Gah, WD2000JD dies overnight

I had a bad string of luck with the 1200JB line. I had three in my systems and all went. I was dumb enough to use the first couple of recerts as well and they went. Five down.

I thought things would change with the JD/SATA drives but I guess it's the same platters.

The other morning I did the big Windows update and reset. The system froze. Did a safe mode boot and saw it was hanging on a system data file. I tried to chkdsk it from the recovery console but it said it had an unrecoverable error. wdiag would not even try to scan it, it just said the drive was bad (forgot the term it used).

I ran out and got a Maxtor 200GB SATA (all I could get on short notice), installed XP and tried to get the old drive up as a slave. I was able to pull about 20GB of the old drive when it really started to fail. Tried bringing it up read-only in KNOPPIX but the MFTs were fried Tried for two days to repair the MFTs and get some data off but it was gone. I put my ear up to the drive and you can hear the head lightly mashing. Didn't lose anything critical, just a PITA to get it all back.

Do I have REALLY bad luck or are this line of WD drives really error prone? I don't think I am doing anything out of the ordinary, perhaps just defragging often.:|

 

[Spikesoldier]

have you tried the freezer trick yet

 

Originally posted by: Spikesoldier
have you tried the freezer trick yet

Well, left it on the window cill overnight and it while it was really cold tried to no avail. Didn't seem like the temp made much of a difference.

 

[tart666]

about half of my drives over the past 2-3 years have been wd jb, and about 5 of them had to be rma'd. almost every one, come to think of it, some of them the rma's had to be rma'd again.

you are not alone in having bad luck with wd's, but it still might be just bad luck

 

[SMOKE20]

Up early and reading.....I have had the same problem with ours here at home (3 custom built by us systems) 2 of those had the WD "special edition" H/D's and all have now been replaced by Seagates which are much quieter and run with no problems.

I also have been the systems support manager locally for a national retail store (11 stores in our support area) and had disproportionate failures of WD drives. All have since been replaced and will be company wide by April.

 

I sure know how to pick them. My last choice of disk was the IBM deathstars I must have had a dozen disks die on me in the last 10 years.

 

[Deadtrees]

I've had two JB line of WD drive over 4 years total.
One is 80GB(2 years) and the other one is 120GB(2 years), both running 100Mb up/100Mb down VDSL P2P full time. So far It's running great. No weird noise or bad sectors at all.

 

[iamtrout]

Perhaps bad luck. I've had a 120GB WD BB for four or five years now, and a 80GB JB for around three. Both running strong 24/7 practically.

Are you sure there isn't anything that might lead to hard drive death? Perhaps the hard drives are overheating? You physically jolt the computer while it's on? The mobo is messed up and killing hard drives?

I have a friend who has been through about 5 WD's in the past few years, and I'm starting to think that it might be something external that's causing the problems.

 

I am not abusing them in any way. The systems are always stationary, and I shutdown before servicing. Could be heat. Perhaps I will move the drive to a cooler part of the case.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I've had my 1200JB for over two years, my 1200JD for about a year, and my 800JB for about six months - no problems whatsoever with any of them.

 

[dethman]

maybe it's your system. like your PS.

 

It's a pretty good PS (Enermax Whisper). Besides, it happened on totally different systems.

 

[fstime]

Hey, your not alone, I think my Seagate 160GB is about to die, it keeps disapearing from My Computer and Device manager after my computer has been on for like a hour. I think I might have to call Seagate up since I already changed the IDE cable and it still happens.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: dwell
I must have had a dozen disks die on me in the last 10 years.

Dude,
You need File Scavenger...
With your track record, it will be the best $40 you've ever spent. :laugh:

 

[D1gger]

I don't want to jinx myself, but I have had PC's since 1981, and currently have eight PC's in the house with a mixture of WD Cavier SE's, Maxtor's, a couple of WD Raptor Sata drives, a Seagate and even an IBM Deathstar and in over 20 years of hacking, I have never had a harddrive fail. I still perform backups on all of my data religiously, but I am amazed that some people seem to have such grief. It always makes me think that there must be another factor, such as bad power in their area.

 

[Paulson]

I've only had 3 hard drives fail (between about 30 of them)... so it's a pretty small margin... all of my hard drives run 24/7 (hell even the one in my laptop) and I have yet to have too much of a problem..

 

[hippotautamus]

I am very happy with all my WD drives. The only ones I have fried have been because they undervolted. If you have too much load on that rail, your HDD WILL undervolt and fry. I have a 300w PSU with a massively OC'd video card, cpu, and 4 dimms of RAM, plus two CD drives and two hard drives. I was asking for it lol.

 

[Ike0069]

That may consecutive problems must be related to the systems vice the hardware.
I would first look at my case temps. Excessive heat is probably the number one killer of HD's.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

You have other issues with your system if you have killed 6 drives. Either a shoddy psu, or you need some sort of power conditioning such as a UPS