RAW Read Errors, help!

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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And a follow up:

I just got off (or I’d rather say after 10mins of waiting with no response) the phone with WD’s tech support line. Now at least one thing is clear.

All the replacement drives WD send out for RMA are refurbished drives.

Isn’t it nice? The girl on the support line confirmed all the do is a write-zero on the returned drives and send them right out as replacement. And she asked me if I want to have another replacement, with a refurbished drive.

I told her no, I want a replacement with a new drive since It’s been 3 weeks and I don’t want to deal with this mess any more. And that’s where she disappeared. She said “I’ll go get my supervisor” and i was left on the phone. After 10 mins of nothing I hang up.

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Refurbished replacements are standard practice among HDD manufacturers, and I can understand why. Imagine how many unscrupulous users would be tempted to intentionally damage their drives just prior to end of warranty in order to obtain a new replacement. That said, I would hope and expect that any replacement drive would be subjected to a rigorous recertification process, along the same lines as a newly manufactured drive.

A zero-fill procedure is to be expected since the previous customer’s data must be erased. However, a drive must then be subjected to a full read test to weed out any bad sectors. The drive maintains two defect lists, a primary defect list (P-list) and a grown defect list (G-list). The P-list contains those bad sectors discovered during manufacturing, while the G-list contains those bad sectors that subsequently arise during normal usage. During recertification the G-list would be transferred to the P-list, and the G-list would then be cleared. I would expect that all the SMART data would be reset, except for perhaps the Power On Hours Count.

During manufacturing, WD’s drives are subjected to a calibration procedure that determines, among other things, the limits of thermal flying height control and the optimum preamplifier gains for each head. These gains are determined by monitoring the read error rate and choosing the gain that results in the least errors. These tests are referred to as Read Channel Optimisation (ARCO). The same tests are performed once more at an elevated temperature (“hot ARCO”). The calibration data are then stored in flash memory on the PCB. I believe the test logs are also written to various firmware modules in a hidden System Area (SA) on the platters.

I expect that there would also be cases where a drive may be recertified as a lesser capacity model by switching off a bad head or a bad surface.

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So I guess it is totally fine that refurbished drive shows high RRER and Current Pending Sectors?

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xkm121 wrote:

My thread in the WD support section is deleted.

 

This is just nice. Good work WD. Really good work.  :frowning:

Please check your private messages.

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I checked. Still no sign of the promised help. All i got was the message from yesterday “your post was deleted”.

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@xkm121, you wrote … “So I guess it is totally fine that refurbished drive shows high RRER and Current Pending Sectors?” Of course it’s not OK, but I’m just trying to make sense of this bizarre thread. My own experience with refurbished drives has been mixed. I once RMA-ed about a dozen drives to Maxtor and received 4 duds in return. That was prior to their eventual acquisition by Seagate.

That said, ISTM that the girl on the support line must have understated WD’s refurbishment procedure. At least I very much hope so. Of course that doesn’t explain why so many users are experiencing problems similar to your own. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe WD doesn’t subject their refurbished drives to a complete recertification process.

Personally I believe that rotating storage is pushing the limits of current technology, so I’m not at all surprised that today’s drives are far less reliable than those of 10 years ago. In fact, considering the tolerances involved, I find it incredible that they are even manufacturable, let alone remotely reliable.

I have just one more suggestion. If you are disaffected with WD’s products, why not ask WD if they will send you a Hitachi HDD as a replacement? I don’t know if anyone has tried this, but you never know.

I know it doesn’t mitigate your own troubles, but there are many similar stories in Seagate’s forums where users have received replacement drives that have failed within a short time. In fact a good Seagate drive will usually report a normalised RRER score in the range of 110 to 120. AIUI, a score of 120 reflects 0 errors (very rare) while a value of 110 corresponds to 10 errors in 250 million sectors.

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  1. I was promised to receive help from WD by the moderator robthief yesterday when he deleted my thread. Yet I get nothing.

  2. Before posting up I contacted WD’s email support line on Monday. They promised reply within 48hrs. Still I have nothing.

  3. I called WD’s phone line for help. I was left hanging on the line for 10 mins.

4, My drivers RRER value is still steady increasing. I still have Current Pending Sectors stuck at 5. And I still cannot access one volume on the drive.

Yes, I understand modern HDD is no longer reliable,

But I am no manufacture of HDD. I am just ONE end user who paid for his product and want it to WORK. I just want it to WORK normally. I feel that WD customer support is just ignoring me right now.

I feel sad and hurt.

To fzabkar:

I don’t know if it is possible to ask for a Hitachi. Do you know which model of Hitachi should I ask for?

Also, on a different question. How can you completely clone one HDD onto another? I have been calling Microsoft  and Adobe for product reactivation for the last 3 weeks due to constant reinstalling. And they are now suspecting me.  More frustration for me.

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I would expect that product activation would be tied to the HDD serial number, so even if you made a sector-by-sector clone, you might still find that the activation codes might not be valid.

As for a Hitachi, and assuming that WD does eventually respond to you again (maybe they’re just waiting for you to cool down), I would think that it would be reasonable to ask for a 2TB 7200RPM DeskStar. Your Caviar Black is probably a 500GB-per-platter model, so I would think it would be logical for your replacement drive to have a similar data density or better, otherwise its data transfer rate would be lower.

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Well that’s a bummer. Guess I will tape a video this time to show Mircrosoft and Adobe that it is not me, but my WD hard drive causing all the problem. Might provide them with the link to my thread here and Techpowerup as well.

I have finally received response from WD. I will see if they want to offer the Hitachi HDD as replacement

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fzabzar, I am now seeing disk errors in my event logging on my OS. The error code is event ID 11. Judging by the event time, It is about the same when my current pending sector reading reached 5 yesterday. Plus, I am also getting massive disk warnings in event logging. I checked the SMART logging in my HDSentinal. It seems for every RRER demecal value increase I will get multiple disk warnings in the event log.

And just to clear it up, I have done the following when investigating this RRER issue:

I suspect other problem is why I pull the WD drive and test it on my ITX build, which is also why I test an old laptop drive from the ITX build on my workstation mobo.

WD drive on ITX build still see steady RRER increase. I tried all 4 SATA ports on the ITX mobo and used different cables. Still seeing RRER problem.

ITX’s old 2.5’’ drive works perfectly on my workstation MOBO. So it is definitely not my MOBO’s problem.

Should I backup my data right now? I have already lost one volume on the disk. It shows up as unable to access. I maganed to recover some of the data using a Linux based boot cd.  However I fear the trend is accelerating.

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To be honest, I used to dread support cases like yours, not because you’re a difficult customer, but because I have no satisfactory answer for your questions. The Seagate article that I wrote was compiled from numerous sources, each of which represents one piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Much of the information was gleaned from the SMART reports of other users, and from my own experimentation. There was also a little collaborative feedback from another Seagate user. It took me a very long time to assemble all the data and to make sense of it. I have not tried to do the same for WD’s drives. In fact I confess that I have no idea how WD computes their SMART attributes, or how significant their error (?) counts are.

There is a program called MHDD which runs in DOS mode. It scans your drive and identifies any slow sectors, ie those that require an excessive number of retries. If you see many sectors that require more than 500ms to be read, then this is a sign that the drive is going bad. A weak head may show up as a checkerboard pattern of bad blocks.

That said, backup your data ASAP by all means.

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If it’s of any interest. Most of the WD drives I’ve used over the past 15 years have failed suddenly, yet gracefully enough to effect a mass copy operation to save the data.

It typically begins with a few ticks in the Current Pending Sector. Next, any attempt to verify & zero the disk results in a more rapid increase in CPS. And then following that the Reallocated Sector Count starts going up. Couple of hours later, boom, disk is dead.

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from what your saying it sounds like your situation has gotten worse since you first posted. Most importantly i am sad and frustrated for you !

it is UNACCEPTABLE to ship bad drives to people for a replacement.

there is no excuse for that. NONE ! period.

and this inflames me because with a small amount of digging when i got my Green drive

and when i was told what model i was getting on my RMA (a new black drive)

i could see a LOT of people getting refurbs mailed to them DOA.

any company that does this does not have the right to be in business.

luckily for WD most people are not pc smart enough to even know what a hard drive problem is.

And this would mean they can fly under the radar for the most part… look around at what people post.

Usually its people who have little knowledge in here and they ended up here because they went through computer drama and eventually found the culprit… a bad hard drive. and i agree with the other guy who said other companies have issues too.

I have RMA’d a Maxtor drive way back and have one with massive RRER issues with it too.

But so what…

Bottom line in my view is your gonna have to look at your options and make a decision.

And getting an RMA refurb drive *seems like your only option (check with them on that of course)

I feel your frustration but please remember that the tech support people are just hired to clean up the mess…

they didn’t make the drives :wink:

So try to be patient as possible with them and friendly it will help things go smoother for you.

Also if that admin/mod said check your messages etc maybe pm that guy and ask him to escalate your issue with a support person (on the forum) I don’t know about you but i don’t like dealing with people on the phone.

That is how it worked for me… i was sent a pm saying my issue was escalated or something then i was contacted by a user names “TotalSupport”

What i hear you saying is Raw Read Errors

and now current pending sectors and you have a paritition that is not accessible

and you are now seeing a variety of event log warnings/errors. your whole story seems to be exactly

what i went through and after searching for corrupt data i found lots and windows chkdsk didn’t really fix things… i got an Advanced RMA drive for WD and they saved my butt by doing that for me so that i could copy my data off the drive before i shipped back the faulty drive. but when i was copying files with drag and drop from my old to new drive i was randomly getting corrupt files that would not copy/read etc

So my long winded point here is RMA that drive ! sad but you don’t have much choice i guess ??

AND

I have been keeping my RMA experience private but i want to show what they did for me…

I was contacted first by the user “TotalSupport” who asked if they could help etc

And i basically gave em some event viewer messages and smart data and a break down of what i have found with HDD issues.

And with this info I asked if there was any way i can get something that would perform better and be more reliable. and i was told right away yup no problem we’ll send you a black for your green drive…

next i asked if they help me with an Advanced RMA but i don’t have a credit card and i was told sure we can do that and the also gave me a prepaid shipping label that i printed out and taped to the box they sent the new drive to me in… few days later i had my new drive… seems to be perfectly fine (knock on wood lol)

I’ve since confrmed that they have received myu old drive so my rma case is closed.

Sorry to hear your having problems with the first drive and an RMA drive too but we gotta use the cards we’re played i guess :frowning:

I hope my story with my RMA helps rather than makes you foam at the mouth with rage.

I felt kind of guilty about my earlier replies maybe helping get you angry at them but i just can’t

accept that many people have gotten bad rma drives… this shouldn’t be happening at all !

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I, too, have been having an issue with a WD disk. I got contacted by TotalSupport as well and a satisfactory resolution seems to be in progress as we speak.

I’ve been a customer of WD for ages upon ages, and I’d like to think this is some sort of turn around effort at providing more personalized and to-the-point service.

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Friday morning I got a phone call directly from WD’s Customer Support Manager Jim Case. He promised either a complete refund or a new WD Black 2TB for compensation. Well, I accepted his resolution of getting a brand new drive consider how much pain I have been through with lost data & reinstalling OS.

I dont have other choices. His other solution is to give me back my money–$89.99 for my original purchase. I cannot accept that since HDD price has been up so much since my original purchase in 2011(before the Thailand factory flooding). I need at least a 1.5TB drive and 90 dollars cant get me anything close to that.

I sent him an email with my address. So far I havent received any reply from neither Jim Case himself nor WD support. I will keep everyone posted about the situation.

Quick question. How stable is this WD drive I am using right now gonna be? I am seeing the following stats right now

400+ RRER values,
63 Pending Sectors
140 reallocated Sector count
15 offline uncorrectable.

I cannot stop working since since I have already been out of business for 3 weeks. At the same time I really dont want to risk losing data again before the new drive arrives. Do you guys think it is safe to operate this drive a little longer?

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Risky, and worse if they are increasing.

It is sometimes not enough to backup your software. What if your hardware fails? If it’s mission-critical, it is important to have spare parts in a box ready to go.

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OK, so here is the final update on the situation.

As I stated earlier, I was contacted by James Case from WD who promised a new WD drive. In the end I get what I requested: A brand new, not recertified WD Black HDD 2TB.

I received the drive on Jan.9th. This time the packaging is correct. Air-bags along with proper sized box. The drive is in retail condition. I installed the drive and reinstalled my OS(again), Did some quick testing of the drive: And I am more than pleased to see it is showing NONE Raw Read Error in the SMART monitoring.

I also did a performance test, It is considerably faster than the recertified-now-dead WD Black 2TB. The new drive has no strange noise, no sudden freeze and appears to be completely healthy.

This will brings me to my thoughts about this whole situation.

Did WD really make sure the recertified drive perform as a new drive before sending it out to RMA cases? I strongly double it. Both of these drives are marked as WD Black 2TB, yet their performance are so far apart that you will think they are 2 different models:

New WD Black 2TB: Max 144.4, Min: 69.7, Avg: 112.3

Recertified Black 2TB: Max: 139.8, Min: 60.2, Avg: 98

The new drive has very smooth linear read graph, while the recertified drive will sudden go down 20MB/s along the graph. Not to mention the bad sector problem and Raw Read Error Rate problem.

What if I am a customer that is unaware of SMART data? What if I am just a regular user who don’t know how to research on the issue?  I can see what WD is playing here. As long as the drive runs fine, users will not complain. This is how WD can get away with such horrible recertified HDD for such a long time.

In the end, I am 99% satisfied with the result. All I wanted from the beginning is a working, reliable HDD with large capacity. Yet it took me such a long time to get what I want. This should not be happening to end customers WD.

Something suggestions for WD:

  1. Take care of your quality control. If your HDDs are reliable to begin with then this whole complication could have been avoided. Although we like longer warranty, we end customers HATE poor reliability. Trust me, no one will find losing TBs of data fun as well as constantly re-install OS and Software.

  2. If you are going to continue using recertified drive for RMA cases, PLEASE make sure you are sending them out in working condition. Worse thing than getting a dead HDD is receiving another dead (or dying) replacement HDD. It is simply frustrating and WRONG!  If you cannot do this, USE NEW DRIVES for replacement!

  3. Improve your customer service. During my case there are only two helpful WD employees—Sam D and James Case. Sadly, both of them seem to be at higher management positions.  I contacted WD regarding my case through all the possible means and let me show you how it worked:

              A, 800 number phone call. I was left on the line unanswered for 10+ mins. Attitude problem.

              B. Email support sent to WD Tech support. I got response 3 days after submission. Yet it stated I will be contacted within 48 hrs. Attitude problem, again.

              C. Posting on this forum. I have my threads deleted and edited. Yet I got no response from your moderator “robthief”.  Attitude problem, once more.

 A successful business rely on good customer support. From my case with WD, I cannot say you offer good customer support.

I will be sharing my story of WD with my friends, my clients and on all the hardware forums that I am a member of. I will also post reviews of my experience with WD HDD on newegg, amazon and all major shopping sites. Let people see how Western Digital stands behind their products and let them judge accordingly.

As I said before, this is my first time ever purchasing a WD product, and I am sorry to say this isgoing to be my last. I will not be purchasing anything else from WD.

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Well. I like stories like this. I mean ones that are discussed in detail. I have a replacement/RMA disk on the way myself. You can be assured I’ll be testing it with consumer and pro-level tools. I’ve had rather good luck in getting some past issues resolved, once I got to a higher tier level of support. But getting to that next level has not always been easy.

I believe that problems like yours are prevalent throughout all corporations and are symptoms of turnkey cost-cutting procedures. A company spends a lot time developing procedures which are supposed to cover every situation. Then they staff the execution/interface part with the lowest paid help possible. When something doesn’t work out nobody knows what to do.

Well… let’s see how the replacement disk performs.

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From my chatting with other unhappy WD customers I can conclude one thing: WD will keep sending recertified drives until at some point one of those actually work.

It seems WD rarely recycle its returned HDDs. As long as they can find a way to get it spin-up they will keep sending them out. One of my client used to get a 808GB WD external drive during RMA. I didn’t believe it until my client showed me his screenshots.

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Glad you stuck it out and tried to work with them to find a solution to your liking. Its cool they did that for you i think and in case people don’t know my RMA drive said recertified on the drive label.

And that is a pish posh fancy box lol

My original Green drive was from FutureShop and came in a generic brandless plastic shell that stated clearly the drive was 7200 rpm ! …and we all know Green drives are not :wink:

So i told them that and offered to send or give pictures of both my receipt and box I still have right now and they didn’t want it but i figured and what i said to them is if they needed a reason to give me a 7200 drive instead then my box misinformation was a good excuse to do the trade etc

Anyway i say this because every case is probably gonna be different with these guys that is why i wanted to avoid talking about my specific case (People should not expect specific things like swap/trade ins etc)

I don’t think it says anywhere in their legal warranty info they have to upgrade people on an RMA which i have seen happpen a LOT ! So we should be grateful !

(to anyone that reads my comment)

I understand peoples frustration but don’t forget the tech support people don’t work in the manufacturing plants or whatever… they just clock into their jobs like anyone else trying to do their job. and even if you get dumb smart info/advice on the phone they probably mean well and are trying to help lol

Cool you kept us up to date with your story… sometimes problems happen so we gotta deal with it and move on.

I’m guessing that recertified *could be bad… as in you *may get a bad drive etc

But i bet TONs of people RMA their drives simply because they say its noisy or soem other trivial issue. Which means there was nothing wrong with it most likely… I’ve returned tons of stuff to places like Futureshop and Wallmart and you know they can’t put open packages on the shelf so it goes back to the factory etc… even if it was just an open box etc

I REALLY hope you don’t have anymore problems :slight_smile:

I’m crossing my fingers for you. My RMA drive is still rocking perfect / flawless !

I was kind of scared to go to the trouble of doing an RMA but if people think they should then do it !

Its better than struggling with a faulty drive…