Hello,
I am posting here because I am experiencing a very unusual failure with a WD My Passport 4TB drive and I would like to understand if anyone else has seen something similar.
Drive model: WD My Passport 4TB
Serial: WX31D989ZPV0
The drive has only accumulated about 18 days of actual operating time.
Recently the drive started showing serious problems and multiple diagnostics confirmed hardware failure:
• SMART overall-health status: FAILED
• Hundreds then thousands of read errors during full surface scans
• ddrescue reported more than 2600 read errors
• Large sections of the disk became unreadable
Example diagnostics I ran:
- SMART tests
- WD diagnostics
- Full surface read tests
- ddrescue multi-pass recovery scans
The results consistently indicate hardware degradation (possibly head or media surface issues).
What concerns me most is that the drive failed after extremely limited usage (around 18 days of runtime). This seems like an early-life hardware failure rather than normal wear.
Western Digital support has reviewed the case and confirmed the hardware failure through SMART diagnostics.
I chose WD because of its reputation for reliability, so this early catastrophic failure was quite unexpected.
Has anyone experienced something similar with WD drives failing this early?
I would appreciate any technical insight or guidance from the community or WD engineers.
Thank you.
