I must have very bad luck with WD 10EARS HDDs , I have now replaced EVERY one of the 6 drives I bought 1 year ago under warranty except for one. Now this last one is going bad as well.
First up, in the WD Diag software it is detected as an IDE drive where all other are detected as SATA and the drive sure is a SATA drive.
2nd up it has started with lots or read and write errors but SMART still says OK.
A scan with HDtune shows 1 cluster as bad, but if you read from or write to the drive at different times the PC hangs and the HDD light is solid on, after some time it resumes, only to later hang again.
I have removed everything off the drive that I could and now in the process of running the Diag software on it.
The report I get from WD Diag and HDtune are the same except HDtune has an extra column with some interesting data, I can’t copy and paste from either program, and I am not going to type it out, but these are listed:
Raw Read Error Rate = 4706 [about 1 hour ago it was 4705]
Current Pending Sector = 2
Offline Uncorrectable = 1
Write Error Rate = 4
Untill this year I was a fan of WD and had been using them for many years, and the computers I built this year for people all had WD drives, a few of those also had to have the drives replaced, but not all of them. But interestingly enough they are all GREEN drives. So is there maybe some underlying problem with them not discovered or kept secret ?.
If the drive doesn’t fail a SMART test but has data problems then how to I proceed for a warranty return. I don’t use the WD RMA service cause I usualy keep the reciepts and just return them to the place I bought them, then they ship if off.
Then comes the last question, how long does WD take to replace a faulty drive in Australia ?, each time I do it its up to 8 weeks. I am waiting on 2 more to come back from repair and its getting close to the 8 weeks now.
