bought a WDC WD1003FBYX re4 one month ago, has been working great since day 1 with what seemed a normal hard drive crunching noise similar to a Velociraptor when reading/writing.
today for no apparent reason, the drive froze while reading large PSD template files with very high CPU usage (DPCs) - in explorer an error message saying drive not accessible, shut down, checked all the cables/connections - rebooted, drive not recognized in BIOS (AHCI mode), Windows 7 disk management shows drive offline completely empty!!!
I shut down, unplugged the drive, inserted a working drive with same connectors SATA & power, rebooted and all is fine - so it’s not the connectors, motherboard SATA ports or power plug.
Tried the drive on a different SATA port, booted, recognized this time and all my files still there (ouf!!)
backing up everything atm, but it appears a lot slower.
High CPU usage by DPCs usually indicates a failing drive, SMART shows drive is Ok with 1 bad sector.
The drive was intended for backing up important templates and documents, hence the choice of Enterprise quality, now I dont trust the drive and will be returning it to the shop.
