WD Gold 4TB drives won't initialise

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I purchased Qty 4 Gold 4TB drives for a Synology NAS, model WD4003FRYZ, all manufactured between August and September 2019. Installed them in the NAS and tried to set it up, but it kept failing saying it couldn’t format the system partition. Eventually tried with only single drives installed - same problem.

I then installed WinDFT on a Windows 10 Pro 64 PC and connected the drives, one by one, directly via SATA to the motherboard. WinDFT, for all 4 drives, is giving mixed messages. Running a short self-test says the SmartSelfTest was a Pass, but also ReadErrorCheck says “CommErr”. Running a short surface test is a straight fail, again with “CommErr”. See screenshots attached.

I went in to the Windows Disk Management utility, and it said the drives were not initialised. When I try to initialise them it fails, saying “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”. The same on all 4 drives.

I tried with a different sata cable - no difference.

I’ve raised a support case with WD - no response yet, but I’ve wasted 2 days of my life investigating this as I assumed it was inconceivable that 4 out of 4 brand new hard drives would be DOA.

Any thoughts or suggestions anyone?
{pics removed due to s/n visible}

2

Attached screenshots trying to initilise the drives in Windows:

wd1_d
wd1_d1623×857 213 KB
wd1_e
wd1_e1647×853 215 KB

3

Also tried, on same PC plus a much older WIndows 7 machine, booting with a linux GParted Live CD with the drives connected via sata. This throws up loads of i/o error messages to the console during boot, and the drives can’t be partitioned. Also won’t run smart self-tests under linux.

Running hdparm -I on the drives gives output saying that security is supported but not enabled, but the drive is locked. I don’t understand how the drive can be locked without enabling security and setting a password.

20191128_150212
20191128_1502122016×1512 1.34 MB
20191128_150444
20191128_1504442016×1512 1.15 MB

5

If you want to claim warranty … don’t post your Serial Numbers on a public forum.

Serial Numbers are used for Warranty Claims and posting them on a public forum for all to see, they can/could be stolen for fraudulent purposes.

6

Didn’t think of that - thanks!