WD15EARS In An External Housing For Use With Windows 7 64 Bit & XP 64 Bit

p645n · February 11, 2010, 7:31am

I’ve looked in several different places for info pertaining to the use of a Western Digital 1.5 TB WD15EARS drive in an external housing or drive dock.

The drive\housing\dock would hold files that would be accessed with a Windows XP 64 Bit or Windows 7 64 Bit computer.

Could anyone clarify?

Thanks in advance.

p645n · February 12, 2010, 4:47pm

Anyone?

MGHolley · February 12, 2010, 10:00pm

I’m sorry, I guess we don’t understand your question.

Do you want to know an external enclosure that will work?

Do you want to know if we recommend getting a WD15EARS drive?

Regardless, I currently recommend you avoid the EARS series of drives. It seems the drives are possibly firmware crippled and its also possible that the manufacturing process needs to be tweaked. Most report at least 1/2 the drives have problems and need to RMA. Since you won’t be using in RAID, the firmware issue might not apply, but unless you know how to use extensive 3rd party HDD testing tools, I would avoid this drive. Just because you get a S.M.A.R.T. “thumbs up” doesn’t mean that a silent killer isn’t lurking waiting to kill your precious data.

LB_WD · February 12, 2010, 10:00pm

A Western Digital drive should work in an enclosure as long as the enclosure supports the parameters of the drive. For example, the enclosure would need a SATA connector and be able to support a 1.5TB drive. We don’t support our internal drives in an external because there can be possible issues between the drive and a 3rd party chipset located in the enclosure. I included KB 296 below that talks about this.

KB 296

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=296

Tommy_J · February 12, 2010, 10:50pm

Did a little research on these, and found that they are advanced format drives. Many of the issues being encountered may simply be that you can’t format these with XP. They have to be formatted with a bit alignment utility. Vista and 7 can do it, easily and automatically. Or, you’ll need to go to WD’s Downloads page and get a format utility for it if you’re using XP.