WD Media Player corrupting disk, causing bad sectors

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

I am now on my second WD 2 GB external drive.  The first disk last 2 weeks before total corruption.  This second disk lasted 2 days until dropping to only 40% health as diagnosed by Hard Drive Sentinel.  Prior to that the first disk was used for six months with no disk errors at the computer, and the 2nd disk a whole year.

Is it due to these being very large drives?  If this keeps up this becomes very expensive – and very time consuming in re-creating a disk.

2

I assume if they’re “very large” you mean 2TB and not 2GB.

I’ve been using 1TB drives with my WDTV HD and WDTV Live and nothing’s ever gotten corrupted.  And I’m not seeing others running into the same problem in droves.

Except for things like the Media Library, the WDTVs don’t write much to the drive, so I fail to see why they would be corrupting the entire platters’ surfaces during their reads of the media.  The drive doesn’t know what device it’s plugged into… it doesn’t know it’s supposed to wreck the data when being read by a WDTV.

I’m thinking you need to look elsewhere to the source of your data corruption.

3

I occasionally have this problem on my 1.5TB seagate drive. It looks like things I added are not there. To fix it, I eject it from the WD Live and plug it into my PC and run chkdsk. That usually recovers the missing data. Hope this helps.

4

Roofing Guy and Archb1shop,

Thanks so much for your replies.

Yes, sorry I meant 2 TB.

I can’t see how the WD Media Player could possibly corrupt the drive, either.  Just wondered if anyone else had seen this.  At $150 per 2 TB drive it gets expensive – worse, is having to move files over to a replacement drive as takes time to hunt them all down again from their various backups.

I can’t think of anything different  when attached to the media player except it is on the same shelf as the TIVO which vibrates a little.  But in the computer room, when it was there, another on of our WD Drive sits on top of the printer, and every so often my wife would forget to move it before printing and it never had an issue. 

But yes, I suspect there is something else, but the only commonality is the WD Media Player.  If no one else have ever experienced it, then I need to look elsewhere.  (Maybe the issue is also that I left it on with the Media Player for 3 days in a row – but I live drives on several days when connected to the computer.)

5

Okay – Contacted the WD Phone Support and without hesitation they told me what is the probably cause.

I have connected the WD media player to the same power strip as the audio components.  The audio components are drawing power and causing the WD Drive not to get the power it needs thus causing disk corruption.

This makes total sense.  For anyone using their Drives in their audio room, please take note!

6

If you believe that is the solution, please mark your post as the solution so that others will more easily find it.  

Glad WD support was able to help you, they don’t usually get much praise on the forums!  :)

7

PixelPower,

Will wait to mark as solution unitl I have tested it out.  If I go a couple of weeks or so with the new hookup with no or minimal new bad blocks, then will mark as solution. Will take awhile as I have to put data on a new drive.

8

The other thing to consider is that you should eject the drive before removing it from the WD TV - even if you turn off the WD TV, you can cause corruption if the drive hasn’t been ejected. 

9

Update – I have the drive plugged into it’s own wall socket instead of a power strip or surge protector, but still seeing degradation in disk – dropped down from 40% health (according the Hard Disk Sentinel) to 31 % health and then further dropped down to 16% health after doing a chkdsk on drive.  I am still wondering if maybe the size of the drive is just not a great match for the Western Digital Media player.  At least able to back up the entire drive, so thinking of getting one more 2 TB WD Green drive to try and if that doesn’t work then will settle with the 1 TB drives.

Maybe I am still just seeing the original corruption caused by the surge protector and it takes time to manifest itself? 

10

Marked the post of what Customer Support told me (get the USB drive off the surge protector that has the stereo equipment attached to it) as the solution since I hooked up a new drive a couple of days ago and no corruption to it after several hours of use. 

Important to keep in mind that turning off the WD Player without ejecting the USB drive can also cause corruption.  So important to be very careful with the drives connected to the WD Media Player.

They should make this very clear in the manual and think about making this happen automatically when one turns of the power.

11

I have the WD TV Live HD and it seems to be doing the same thing to external usb drives which are powered by the USB port and not external power. I have replaced 2 drives now and the third drive is slowly starting to degrade if I look into the Hard Drive Sentinel stats.

I am stumped. The first drive degraded in the first 3 days I had the device. The second drive in a week and the last drive is now not fixable when putting it into a Windows workstaiton and running checkdsk.

The device and drives are in a well ventilated area and are never moved. I alwyas power down using the power switch on the remote.

12

Do you EJECT the disks before powering down??

13

The only time I eject my disks is when I am going to unplug the USB with the power on. I never eject before powering down the WD TV. I often unplug the USB with the WD TV power off, without having ejected. I have never had any disk corruption.

edit: I should mention I am using USB powered drives.

14

I am using the “new” Freecom 640GB USB powered disks and I do not eject them ever as I copy my files to the drives via wireless.

I am trying a Seagate 1TB 7200 RPM external usb powered drive now which is doing the same thing. 

15

I cannot for the life of me see how a host device could CREATE BAD SECTORS.   

Data corruption, yes, but not physical defects. 

Have you pulled it and ran SMART tests against them?

By the way, if you don’t EJECT the drives, you’re asking for problems…  It’s the same thing as a Windows box…  If you don’t “Safely remove hardware” before you just pull the power, you WILL get data corruption.