Heads up: There appears to be a bad batch of WD20EARS out there. I have now tested the fifth(!!) drive in a row, all of which seem to belong to a batch made in “22 Oct 2010”. All of them, new out of the box, failed the DLGDIAG Extended Test, with “Too many bad sectors”. Apparently my supplier (to whom we are running back and forth for replacements) had a series of them in the warehouse so the replacements I got were coming from the same batch
If you have a WD20EARS marked “22 Oct 2010”, I’d strongly recommend you run the test.
You’d not believe the amount of time we’ve spent on a box we’re building that had 4 of these, chasing all kinds of weird phenomena, not entertaining the “very unlikely” explanation that all those drives were bad.
Doron, it might help WD if you could provide the serial number(s) of the drives that are failing right out of the package.
Not a problem - I don’t have the drives anymore but do have their SNs - I’m just hesitant to post them publicly in the forum. Is there a more appropriate channel for that? Or is posting them here considered appropriate?
Well, I know when I’ve seen issues in the past, I’ve seen WD staff ask for S/N, if possible, to help them track issues.
If you don’t feel comfortable posting the S/N publicly, I’m sure you could send a Private Message to Bill_S and he could pass them on to the appropriate department.
On the original raw, unformated drives, repeated runs of Data Lifeguard indicated read errors on a Win 7 64-bit Pro, with one simply not progressing past about the 65% mark for a number of hours, and the other unable to repair its bad blocks. Both indicated I/O errors when scanned on a Linux system, which was the original symptom.
But once I used the Win 7 Computer Management (Disk Management) to accept the volumes and form a simple volume, rather than as the original raw drive, out-of-the-box (which did a full format), I was able to do a full sector scan on Win 7 with no problems, and putting the drives back into the linux system also permitted a full bad block scan, with no problems.
Of the 6 drives, I had no problems with two, with the raw out-of-the-box bad block scan, and use in the Linux system, but not the last 4.
Ordered two with 22 SEP 2010 dates - both defective.
Replacements just arrived, both dated 19 DEC 2010, all had weird connection issues under Windows 7. First one already failed DLGDIAG - Too many bad sectors detected. I am testing the other one now.
newegg reviews are filled with stories suggesting *there still is* a major problem with defective WD20EARS hard drives.
It appears huge number of defective WD20EARS were dumped on the market. How many of them can be formatted but would fail DLGDIAG if they were tested and people don’t test them because they don’t know about this? That’s the scary part.
Yest another lemon! Three times I had to retrun them, this is really damaging the WD brand. With this many of them being defective, how could WD not know about the huge percentage of failure rates on these and still keep them on the market? My latest one also had a Dec 2010 date.
