I recently purchased (<2 months ago) the 1.5 TB WD internal drive and initially all was fine. It was installed on a Windows 7 machine using an ASUS motherboard, chipset, and AMD processor. If more detail is needed I can provide it.
I loaded the drive with data within a couple weeks and experienced no apparent problem. It was not partitioned as a boot drive, but partitioned as one large drive primarily to hold data statically so as to avoid overuse, (and therefore presumably wear and tear). However shortly thereafter (within the last month) I noticed that when a call to access the drive was made, (such as selecting a link to a file on that physical drive), there would be a long time out before the drive was accessed. However, once accessed, the drive was then fairly spontaneous in response and appeared to operate normally. However, if the physical drive was left idle again, new attempts to access it also were met with a long time out (about 3-6 secs). In all cases, once access was achieved, all data appeared to be intact and fully readable.
At the time, since the name of the drive was “Green” Caviar (or something like that), I thought maybe the delay might just be the result of some powersaving feature which shut down the drive after a time, so I mostly ignored the issue but began thinking of getting a new drive just in case to transfer my data.
Over just the last couple of days, occasionally on a cold boot up, the drive would not appear as a physical drive, even when I examined the system BIOS hard drive list. However, intermittantly the drive would reappear on subsequent reboots, and each time it reappeared as a valid physical drive, I was able to fully access it, no data loss was apparent, and all seemed normal again. Nevertheless, I began seriously looking for a replacement drive.
A new backup drive was purchased and arrived yesterday, but unfortunately today the WD15EADS refuses, even intermittantly, to appear as a physical drive at boot up. I also tried the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows, but it also cannot “see” the presence of the drive.
I have on rare occasion witnessed a hard drive fail, but usually there is data loss or bad sector warnings heralding the event, or if SMART was available and turned on, SMART warnings. Here, no such warnings. It just seemed to just fade away with my data intact. Since there was never any bad sector, read or write warnings in this failure, my presumption is that my data still is intact, but perhaps because of some harware issue, simply cannot be accessed.
Question: does anyone know what kind of hdd failure this is and what is going on? Is there at least a temporary work around I could implement to force recognition of the drive so I could retrieve my data? What would the procedure be to retrieve my data if no such workaround exists? Based on the symptoms, I’m pretty convinced the data is still accessible and not scrambled in any way.