I bought my WD15EARS in 2009. From the first day I was having problems with it. I used it only for storage, and I was ok with green concept, slower speed, silent drive and low consumption of energy. However, that is when my now 5 year struggle with it had begun. Clinking sounds, freezing of its logical partition/s and/or entire system, disappearing and reappearing in bios after several tries to cold boot it or waiting for an hour or so, were issues on regular basis.
Many times I was losing whole partition (it become unallocated), and several times entire hard drive was lost, 1500GB becomes unallocated. I had to run chkdsk at least several times a month, due to problems with bad sectors. After formatting a partition, everything is good for few days (sometimes for whole month), but the main problem always persists. Over the years i had changed several PSU’s and several cables, I tried to use the drive in different combination with my other drives, i even tried to use it alone, one system partition and 4 logical. Drive was repartitioned and formatted for so many times… and of course writing zeros with wd’s data lifeguard. I even disabled head parking feature with wdidle3. It just won’t work for me like any other drive. Several days ago it was low –level formatted with data lifeguard and repartitioned and formatted again (5 partitions) through command line in windows 7. It has only around 20GB of data on just one partition i used for testing and is behaving again! When I try to read a file it just freezes indefinitely. Other files can be opened in normal way but that particular one has been corrupted in just a few days for some reason (and there are several others). 5 years of inhuman nerves and testing it and trying to use it in normal and safe way is just too much, it’s above and beyond… I know none of you can help me because it’s obviously defective hardware from day one, but I just wanted to share my painful experience and to hear your opinions. Best wishes.
