WD80EFZX not spinning up, not recognized

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hello

I bought four WD80EFZX ‘Red’ 8TB drives online and they arrived today, well packaged and sealed new in WD’s own brown-box packaging. None of them seem to work and all exhibit the same symptoms. I’m not new to computers and HDD so have spent the last few hours substituting controllers, cables, HDD with the new 8TB drives and known-good WD drives. The issue is staying associated with only the new WD80EFZX drives. If I only had one bad drive I’d put it down to a DOA fault, but that all four new 8TB drives are the same is causing me to scratch my head.

So, I am experimenting with:
4x WD80EFZX (the ‘faulty’ drives’)
3x PCs with Windows 10 Pro (Creator edition, fully updated)
1x Windows Server 16 with 20x 3TB Pro drives yes, 60TB in all, as a Storage Space)
2x LSI 9201-16i HBA controllers (flashed as ‘IT’ firmware so they are dumb pass-through, not RAID).
Intel Z77, Z97, and Marvell SATA controllers on various PC mainboards
Numerous SAS and SATA cables, all certified for SATA3 and proven good today.
4x PSU, variously 750W and 1000W and under-subscribed.
A USB3-to-SATA controller
eSATA - SATA cable

Whichever permutation of computer, SATA controller, cable, and PSU I use the four new WD80EFZX drives are not seen by any of a traditional BIOS, a UEFI BIOS, much less the Windows OS when the machine has booted. They do not even show in the Disk Manager, nor in PowerShell’s with Get-PhysicalDisk.

Ever permutation I have tried I have substituted an old 2TB WD HDD. That drive is always seen and behaves exactly as I would expect.

The closest I have to ‘seeing’ the new 8TB drives is when I attach them by a SATA-USB3 controller dongle/adapter. Then they are seen as a USB device, but of 0 (zero) GB. WD’s Diagnostic tools sees them as 50kB (yes kilobyte) drives and passes simple and extended diagnostics in split-seconds (!?!?!), but cannot read s/n etc. If I try to initialize the 8TB (as 50kB) drive then I receive a fault that the drive is too small for GPT partitions. Ditto MBR.

The 4 drives have close but not obviously sequential S/N. They were all manufactured on the same date (3/15/17) in the same facility and except for s/n are identical.

I know ESD precautions and had grounded myself before opening the electrostatic bags. I wore cotton and worked on a wooden bench with an grounded electrostatic mat. I am super-confident that I eliminated static damage as much as anyone could.

Any ideas? At the moment I may as well have bought four lumps of wood. Does WD have a counterfeit problem in the distribution network? I bought mine from a trusted, large reputable PC components store.

Thanks for any suggestions.

2

Can you post a picture of the “brown packaging” and or “label on the drive” minus the S/N
Please check the warranty here https://support.wdc.com/warranty/warrantystatus.aspx
Depends, but the warranty may be carried by the OEM in some cases of OEM drives.

3

Not surprising the USB3/SATA adapter doesn’t work. They all have various size limitations. Quite often they’re not even documented. Discovered this myself when my SATA-USB dock would “mount” a 3TB drive as a 546G (or something like that) drive, and not be readable.

Had to call tech support for this dock and they said it’s only supported up to 2TB.

But at any rate, 8TB drives-- have you had ANY 8TB drives that worked in your setup? Or is the largest drive you’ve had success with a 3TB drive?

Looking at both Broadcom and LSI’s websites, they hint at similar drive size limitations, like this:

but I didn’t dig deeper to find your specific models / usage.

4

Thank you. Two pics attached. One of the packaging label and drive with s/n obscured; the second of the packaging. The packaging is identical to that I have received all my other WD drives in over the years.

The drives report as being In Limited Warranty until 5/3/2020. An odd date neither 3 years after purchase nor 3 years after manufacture (3/15/2017).

Thanks.

4032×2268 1 MB
2268×4032 2.29 MB

5

Good suggestions. I’d be wary of the dirt-cheap USB adapter too. I only tried it out of desperation, rigor.

Until these 8TB my largest drives had been the 3TB drives. I do not have a larger drive except for the new 8TB ones on hand for experiments.

My LS adapters are flashed with Phase 20 ‘IT’ firmware (latest iteration after the earlier bugs were ironed out) and latest option ROM BIOSes. I am confident they are healthy. The hardware/firmware combo is supposed to be good for large capacity drives including 8TB per LSA/Avago/Broadcom support WWW.

In any case, no controller is even detecting them, even with smaller size limitations. I am using a Z77 chipset on my intended machine (both SATA3 and SATA2 ports tried), plus an on-board Marvell chipset, plus of course those LSI HBA. For good measure I have tried eSATA (with an aux PSU) to a 6-series Intel chipset in a desktop and a 7-series Intel chipse tin a laptop. I have also tried direct-connect to various active SATA ports on the desktop mobo.

All ports and cables ‘see’ the 3TB and 2TB drives. No concerns at all. No ports and same cables ‘see’ any of the 8TB drives.

I am concerned that the 8TB drives do not seem to spin up at all. If I gently roll them in my hand I cannot sense any gyroscopic resistance forces which would indicate the platters are spinning. To all the world all four drives appear dead no matter which PSU I use, and the power cables will spin up other drives.

Oh, and I have never hot-plugged these drives. I have only attached/detached power and SATA cables while the machines have been off (not sleep or hibernate. Off).

Regards,
Frank.

6

I don’t have any idea why your 8TBs are not working other than the brown boxes were individually dropped at the warehouse and the disks got ffed or the delivery guy/warehouse dropped the entire shipment.

You probably bought yours from amazon during the sale, me too. I also bought this USB3.0 to SATA3 and using those right now to test the disks using WD utility extended mode and HDD Tune Pro’s error scan, will also later plug them into my spare desktop and run badblocks to make certain.
This sees all 8TB and reads/writes to all 8TB, speed is 140MB/s to 180MB/s depending on head position on the platter. (inner vs outer, respectively)

7

Maybe I’m tilting at windmills, but… the label says “Made in China?” I thought all of these drives were made in Thailand. At least 100% of the photos I find on Google Image Search say that, EXCEPT for listings on eBay and the like.

8

OK, I repeated a few of yesterdays experiments and added a few more with some other power supplies and another USB adapter I had. Still no joy from any of the 8TB drives and always success with every other drive I try in the same set-up. I want to RMA these four 8TB drives.

BUT - I want to use the Advance RMA with a cross-ship so I don’t have to wait for 2-way shipping plus turn-around time. The RMA tool doesn’t let me.

If a WD support person can get in touch (my profile email) I’d appreciate it so that I can RMA these guys together in one box and label. Any live-person phone support is well hidden.

Thanks.
Frank

9

Hmmm. Curious and somewhat disturbing. Maybe a WD person could step in and assure me (us).

My drives do have crisp well-printed labels and the s/n labels on the face and end do match up. I think these are money-quality counterfeits if they are, at least by external appearance. Better than your usual flashed firmware and crude label counterfeits anyways, and the serial numbers do check out on wd.com as being the right product.

The ‘Made in …’ designation is the place of final assembly for things like this. Perhaps WD now have or have acquired an assembly operation in China which puts together parts actually ‘made’ in more customary locales. E.g. Intel makes its semiconductors in US/Israel/Ireland but they are labelled as being made in Central American or SE Asia countries because that is where final assembly/packaging occurs.

Frank.

10

Hi there,

It would be better if you contact Support directly to do this for you. Moderators are not part of support and cannot create an RMA for you.

http://support.wdc.com/Support/case.aspx

11

Is there a usual or current support response time? Hours? Days? Weeks?? I raised the support ticket early yesterday (before ArMak’s post) and so far no acknowledgement or anything. It shows in the system though. I would have liked to get these drives RMA’d today so that the cross-ship could happen while I am out of town anyway next week. Otherwise I’ll have another week of dead time and I bought these drives to fill a need, not as a casual $1000+ experiment.

12

My WD80EFZX worked right out the box. The packaging and labeling seem to be same as yours.

13

Hello. OP here.

I ended up RMA’ing my four bad 8TB WD80EFZX drives back to the original retailer (Newegg) so that I could avoid refurbished drives coming back from WD. They price-matched the weekend special and other discounts I had originally applied on the first set of drives and when they received the bad ones credited my account almost immediately. Kudos to them

So here’s the thing. ALL FOUR NEW DRIVES WORKED PERFECTLY.

Same setup(s). Same cables. Same everything as the bad drives. I’d left the experiment in place in readiness for the new drives so I know the setup was identical.

Problem solved. But, wow. What were the chances of receiving four bad drives? Not high, I thought. I was tearing my hair out with the first set looking for the bozo mistake I was making.

BTW, the new drives are outwardly identical to the first set, including all aspects of the WD product labels, except that the paper label on the outside of the brown-box packaging (see my earlier pics) was this time used to seal the brown-box flap instead of being square on the box face. Some differences in box-up then. The s/n came from an alphabetically varied mix and only one was from the same sequence as the bad drives (VK19****). None were manufactured on the same date (3/15/17) as all four bad drives.

So, beware the Ides of March.

Frank.

14

How did the drives come packaged? Individually in cardboard boxes with black plastic springy forms inside?
Newegg used to ship drives without any protection, luckily I ordered like 8 drives and they decided to cut off the foam carrier from the manufacturer and ship it in that, inside a large box with other stuff and little room to bounce.
If your package got drop kicked, that’s why 4 drives are DOA.

15

All mine arrived individually in the single-disk plain brown fold-open cardboard boxes with black sprung plastic end-caps supporting the disks inside their sealed anti-static bags. I’ve received dozens similarly. Both packages (of four each) arrived outwardly undamaged. I am super-sensitive to how HDDs are handled just because of an abundance of caution and an engineer’s awe of the data density and technology.

But, I used to work in a lab environment and over the last 20 years have handled if not thousands certainly high hundreds of new and lab-abused drives. I wince when I remember the horrors some of those drives experienced. Even in that coarse world it was rare to have a drive fail unless it was dropped while spinning, and even when we retired drives and had to scrub them or wreck them we had fun bouncing them off a steel plate before putting them in the drive shredder. It took a serious throw to fully wreck a disconnected parked drive.

I would bet that the faulty HDD were not damaged in handling but somehow escaped having their firmware loaded at the factory, or were shipped from the fail-test pile. It just has to be more than a coincidence that none of the first four drives responded at all and they were all made on the same date in the same factory and had very close s/n from the same sequence.

Frank.

16

Seriously? I’ve seen drives fall off a shelf from 18" to a padded floor which, hitting at an Achilles Angle, so to speak, loads the heads onto the platters. That tiny bit of friction prevents spin up.

17

Hello, I was reading your comment on this post… just curious if the brown packaging is what would normally be used when ordering these drives new from a retailer? I wasn’t sure if that packaging is what is used on your refurbished products?

IF this is new packaging, what would a refurb look like? Thanks

18

Hi.

I cannot speak to what refurb packaging looks like as I have never and never would purchase a refurbished HDD. But, I can tell you that when I have bought WD HDD from both Newegg and Amazon they have arrived in the plain brown boxes I showed photos of earlier in the thread.

I tend to buy HDD when I see a good deal, and keep one or two spares in hand so that I am able to avoid ‘stress purchases’ when I might have to buy at more usual retail rates or, God forbid, from a brick-and-mortar store at MSRP. Possibly the deeply discounted rates I buy at are satisfied by WD and other manufacturers stripping the non-essentials such as glossy printed packaging, a set of screws, instructions, a copy/license of drive copy/dup software, etc. The brown box versions come as shown and assume the user is able to use them as such. Warranties, factory sealed bag, and protective shock-buffer are as usual.