Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Matt]

The other day I was watching a BD rip and it hung.  I ended up having to reboot (a few times) and skip a chunk of the movie.

I sort of forgot about it for a couple weeks, but then it happened again to a TV recording the other night.

When I tried to copy the TV recording to my phone to bring it in to work for testing, it wouldn't copy.

It turns out the hard drive has files it can't read or copy.  Presumably it's getting CRC errors and failing. 

This causes a low-level hardware hang with a huge timeout.  It makes Media Center (or any program that uses that chunk of the file) look hung.

So what looked like a Media Center problem turned out to be a hard drive problem.

[jmone]

I love it - real time monitoring --> http://www.harddisksentinel.com/

[Matt]

I'm puzzled by the bad drive.

I had these problems:




I tried a full, slow format (16 hours).  It finished fine, with no bad sectors.  And now the Western Digital tool passes when I do a quick test.

So is the drive safe to use as a backup drive, or should I be scared?

I actually tried to RMA it before the full format (it's a bit over a year old), but WD wouldn't let me because I already RMA'd it once when the first one died after two weeks.  I'm guessing they'll let me if I talk to a real person, but now I'm not sure if I need to.

Thanks for any advice.

[rjm]

I've seen so much weirdness over the years that the only thing I trust is a full binary verification. If it were my drive I would use it for backup but I would do a full binary verification of the backup copy. And schedule a repeat verification about once a month. After a few months of no verification errors I would trust the drive.

[MrC]

Replace the drive.  Others agree:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/Quick-Test-on-drive-did-not-complete/td-p/334865
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/WDC-WD20EARS-Fails-Data-Life-Guard-Ouick-and-Extended-tests/td-p/148674

[InflatableMouse]

I agree, RMA it. Do you know the revision number of the last one? Check this one's revision number as well, keep a record of it and try to get one newer, especially if the first one had the same revision.

But have a look at the SMART counters. Several free programs will show them. It will tell you which counters had warnings or errors.

[Sparks67]

I am not surprised that WD hard drive has failed within a year.  I recently had 4 WD drives to fail.  One of the members suggested that I do hard drive backup, but I always done optical backups.   If I had listened to him, then I would have lost 15% of my data with the (4) WD that failed.  The data was only on my drives for 2 weeks, while setup a new array.  I had everything backed to optical and only 1 disc didn't work.  So less that .5% failure.  Seagate is the best drive that I owned so far.   I do own Hitachi as well, but those drives are almost 2 years old.