Return Dead Drive for Refurbish?

WD Internal Drives Internal Drives
1

I’ve got a 12TB WD Gold drive that is on its way out. My home server started sending me emails about uncorrectable read errors last night. The warranty is expired and I’ve already ordered a replacement so I’m not looking for warranty work. I was just wondering if there was any kind of program where I could ship the old drive back to WD so they could refurbish it. Ya know, replace the read head, the platters, whatever the problem is and then resell it to somebody who doesn’t mind buying a refurbished drive.

Or should I just record myself shooting a hole in it for YouTube?

2

The cost of labour for any internal work would be prohibitive, especially for helium models. I think that refurbishment would be limited to scanning for bad sectors (grown defects) and then moving (hiding) them in the primary defect list. The factory could also disable (depopulate) a bad head and reduce the drive’s capacity accordingly.

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3

Bullet holes it is then, :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

4

The PCB would have some value on eBay.

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5

I find zero wiping disks can often get them back to life in cases of back blocks

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I thought about that. The SMART status summary still says “PASSED”, but I don’t trust that. I’m getting emails occasionally about it and it has failed to complete any smart tests since the bad blocks started appearing. Up to somewhere over 2,000 blocks so far.

7

Grab Seatools and use it to write zeros the affected disk. You may need to do this 2 or 3 times. Each pass may be slow as the controller checks track conditions.

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It has already been replaced, new drive arrived in the mail today. Thanks for the input though, :slight_smile:

9

Keep the old as decorative item in safe place.

While this is a rare event, even the sata connector over it, this might save the life of another HDD with damaged sata connector.

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