1TB Western Digital Green Hard Drive failure
I just want to let the people know that I bought 2 retail boxed 1TB green drives back in November and 1 has failed. The build date is October 22, 2008. The drive is of the 3 platter 16mb cache WD10EACS variety.
This one was giving me some windows problems, reboots, loss of recognition, LONG booting (like an hour of that blue windows bar moving). I reformatted the system, and problems were still there, so I changed a power supply around, then the hard drives, which were the only two things I've touched lately that could screw the system up, besides old age. I figured the precise drive that I had problems with, and tried externally connecting it, connecting to different controllers, and even a different computer, but always with difficulty. I was sort of able to do a 100% format that failed a couple times, and well... it never worked right and would get derecognized soon after. The thing then seemed to power down post power up after quietly trying to grind away, sort of a clicking pattern, but far from a clicking sound. I'm now setup for an rma, my first Western Digital one ever.
Any other bad luck with these? Green or otherwise?
This one was giving me some windows problems, reboots, loss of recognition, LONG booting (like an hour of that blue windows bar moving). I reformatted the system, and problems were still there, so I changed a power supply around, then the hard drives, which were the only two things I've touched lately that could screw the system up, besides old age. I figured the precise drive that I had problems with, and tried externally connecting it, connecting to different controllers, and even a different computer, but always with difficulty. I was sort of able to do a 100% format that failed a couple times, and well... it never worked right and would get derecognized soon after. The thing then seemed to power down post power up after quietly trying to grind away, sort of a clicking pattern, but far from a clicking sound. I'm now setup for an rma, my first Western Digital one ever.
Any other bad luck with these? Green or otherwise?
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Although your description doesn't really give enough information, I'd say that drive was bad right from factory, which can happen from time to time. I bought a few Seagates a few months back and one of them had this exact same problem.
How about this one, i have a media box that i originaly built because i had some spare money. Put in 2 greenpower drives. Within a month one died. Fixed it, 2 weeks later. Another died, since than im at replacement #7. I get from a local dealer who swaps them for me in house for brand new.
As we speak. The raid utility is rebuilding because of a crc error. Hopefully its just a error and not a crapped out drive. But i did move the machine a few feet to hookup a new keyboard right before it started giving problems.
I signed up here just to post about these drives and how bad they suck. Id add the extra money and get a black edition for anybody who wants to get a good drive. DONT get the GP series.
On a side note for those wondering. I have 2 of them. Originaly ran in raid 0. After 2 drives died i switched to raid 1. The 5 that died are 3 platter models. The one that is showing with errors is also a 3 platter edition. The other one currently in use is a 2 platter. Maybe it is better than the 3's who knows.
i came in today and my 2nd drive is giving errors now. i got untill monday before i can get another drive to rebuild the raid so hopefully this one dont die. raid 1 on these drives and it dont even stay working right
The dealer i get them from sometimes has the latest date code and sometimes there around 6 months old. WDC starts the warranty when they ship to me tho.
Yea but i got a WD Black in my laptop, no problems. I got 5 of those seagate 1.5tb problem drives in the machine im on at the moment. No problems like others seem to get when running raid 5.
The reason I'm curious is because I've been searching the net for other people complaining about WD Green drives and I can't really turn up much. Which in and of itself doesn't mean anything. However if you've had 7 back-to-back failures I would think search on the net would find some more rumbling.
The WD diagnostic program for windows ive ran it on the drives thru a usb adapter. Some it says it will fix the bad sectors which i dont want that in a system used to backup other failing hard drives. Some it flat out comes up smart failed.
Running thru a USB adapter would get rid of any problems the controller would cause.
Have you considered that your issue might be vibration?
I've just had three "problematic" EACS 1TB drives in a server.
Statistically, as people have mentioned, once you get to this number it's unlikely that it's the drives. Eventually I narrowed the problem down to a dodgy bearing in the fan in front of the drive cage (grinding/screaming.. hard to tell on the outset because it was in a datacentre) - swapped the fan out and the poor write performance and instability issues largely vanished.
I was getting 25MB/sec read, and < 1MB/sec write. When used outside the case on their own the drives work at 60-70MB/sec in both directions. Also was getting "ghost" bad sectors detected during reads (ie non-reproducible errors), high SMART read error rates etc, and one of the drives was periodically not being detected on boot.
Luckily I'd seen this video a few weeks previous and that made me think of the possibility of noise/vibration being the problem.
That's fascinating. I had no idea it could have such a dramatic effect.
Welcome to Icrontic, BTW!
*doesn't think "being green" is cool*
As for losing your RAID array, and 300 times the cost of the drives, RAID is not a backup. (I'm assuming you are losing "300 times" the cost of the drives because of data loss.) RAID was never meant to be a backup solution, it's meant for performance increases, availability or a combination of the two. Not having a backup solution for critical data because it's on a RAID array is monumentally stupid.
I got 8 of these drives, three in external cabinets (WD's own) and five "internal". Of these all the external have failed (on different machines. Some on USB and some on FW). Two internal drives have also failed. Thats five out of eight. Have a raid with five Raptor and they have worked like they should (for two years now) so its not all WD drives.
The internal drives have all been mounted properly and have had good cooling. They all pass SMART health check, OK but fail extended offline test. (and also stops and retry for long periods of time now and then). One of the externals ar totally dead and dont even spin up.
Last time I saw problems like this with drives was with the old IBM IDE drives. I threw away ten of them....
out of 8 drives between 1TB and 2TB for customers over the last 2 years (and before it was made obvious anywhere that WD don't approve them for RAID - this is due tot he firmware apparently), we regularly ordered and used them in cheaper mirrored arrays for small businesses. We also have used them in normal use, i personally lost 1TB of movies on an external drive.
I'd say in total, 7 of those 8 drives have died, in all sorts of use - click of death, to just simply not responding any more... and the one left hasn't been used yet.
I can think of 4 others I've seen fail which we didn't supply (one in a Fantom drive and one in a MyBook World, 2 in another RAID mirror) that have also failed.
Current situation is that a customer's data RAID mirror has just lost the second drive, 8 months after the 1st, and 13 monhts after initial install. AC in room, ventilation good.
Utter, utter crap. Not like WD will listen though.