Am I a glutton for punishment?

[stompah]

Lately, I've been having a few reliability issues with hard drives. Mostly my fault. I parked a few and they never woke up. It happens. Had a WD Black die just outside of the 3 year warranty. But recently I bought a 4gb WD external drive and ran it for just over a year. Now it's throwing errors. I contacted customer service and they try to claim it only had a 1 year warranty. Took a picture of the box and had it adjusted to the proper 2 years. Now I am waiting for a replacement drive (purchased an internal drive) I purchased so I can transfer files and send this one back to WD.

Now here is the punishment part... The replacement I ordered is a 4TB WD Black drive. Am I begging for another headache at just after 5 years?

 

[trents]

From what I have read, there isn't solid evidence that the blacks out live the blues. But they do come with a better warranty. Hard drive life spans are all over the place. I've worked on a customer's computer who had a spinner hard drive with over 90k power up hours and it was still going strong and it was not an enterprise class drive. But I've also had plenty of customer's with failing hard drives with less than 25k power up hours on them.

 

[EarthDog]

Not sure anyone can answer this question, really. Stuff happens. Good parts break early, bad parts may not... Failures are typically in the low single digit range for HDDs, so.... I wouldn't worry about it, statistically speaking.

 

[stompah]

trents, I mostly bought the black for the warranty.

ED, I think I am more wondering if Western Digital has again fallen out of reliability favor. My memory seems to tell me that drive manufacturers have swapped quality positions so many times in the past 2 decades of my being into the internals of computers. Am I buying at the bottom of WDs quality cycle? I know I bought a shingled drive, now I'll see how that pans out in 5 years. lol

 

[EarthDog]

Maybe... but again, the difference between them isn't worth fretting over IMO...there may be a bad apple or two that are higher as always... but... that's about it. I know one WD is there...but, you get the idea that most are lower than you think, just a couple of percent.

Take a look at these...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/

 

[stompah]

ED, I wish I could open up the external drive and see what drive it has. Unfortunately, that would void the warranty.

 

[EarthDog]

If you look up the model, I bet you can figure it out. "Shucking" drives out of external commercial enclosures (think WD Passport has seemingly become popular as they are, in some cases and somehow, cheaper than buying the drive that comes inside. I've seen lists on the web of what 'generally' comes inside.

I'd just google, what hard drive is inside my [NAME OF DIRVE] and see what you can come up with.

 

[stompah]

Apparently I am a glutton. Brand new 4TB Black drive. 2 different SATA ports and cables, same error. My existing 1TB Black drive passes without a problem. Going to try it in another system.

 

[trents]

Try CrystalDiskInfo on that bad drive and see if it agrees with Data Life Guard. Are you sure the drive was new? Where did you get it. There are a lot of vendors on Amazon who are selling refurbished drives and trying to pass them off as new. On the other hand, you do get a bad drive out of the box now and then.

 

[stompah]

trents, sold and shipped by Amazon with a build date of 3/10/2020. I have popped it into my Dell 3500, let's see how it does.

Edit: So far windows has let me format it. Not I am running WD's Lifeguard. As it is running it made some loud searching noises

 

[trents]

trents, sold and shipped by Amazon with a build date of 3/10/2020. I have popped it into my Dell 3500, let's see how it does.

Edit: So far windows has let me format it. Not I am running WD's Lifeguard. As it is running it made some loud searching noises

Typo?

 

[stompah]

Now*

 

[stompah]

Now I am at a loss. This drive does not play well with my main rig. Yet passes tests and works fine on my t3500.

Crystal info:

 

[custom90gt]

Silly question, but have you tried different USB ports and perhaps a different cable?

 

[trents]

Now I am at a loss. This drive does not play well with my main rig. Yet passes tests and works fine on my t3500.

Crystal info:

View attachment 209699

This looks like what you see in CrystalDiskInfo when the drive has been used in a RAID configuration. Check the bios to make sure SATA is in AHCI mode and not RAID. CrystalDiskInfo cannot properly read a drive when RAID is in effect.

 

[stompah]

Silly question, but have you tried different USB ports and perhaps a different cable?

On my external drive yes I have. I only have two of the cables it uses. I've also tested it on two different PCs.

On the internal drive two cables and two ports on my main rig and then a different cable in the t3500.

 

[stompah]

trents, I checked it out RAID was not an issue. Saw that the drive was not even recognized by BIOS even after reset.

But now the problem is fixed. Somehow not sure 100% exactly why yet. This time I swapped SATA cables with a working drive in my system. Same result. So I swapped SATA power connection with same working drive and it works. It is not the connector because this connector was the one originally on the other drive and it worked fine. Well, unless that connector is a tad loose and when there is stress on the cable it causes a poor connection. Or maybe something is wrong with that entire cable or the rail that it is on is near max, but everything else in the PC (except for USB drive) is working properly. For now I am just going to use a different cable to power that drive.

Thanks for the input. I appreciate you guys helping out.

 

[trents]

I've had PSU SATA power connectors go bad.

 

[stompah]

I don't think its the connectors on the cable itself. No matter which connector I use it works until I plug the other drive in. The other drive will work 100% of the time while the new drive will not work at all. Luckily I am able to use a connector from my DVD drive to the hard drive and problem is solved for now.

 

[trents]

Sounds like the male SATA power connector on the drive itself is flakey or out of spec.