread)

I bought them directly from the retailer. In my entire professional life (20 years), I never seen so many failures in such a short period of time from the same manufacturer. I used to keep WD at high esteem and all my drives are WD. But since they changed into green / blue / black categories they are not what they used to be.

About handling, I do not think that dropping a packed/wrapped HDD from 2 meters can damage it. After all, WD is saying in the specifications that FAEX series can withstand 300G for 2ms when not operating. So dropping the drive cannot dammage it. It is just pure and simple BAD MANUFACTURING.

They should pey for all the data lost because of this. It is unnacceptable for a drive to crash in such a short period of time when you give 5 years warranty and “High performance, high capacity, best-in-class reliability, and cutting edge technology make up WD Caviar Black, the ideal drive for those who demand only the best” (bull**bleep**).

Did all those drives failed with the same computer/system/place?

If it is so, then check your power supply. And also check for other special conditions,

like case vibration (same case?), temperature or humidity.

Also try another shop, you cannot know how bad they where handled.

What OS do you use (Win?/Linux?)?

Did there were some indication of failure, like an error or other ?

These are too many failures, seems almost like unreal.

PD: regardless of what anybody says, droping a hd to the floor is a forbiden act.

never do that, and if it happened by accident, proactively replace the drive, even if it

works. it is the only safe choise.

Happened on 3 different systems. Notebook with WinXP/Win 7 32bit, desktop with WinXP/Win 7 32 bit, desktop with Win 7 64bit.

Power supply works great and all wall plugs in my office are protected from power supply spikes. On laptop it is no problem of power failure and on desktop I have 200 EUR value, 1000 Watt power supply + APC UPS.

Hard drives where not dropped or improper handled by me. I do not know how they where handled until I bought them and it is beyond my control. As far as I am concerned WD could had handled them improperly. Blaming handling to justify poor manufacturing it is a very convenient solution. HDDs were not born yesterday, everybody knows how to handle them. More of it, I have a constant and trusty supplier who is buying these components directly from the importer and I always pick up my orders in person.

The HDDs where changed imediatelly they had errors: bad sectors or suddenly not seen by the BIOS or windows

Funnny thing is that I went today with the 2 x 1 TB Black (both crashed in a RAID 1 on Saturday) to a specialised data recovery company to see if I can get back my data and they were going to reccommend me to buy a WD Black to save the recovered data. When they saw my drives they withdraw the reccommendation.

Another unpleasant thing after loosing my data it is that if they will need to crack open the drive in a dust free environment to retrieve data, I will loose my warranty. So I cannot change the drive or get any reimbursment. 5 year warranty and hundreds of dollars flushed down the toilet.

You will not loose your warranty, call WD tech support and inform them that you need to perform data recovery.

@oxter:

I already called one of the authorised importers from Romania, warranty department, to inform them and to ask if I can open the drives to recover my data. They told me that I cannot open the drive and that they need the drive to be checked by their department and to justify the warranty replacement. Basicly, if I open the drive, I loose the warranty.

The thing is, in such drive failure cases, the more you play with the drive, the more you risk to not be able to recover your data. So no way I will let them check the drive before I recover my data.

I do not know what is your position in the WD company dear Oxter, but if you have such power I would very much appreciate if you inform Romanian WD importers or send me an official email that a customer can do this and that WD approve such practice so I can get drive replacement (even I prefer the money back) after I recover my data (I hope).

Thank you for your advice, I just opened a ticket on WD Support

Im just a moderator. I was just quoting the WD replacement policies.

cosmin wrote:

In my entire professional life (20 years), I never seen so many failures in such a short period of time from the same manufacturer.

You are using them with _ only _ a software RAID setup, right?

I just have to ask.

Because, being a professional, you would have noticed the:

* Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Green Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.


* Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Blue Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.


* Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing.

Cosmin, please private message me the serial numbers of your drives as well as the RMA number.

@cosmin : you are certainly not alone in having so many HDD failuures (mine all being Too Many Bad Sectors).  The time, effort, downtime, frustration and wasted money is unbearabe…

@RoofingGuy

I was wondering when somebody will quote what you just quoted. If you want to believe that marketing mambo-jumbo be my quest. Apart from this marketing text (this is for this and this is for that) I see no difference in drive specifications (i.e WD Black and WD RE3) the reccomend them for RAID or not. And as far as I know WD Black series used to be WD enterprise series until some time ago.

I did not said I am an IT guru but I assembled and debuged enough hardware and until now I can count on my fingers the drive failures I had. Now I had 5 failures in 6 months, all WD, all during warranty, most of them after couple of months of usage under normal conditions. This RAID failure was the cherry on the top.

I used hardware RAID (Intel Matrix, ICH9).

I have several servers working non-stop for 3 years now, with both software and hardware RAID and with non-enterprise WD drives (RAID 1 and RAID 5). But back then, WD used to manufacture good drives.

This rate of failure I encountered today it is unnacceptable.

cosmin wrote:

 

I see no difference in drive specifications (i.e WD Black and WD RE3)

The current Enterprise drives have TLER; the current Desktop drives don’t.

When a current Desktop drive encounters an error, the drive can take several minutes trying to recover, using the deep recovery cycle.

Hardware RAID setups will drop the disk from the array if the drive hasn’t recovered within 7-15 seconds.

The Enterprise drives will not enter the deep recovery cycle when the drive encounters an error, thus they will not drop out of the RAID array and will not have the entire drive marked as “Bad” by the RAID controller when one bad sector has been encountered.

Just curious… if the drives were admittedly used in a hardware RAID, and aren’t warranted by WD to perform in a hardware array because they don’t have TLER enabled, wouldn’t it have been fraudulent on your part to have had the drives replaced under warranty?

@RoofingGuy:

You do have a way of losing the big picture and you pick your subject as serve you better.

About your little curiosity… Please read WD Black specifications (bottom of page 1, Applications, second bullet)

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701276.pdf

“Desktop / Consumer RAID Environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 / RAID-1).”

So, how fraudulent am I?

About that TLER thingy…

From what you said and what I understood (thank you for the explanation), when you have a drive without TLER and you encounter an error on that drive, then the RAID controller put a logical mark on your entire drive saying that the entire drive it is bad and cannot be used anymore in the matrix.

Well, if I had this issue, I would not be here right now. Both drives were dead. I removed them from the matrix and I tried to acces them as a normal drive. It was not possible due to hardware failure. After diagnostic at a specialised data recovery company the electronic part was found to be malfunctioning.

If you will carefully read my posts you will see that the problem with these 2 drives was only the climax of my problems with WD drives lately.

I would love to tell you that my RAID control damaged the drives electronics or that I have 3 faulty computers or that I have power supply fluctuations, but it is not the case. Till now all fault points to the WD drives. And as a proof, all replaced drives are working fine right now on the same machines.

I wonder what you will quote now…

cosmin wrote:

@RoofingGuy:

 

You do have a way of losing the big picture and you pick your subject as serve you better.

 

About your little curiosity… Please read WD Black specifications (bottom of page 1, Applications, second bullet)

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701276.pdf

 

“Desktop / Consumer RAID Environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 / RAID-1).” 

I think you’ll find this article from the official Windows Home Server Team Blog related to consumer/home RAID’s very enlightening: Why RAID is not a consumer technology 

Most of the times, a consumer configuration means low end while Enterprise means high end. Any drive advertised for a consumer RAID is the same as not advertised for RAID at all, as the closest thing to a consumer RAID would be the software RAID, this is why the external RAID drives from WD (Sharespace, MBWII, MBSII, all use Caviar Green) can’t be set to a RAID anymore if you format all of the drives; it’s because they run a software RAID, not a hardware configuration…

Other than that, you can’t just compare the public specs of the Caviar Blacks and the RE3s and say than other than the TLER then the drives should just be dropped out and not dead. You can’t tell what do they look like INSIDE, the firmware they have, the manufacturing process, the materials used, the strain they were designed to take before the saturation point and fail…

Dude it’s way more than you think, all RAID (Enterprise) drives from all hard drive manufacturers are on a different level than the consumer drives. It’s like Toyota and Lexus; they are both cars with four wheels made from the same company, but you know that they are not on the same level. You can’t just compare them with the classical “Lexus is just an overpriced luxury Toyota” or in this case “The RE3s are just overpriced TLER Caviar Blacks”.

Caviar Blacks were NEVER Enterprise at any point of the past, just look at WD’s legacy drives section and you’ll see that they have had the RE’s from the start… RE, RE2, RE3, RE4, no Caviar Black there. Your immense back luck with WD drives is out of my understanding, there’s something wrong somewhere. But the last drive fails were to be expected if you were using them that way… Just look around here and you’ll know you’re not the only one who tried low end drives on a configuration that needs high end drives. You’ll note that it’s a shared story and results.

So many dead drives… I kinda feel bad for you, but I honestly don’t know what to tell you…  :S

i believe Intel Matrix ICH9 is software raid not hardware as it has no cache and the cpu does all the work also raid 1 and 5 = enterprise usage and running servers is not a consumer environments so im not suprised the drives failed so get server drives and also stop using raid 5 with software raid