Western Digital HD/2T Failure !!

Assassin

Assassin

Messages
101
Name
Barry
Edit My Images
No
I bought a Western Digital external 2T hard drive about a month ago, obviously to backup my PC. But I had other files on there which I didn't have anywhere else. The drive failed, now I have to recover the data... costly excersize... probably a bit short sighted of me, I was just about to copy the data to another disc when I noticed it wasn't working... well I can't believe and wasn't expecting a brand new drive to fail like it has...:bang: I think the disc is still spinning inside, but doesn't connect to my computer or my laptop...

Western Digital want to charge me $500 -$1500 ro recover the data...

NOT HAPPY Western Digital !!:razz:
 
I remember, google posted an article about their hdds. Their experience was that most failures occurred at an early stage, and after that period the 'good' drives performed very reliably. It sounds like all new tech needs to be tested and 'approved' for serious use.

Does the disk still show up on the computer, but fails to read, or is it invisible but only spins? If it is the latter, it could be a connectivity issue somewhere, and potentially easier / cheaper to fix
 
Hmmm. just helped my son build a new puter and we used a 2T WD HDD as the boot drive. There's a 750gb installed from his old one, think I'll tell him to keep all his stuff on that one till the 2T has had a little bed in time.
 
Firstly, don't panic too much.

I had a WD external drive fail on me a while ago. It turned out it was the USB to SATA interface on the drive had corrupted the MFT (it was formatted as NTFS) on the drive. By disassembling the drive and connecting it internally to my PC I was able to use some software called Recover My Files to find the shadow MFT and recover all the data.

It took a long time to find the shadow MFT, and a long time to recover the data once it did, but I got it all back in the end.

The fact that your drive is still spinning at least is a good sign that all is not lost. Also, the fact that it isn't being recognised via the external interface would suggest that it is the host controlled and not the drive itself that is buggered.

Good luck and ultimately use this as a learning exercise about a having a robust back-up strategy for your data. I can't preach myself as I've been caught out in the past, hopefully not again though.
 
I too had a WD external drive fail on my after a month or so. Thankfully it was only a backup drive, so I had all the stuff elsewhere. I havent bought a WD drive since!

I dug it out of the cupboard the other day and took it to bits to see what an HD looked like inside!
 
Thanks Guys, ultimately I have to have a different strategy for backing up data. I don't have a shortage of space, so perhaps having it in several locations would be sensible. The drive still seems to be spinning, and I think there is some electronic failure, perhaps the logic board or perhaps even the power supply. I have an identicle drive, so I might try to swap all the externals first. Either way, I'm really uncomfortable with all of this.... I'll probably also opt for a different drive in the future...
 
The thing is the 750gb drive is a WD too (black edition same as the 2Tb one) although it's sata2 and its 3 years old. Never had a problem with them., now Seagate, that's a different story lol.
Hope you can recover it
 
Davie said:
The thing is the 750gb drive is a WD too (black edition same as the 2Tb one) although it's sata2 and its 3 years old. Never had a problem with them., now Seagate, that's a different story lol.
Hope you can recover it
Click to expand...

Cheers Dave, I hope so too....

Are you saying Seagate is worse than the WD ?
 
Just my experience with Seagate in the past, I had 3 Seagate barracuda hdd's go in a short space of time. One was a 500gb unit that was housed in a NAT Server that I backed up alot of my music and photos on as it made them available anywhere there was internet access. Didn't lose much as I still had most of them elsewhere. Samsung hdd's I've also had fail in the past.
I would still buy Seagate in the future though as I doubt they specifically targeted me ;)
 
Hmmm. just helped my son build a new puter and we used a 2T WD HDD as the boot drive. There's a 750gb installed from his old one, think I'll tell him to keep all his stuff on that one till the 2T has had a little bed in time.
Click to expand...

No, copy it to BOTH. TWO copies.

I used to work in server administration. Hard drives die ALL THE TIME.

Sorry OP that it happened too late, but everyone needs to back up RIGHT NOW! are all of your holiday photos, everything that you've produced with all of that expensive camera gear, really not worth £40 on another hard drive?


personally, I've no experience with what brand of hard drives die more quickly, and mostly use WD hard drives myself (got a whole stack of the cheap black external ones here and offsite) but dell servers sure seemed to get through more of them than HP's...
 
Last edited:
I personally have never had a problem wit WD hard drives. I never trust them though, always have as many backups as possible. All the really important stuff I am in the process of burning to DVD's.
 
I have Seagate Go portable FW800 and it performs really nicely. The 3.5 WD 1TB also seems stable enough but it feels really awful for the noise it makes, and the spin up lag. That's nothing compared with the horrors and failures of Lacie / Maxtor family.
 
Maxtor and seagate are the same company now.

I've had plenty of failures in the past too. In my experience IMB (now Hitachi) have been the worst followed closely by WD and Seagate. The only brand never to have let me down is Samsung. Consequently all my large drives are now Samsung.

I backup to an old PC with 2 x 2TB drives in it. One drive is shared as 'backup' and a sync program makes a second copy onto the other drive that is not shared. I won't use NAS devices anymore after the controller failed on the last one meaning I could not access data on 2 healthy drives because it was some proprietary format.
 
Anyone use online storage site for backing up pics?Thought about doing it myself just incase any of my hard drives fail.
 
daugirdas said:
I remember, google posted an article about their hdds. Their experience was that most failures occurred at an early stage, and after that period the 'good' drives performed very reliably.
Click to expand...

Yup, there's an inverse bell curve for HD failure, they tend to either fail very early on or at the end of their rated life.
 
Like all things mechanical hard drives can fail at any time. They have a mean time between failure like a shutter.

Rip the drive out of the case and put it in a pc, most of the time its just this that has failed and the drive itself is fine.

ALWAYS have at least 2 copies of data you wish to retain at ALL times. Preferably with an off site copy factored in ( another hard drive taken to parents house etc ) in case the worst should happen to your house.

Maxtor are owned by seagate but maxtor are operated as a budget line compared to seagates range.
 
Davie said:
The thing is the 750gb drive is a WD too (black edition same as the 2Tb one) although it's sata2 and its 3 years old. Never had a problem with them., now Seagate, that's a different story lol.
Hope you can recover it
Click to expand...

He should be running his OS off the WD black drive, then he should get a second WD 2TB and set that up in raid 1, and then keep all his data on that.
 
neil_g said:
Well, depends what raid level. But my point is raid won't protect against deletions or corruption or some types of hardware failure that nuke all attached disks.
Click to expand...


Thats a good point

:)
 
MomentCapture said:
Obviously your confused about which raid does what, so best to go learn what your talking about before commenting.
Click to expand...

Actually I know what i'm talking about, do you?

Oh and just to add, even though the failure rate of RAID1 is about 5% assuming 2 identical disks are used, Neil is right about data corruption, as what happens to files on one disk mirrors over to the other, so a traditional back up plan is still needed
 
Last edited:
neil_g said:
Well, depends what raid level. But my point is raid won't protect against deletions or corruption or some types of hardware failure that nuke all attached disks.
Click to expand...

If you delete something by mistake (never actually done that personally), with a mechanical HDD it's not 'that' hard to get back.

And hardware failures that take out your whole system must be extremely rare, I'v never heard of it happening personally, especially considering decent modern PSU's have implemented safety circuitry.

I have however melted an X25-m due to a wire from a cheap molex connector coming lose and dumping a shed-load of juice to the SSD, but raid 1 protects for those situations.
 
neil_g said:
Please don't suggest raid1 as a backup if that is what you're suggesting
Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I'm suggesting, raid1 is one of the safest storage setups, obviously it would be ideal if it was used in combination with regular backups on an external drive.

Just doing backups to other media, without taking advantage of certain raid levels is much less secure, as securing your data heavily relies on the user actually backing up often enough, as it doesn't bring back the data you lost prior to your last backup.

What I recommended to that poster was actually sound advice for the average user.
 
Rob and Neil are right, RAID1 is not a back up, use it to protect again drive failure and thats it. IME file corruption is far more common than drive failure, and all RAID1 will do is copy that corruption.

I have 3 WD 2TB drives, one them with the "original" data on, another one which receives a backup daily automatically using Synctoy, and another 2TB drive is in an enclosure which gets backed up every few days.

Backing up does not rely on the user having to think about doing it, it's doing it automatically.
 
redddraggon said:
Rob and Neil are right, RAID1 is not a back up, use it to protect again drive failure and thats it. IME file corruption is far more common than drive failure, and all RAID1 will do is copy that corruption.

I have 3 WD 2TB drives, one them with the "original" data on, another one which receives a backup daily automatically using Synctoy, and another 2TB drive is in an enclosure which gets backed up every few days.

Backing up does not rely on the user having to think about doing it, it's doing it automatically.
Click to expand...

Just curious, how much data is on that 2tb partition?
 
Are you sure the drive has failed? or the USB caddy part?

Try taking the drive out and plugging into a different caddy, a few quid from PC world
 
redddraggon said:
Rob and Neil are right, RAID1 is not a back up, use it to protect again drive failure and thats it. IME file corruption is far more common than drive failure, and all RAID1 will do is copy that corruption.

I have 3 WD 2TB drives, one them with the "original" data on, another one which receives a backup daily automatically using Synctoy, and another 2TB drive is in an enclosure which gets backed up every few days.

Backing up does not rely on the user having to think about doing it, it's doing it automatically.
Click to expand...

This is a less secure setup than a raid 1 + daily backup, as the raid 1 acts as a real time backup.

What happens when your 'original' data drive fails at the end of a day before your automated backup has not started? you'v lost a days work that's what...
 
Last edited:
Anyway, to get back to the OPs question...

As someone else above suggested try taking the drive out of the enclosure and plugging it into the computer directly. You might get lucky.
 
MomentCapture said:
This is a less secure setup than a raid 1 + daily backup, as the raid 1 acts as a real time backup.

What happens when your 'original' data drive fails at the end of a day before your automated backup has not started? you'v lost a days work that's what...
Click to expand...

That's why my data gets copied/saved to my nas then I straight away make the second copy to usb and/or blu-ray which then goes in a fireproof and floodproof box, the blu-ray gets taken to work the next morning. My LR catalogue goes to my webspace. Any RAW files are not deleted from CF card until that is done.

Raid mirroring is no more protective than a single disk when it comes to data retention (I.e. deletions and corruption). Hence the san at work has hardware raid then virtual raid on each virtual disk and its backed up to tape every night. Poo happens especially with data and storage.

It wouldnt be unheard of for a raid array controller to fail writing garbage to all disks, if it wasn't for the tape backup in the cases I've seen the data would be lost.

To suggest raid1 as a single point of data storage is irresponsible in my personal and professional opinion.

Rant over.
 
neil_g said:
That's why my data gets copied/saved to my nas then I straight away make the second copy to usb and/or blu-ray which then goes in a fireproof and floodproof box, the blu-ray gets taken to work the next morning. My LR catalogue goes to my webspace. Any RAW files are not deleted from CF card until that is done.

Raid mirroring is no more protective than a single disk when it comes to data retention (I.e. deletions and corruption). Hence the san at work has hardware raid then virtual raid on each virtual disk and its backed up to tape every night. Poo happens especially with data and storage.

It wouldnt be unheard of for a raid array controller to fail writing garbage to all disks, if it wasn't for the tape backup in the cases I've seen the data would be lost.

To suggest raid1 as a single point of data storage is irresponsible in my personal and professional opinion.

Rant over.
Click to expand...

Right, like that's not acceptable for an average Joe that previously had no backup...

Also why not cut the crap and admit raid1 with daily backup was more secure than the option the poster was currently using?
 
Last edited:
neil_g said:
That's why my data gets copied/saved to my nas then I straight away make the second copy to usb and/or blu-ray which then goes in a fireproof and floodproof box, the blu-ray gets taken to work the next morning. My LR catalogue goes to my webspace. Any RAW files are not deleted from CF card until that is done.

Raid mirroring is no more protective than a single disk when it comes to data retention (I.e. deletions and corruption). Hence the san at work has hardware raid then virtual raid on each virtual disk and its backed up to tape every night. Poo happens especially with data and storage.

It wouldnt be unheard of for a raid array controller to fail writing garbage to all disks, if it wasn't for the tape backup in the cases I've seen the data would be lost.

To suggest raid1 as a single point of data storage is irresponsible in my personal and professional opinion.

Rant over.
Click to expand...


(y)

Amen to that


Where I work we also back up the server to tape

Every morning the tape reel gets changed, then stored off site at the end of the day
 
MomentCapture said:
Right, like that's not acceptable for an average Joe that previously had no backup...

Also why not cut the crap and admit raid1 with daily backup was more secure than the option the poster was currently using?
Click to expand...

You suggested that Raid1 should be used as a backup method. It's not a backup method, you've even admitted it here.

Raid1 protects against hard drive failure - it is not however an actual backup unless you are constantly swapping out the discs. It does not serve the purpose that a backup does. In terms of backing up data, it is practically no more secure than no backup at all.

A "real time" backup method completely defeats the point of a backup. You do not want to write over your backup in real time.

MomentCapture said:
^^^
Lol, you didn't even know the difference between raid0 Vs raid1...
Click to expand...

...and you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
 
MomentCapture said:
^^^
Lol, you didn't even know the difference between raid0 Vs raid1...
Click to expand...

lol doesn't know that I already knew the difference between RAID0 AND RAID1, also that I was generalizing, as data loss can happen on both, whether that be mechanical failure or more commonly data corruption, It's still failure and data gets lost

also for the record I didn't have to google anything 10 years as a technician also working in data recovery and rebuilding hard drives at the age of 17 in 100% clean room conditions should be enough experience.

:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top