Less than a month after buying my first WD Scorpio Blue it failed and was announced faulty. I had to buy a static bag online, use a specific type of box which took forever to locate, wrap it in a ridiculous amount of bubble wrap and pay for postage to send it to WD. They sent me another one, but not new. No, despite their product being faulty and me having paid less than a month before for a brand new working harddrive, I had to pay extra and wait a few extra weeks for a USED one.
Despite being used, it seemed OK for a while, and then today 6 months or so later, the replacement harddrive died too. I back up every evening, or every other evening at the least, but I have still lost hours of work as well as general music, video etc. files which I can mostly get back again but which will take hours to re-authorise, download, add back to itunes etc. I expect since it was a used drive, I will be told that it’s out of warrenty. And/Or I will have to pay out even more money for more boxes, static bags, bubblewrap and postage and will have to wait another month for a ‘working’ /‘new’ harddrive.
It’d -ridiculous- to have to wrap a harddrive that WD’s OWN TECHNICIANS decided was faulty so that it won’t get broken on the way. It’s already broken. And when the entire situation is WD’s fault for producing dodgy products in the first place, sending out -used- harddrives that were already broken once to replace a new harddrive is not acceptable. I was told they ‘don’t have access to new ones’. Which is ridiculous when they’re the company that makes them.
I found another faulty harddrive from an old laptop earlier while trying to locate a usable spare too. And yes. It was made by WD. A brief look at these forums tells me that this is not a rare or isolated problem. And I’m sure there are plenty more stories posted elsewhere. Clearly there is some kind of design flaw or low quality parts or a serious lack of QC here.
And obviously I won’t be buying any WD products again.
I’m not posting this in any attempt to stick up for our drives. And certainly there are times when you can just get a faulty drive. Or three. However, when I read your post, I couldn’t help wonder what you might be doing with your laptop.
I would recommend as a common practice that you don’t pick it up, and/or move it around, once your laptop is up and running. I see people doing this all the time and it makes me cringe. Of course they argue that the new laptop hard drives park their heads instantly with any movement. What they fail to understand is that the platters are still spinning at about 4500 to 5400 rpms. On the newer laptop drives they can spin at 7200 rpms. If you are moving that hard drive around, whether in a laptop or a portable drive, you are causing a tremendous amount of stress on the main spindle the platters spin on. The wear and tear can easily and quickly diminish the life of that drive.
Take note how you handle external drives and your laptop. Are you picking them up and moving them around when they’re running? Do you flop on your sofa with the laptop running? Exactly just how careful are you when you set it back down while it’s running? All of that damages a spinning drive. Not “can damage”, it does damage a drive. Understand, I’m not just talking to you here. I’m talking to my adult kids.
That’s why I finally bought me an SSD drive. Cause I got tired of worrying about any damage I might be doing to my laptop hard drive. On an SSD drive there are no moving parts. So you can pick it up and move it around all you want. However, just because there are not moving parts doesn’t mean it won’t fail either. As a matter of fact, I’ve owned probably a dozen laptops, and I’ve never had a laptop drive die on me. However, the SSD drive I bought did fail on me, and I had to RMA it. Oh well, that’s life. I had my data backed up so I didn’t lose anything important.
Now, concerning RMAs, nobody is going to replace a failed drive with a new drive. That’s industry practice. We are required to certify our replacement products, and we do. However, what happens to them once they leave our warehouse, we can’t certify. That doesn’t excuse any failure on our part, but it might add another perspective.
I just wanted to write in and say that I also had a Scorpio Blue drive crash - spectacularly - and I am 100% in agreement with anyone who believes that these drives are fatally flawed to the point of being unusable, and that Western Digital really manufactured a completely inferior product with these drives.
I have had laptops since 2001. Never mistreated them although I do travel with them. Generally, replacement has been because I want/need something faster, not because the computer breaks (with the exception of one very bad laptop that was recalled for overheating 9 months after I bought it). I have NEVER, and I mean NEVER, had a hard drive crash after a mere FOUR MONTHS of use. Yet that is exactly what happened to me this week with the WD Scorpio Blue drive in my new (purchased in July) ASUS laptop. I was using the laptop, I turned it off and set it down, a couple of hours later I went to turn it on and use it again and the computer couldn’t read the boot sectors on the hard drive. The drive was completely toasted. My husband downloaded a commercial recovery tool and it took him THREE DAYS to extract the data off the drive - what data he could extract. Fortunately I had recently backed up so I didn’t lose much, but this was a RIDICULOUS AND COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE FAILURE of a BRAND-NEW piece of hardware. IT SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED AND ANYONE FROM WD WHO SAYS OTHERWISE, OR TRIES TO BLAME THE FAILURE OF THE HARD DRIVE ON OWNER USE HABITS IS A PERNICIOUS AND SHAMELESS LIAR.
I wrote to ASUS and am requesting that they do not use any more WD drives in their laptops. I pointed them to many, many reviews across the web (including at NewEgg and Amazon) with people saying that what happened to me, happened to them too: their drive experienced sudden catastrophic failure four to five months after initial use. Obviously, the product is flawed materially and I refuse to believe WD is not aware of this. I am going to continue to post negative comments and reviews across the web so that other people are aware of WD’s bad hardware and I will certainly make sure, in the future, that I NEVER purchase another computer that utilizes WD hardware, of any kind.
And by the way? The fact that some person from WD would come into this forum and ARGUE WITH A CUSTOMER about their experience is just proof positive that WD is a clueless company run by incompetent troglodytes.
I work on computers as a side job.I have also have had these drives fail numerous amout of times.From people that use there laptops causally to the everyday gamer.I contacted WD support about retuning these drives with no luck.These drives should have a recall and be inspected by your QC department.WD was once a very trusted name with a reliable product, that I personally don’t see anymore.If you would like me to send you these failed drives, one with less then 3000 hrs of use, I will.
I was a true “blue” (pun intended) WD advocate…until the recent failure of my blue scorpio 500 gb drive. It is just 2.5 yrs old. I have also been a sole laptop user since 1997. I aam also a retired IT Admin for a Fortune 200 company. I know how to take care of my hardware. This thing crashed like someone turned off a switch. I’ve never seen a failure like this in my near 30 years of computer experience. For the benefit of an earlier poster, my laptop stayed on a desk at home with sufficient access to air - it was never moved when running, and certainly never tossed about “on the couch”.
In short - I will never - EVER buy another WD drive of any kind. This is inexcusable, given that WD has knowledge of this, and does not alert owners. Now I will be spending more on data recovery, than I did the entire laptop.
WD just lost two decade-long advocates (myself, and my husband, who builds gaminig boxes). We will now alert our friends they need to REPLACE their drives immediately, with a competitor’s drive. I’m not trying to be rude, but it IS about a user’s data safety, ultimately.
Hi well there is only one other competitor and I am not to sure if that is the way to go. I would like to know what the smart data g-sense report is on the drives. I have seen new users destroy a new drive in 3 months due to misuse and yes I have been in the PC business for 20 years, so you may take care of your drive but many do not. One drive failure in 10 years I don’t know if that really means a bad company. Now as for data recovery well all know back up your data to a different drive.
Yeah, anyone who’s worked in IT for 20 years should know *beyond a shadow of a doubt* that only a sound backup plan reduces the risk of data loss due to drive failure.
