Looking for adivce on WD Black problems

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hi,

I have been having problems with a WD Black 1TB in a reasonably good quality USB 3 enclosure.

Firstly, on occasion it will disconnect / reconnect.

About a week ago I turned on my enclosure to find that the WD drive was unallocated. After many hours of trying to recover the partition  and files I finally gave up as the corruption was too great and although I did recover some files many were missing.

The enclosure also has a Hitachi drive which is much older but works flawlessly.

I reformatted and got the drive going again then fired up WD Lifeguard and did an extended test.

This failed with “too many bad sectors”. The smart data is find and HD sentinal shows the drive as healthy without any problems. I did the test again with the same result but it happened much further in - at least 90 mins whereas the first one was about 5 mins in.

Whilst I was doing the file recovery on two occasions the drive disconnected and reconnected and on one other try I had some kind of sector read error all making me have to start again.

As a result each time this happened in the file recovery my raw read error went up  usually by about 3. It was 0 even after the drive ended up unallocated. It is now 10. Not sure if this is relevant …

I was beginning to suspect the usb 3 enclosure or controller but the Hitachi drive in there is working well.

All these errors seem to happen with intensive copying or operations and at most of the points in recovery the drive reached 50 degrees (still in the range of it’s operating temp I believe though).

As I am writing this I have connected the enclosure to usb 2 and doing an extended test. However, this is going to be 8 hours long instead of 2 due to the speed drop. It has been going 3 hours and no error / abort yet and I’m betting it will go through.

Logically I am not sure what I should do since the Hitachi works fine over the same interface but this Black drive is giving problems. Also I don’t remember having problems up till recently.

Are there any known problems with WD drives over usb 3 interfaces that might not affect other drives?

If anyone has some clues or ideas I’d be interested to hear them.

2

Hello there and welcome to the WD community.

I have not seen any issues using this drive on a USB 3.0 interface, but lets see if another user can share some tips and information on this matter.

3

Thanks for the welcome.

USB 2 passed but now the USB 3 is also passing. I had unplugged it and replaced the fan which needed to be done. Decided to plug into the second port on my card and now I’m pretty confused.

Still I’ll wait to see if anyone has ideas or not.

4

I have seen all sorts of problems with USB 3.0. I have seen the connector on a motherboard fail. I have seen add-on cards fail. I have seen cables fail, including the cable inside a case connecting the 20-pin motherboard connector to the front ports. I have seen drives fail. I have seen external docks fail.

In other words, you need to eliminate some variables. Use a different USB connector if available. Test the drive in another PC. Switch cables. Etc.

“Are there any known problems with WD drives over usb 3 interfaces that might not affect other drives?”

I do not believe this is your problem.

P.S. I’ve seen the lights on external docks flicker because the connection is not stable. One vendor told me that USB 3.0 cables are often not manufactured correctly.

5

Thanks PC-Cobbler and I think you are right about unstable failures.

I decided to plug into the other port on my Asus U3S6 card and the drive passed all extended tests.

I then plugged it back into the original port and it fails. I then did the same for the hitachi drive and that failed on the same port so it looks like I’ve got a dodgy port.

Bummer!