1TB Western Digital Green Hard Drive failure

yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
edited October 2011 in Hardware
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?
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Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited February 2009
    I've been using WD's for a long time and have had good luck with them. Haven't tried the Green ones yet though.
  • foolkillerfoolkiller Ontario
    edited February 2009
    This type of situation is what warranty is designed for. Drives can and will fail, even new.

    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.
  • ZuntarZuntar North Carolina Icrontian
    edited February 2009
    I have two of them running in RAID 1 for my Windows Home server, no problems yet. lets see....I got them 4+ months ago.
  • edited March 2009
    yagga wrote:
    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?


    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.
  • edited March 2009
    *update*

    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
  • foolkillerfoolkiller Ontario
    edited March 2009
    Read the batch numbers off the drive. Make sure you aren't getting drives from the same batch. I have seen a few cases where an entire run of drives comes out of a manufacturer with a higher than normal failure rate due to defects for that product run.
  • edited March 2009
    Manf dates have run from jan of this year to the latest 2 are oct and may of 08

    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.
  • edited March 2009
    ALso note im not bashing WDC as a whole. Just the greenpower drives. Ive sold prolly around 1500 drives over the last 3 years and maybe have a 5% return rate.. Which is understandable being more than half go in laptops and laptops take abuse.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited March 2009
    I can't help but think if you've gone through 7 drivers, it's not the drives....
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    That's my opinion as well. The odds of seven sequential drive failures is astronomical. You should probably buy a lottery ticket.
  • edited March 2009
    Thrax wrote:
    That's my opinion as well. The odds of seven sequential drive failures is astronomical. You should probably buy a lottery ticket.

    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.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited March 2009
    From personal experience I can only say that when 1 drive fails, it could be the drive. When two drives fail....it *could* be the drive. When 7 drivers fail, it's likely the controller. This is exaggerated even more if the drives are running in a raid. When the drives failed did you do any tests on them outside of the raid? Like a simple low level format followed by a complete physical sector scan to see if the drive actually is physically damaged or if it was just a drive integrity error being detected by the raid?

    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.
  • edited March 2009
    kryyst wrote:
    From personal experience I can only say that when 1 drive fails, it could be the drive. When two drives fail....it *could* be the drive. When 7 drivers fail, it's likely the controller. This is exaggerated even more if the drives are running in a raid. When the drives failed did you do any tests on them outside of the raid? Like a simple low level format followed by a complete physical sector scan to see if the drive actually is physically damaged or if it was just a drive integrity error being detected by the raid?

    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.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited March 2009
    Yep, testing them in an external enclosure would rule out any controller errors. Guess it's time you buy that lottery ticket :)
  • edited March 2009
    Was at the casino the other nite. No luck.
  • ZuntarZuntar North Carolina Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    You,ve got to have bigger issues. IMHO
  • edited March 2009
    radzer0 wrote:
    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.
  • GargGarg Purveyor of Lincoln Nightmares Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    henrik_z wrote:
    Have you considered that your issue might be vibration?
    ...
    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!
  • ZuntarZuntar North Carolina Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    Gargoyle wrote:
    That's fascinating. I had no idea it could have such a dramatic effect.

    Welcome to Icrontic, BTW!
    Ditto here!!!:thumbup
  • MrTRiotMrTRiot Northern Ontario Icrontian
    edited March 2009
    I think the mistake you made is getting a green power hard drive to begin with....The amount of power used is pretty minuscule.


    *doesn't think "being green" is cool*
  • edited April 2010
    yagga wrote:
    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?
  • edited April 2010
    These "green' Western Digital HD 1 tetra do not work with RAID. Why do I know this, I had a total failure of these drives on RAID 10. I recovered nothing, and this will cost me about 300 times the cost of these drives. The blacks are better, but they are not recommended by WD for RAID, WD recommend the servers. I have Seagate servers right now, and rebuilding things...
  • GargGarg Purveyor of Lincoln Nightmares Icrontian
    edited April 2010
    I forgot about this thread and ended up buying a 1TB WD Green a few months ago. So far, so good.
  • ardichokeardichoke Icrontian
    edited April 2010
    As far as RAID goes, a drive is a drive. Doesn't matter if it's a "green" drive, a standard desktop drive or a server drive. If it's a drive which uses a standard interface (and the RAID card itself doesn't do something funky and stupid like forcing you to use a certain type of drive) then it will work in a RAID array. The only reason a drive manufacturer would recommend a certain type of drive for RAID arrays is because they want to sell you a more expensive drive, or they are pushing the server line of drives because they assume you are running RAID in a server environment. Server drives are manufactured to more exacting specs and have a lower failure rate than desktop drives but are otherwise usually no different.

    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.
  • edited April 2010
    Gargoyle wrote:
    I forgot about this thread and ended up buying a 1TB WD Green a few months ago. So far, so good.
    If you bought one, you are not on RAID, so you should be safe storagewise. The reaction time of these drives to wake up, especially with RAID was painfully slow, and when the drives got locked up with their slowness enhanced by RAID, the safeness disappeared. If you have these on RAID, I would suggest getting some server drives right away. Lets face it, if you are on RAID, you want to be safe storagewise, and these HD's dont belong on your system.
  • mas0nmas0n howdy Icrontian
    edited April 2010
    I've had two of these in a 64K stripe for almost a year. Yes, they are slow to wake up. I made a batch file that performs an extremely small internal file copy and scheduled it to run every 10 minutes. Problem solved.
  • edited June 2010
    radzer0 wrote:
    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 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....
  • edited September 2010
    i bought a western digital external HDD this february and it reboots sometimes wtihout any warning.After every reboot some data gets lost.I don't know what the real problem is.My model no. is Model: WDBAAU0020HBK
  • dwestcorpdwestcorp West
    edited July 2011
    Same bad sectors problem with WD 1 tb Green Power drive dated 2010, I have 5 internal and external drives on main system, one is about 6 years old, never had a problem with it. Computer itself has 2x 500 gb drives in it, I have a 92,000 name genealogy file backed up to 2 systems and 3 drives.
  • edited July 2011
    I'll be glad if I never see a WD Green drive again.

    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.
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