Topic: WD HARD DRIVE ISSUES

[H₂O]

Make gparted boot cd and see if it is recognized using just USB - you may then be able to pull off the data.


http://gparted.sourceforge.net/


I had a WD 200GB drive fail in a similar fashion (there is a common issue with the drive I had and NTFS) at the time I bought some recovery software and was able to get most of the data back (but I had to spend about $100 in software costs).


The above software may have some utils that allow you to recover the partition or volume information and pull the data off the drive without spending the $$$ on recovery software - but if you don't know what you are doing don't mess with it as you may cause more harm - find someone who does - I am sure someone on the site could help you out.


Remember to keep copies of all your masters on multiple types of media and/or brands of HDD's

[TaperBryan]

mine actually seemed to power up last night and the light came on and my desktop found the drive....i have yet to unplug it.....although, i have unplugged the firewire from my desktop tower....just havent unplugged the external from the wall wart.  i'll be stopping at Best Buy on the way home to buy more discs.  Looks like i'm going to have a bit of task to get all the masters I have on there backed up to disc, etc.  I'm not looking forward to the hours thats going to take   .  But, it will beat the alternative of potentially losing them all.....

[flipp]

<cough> get another hd, much faster transferring to it than to optical media and retail drives come with software so you can easily transfer the entire contents<cough>

[adrianf74]

If you can get the data off of them I would HIGHLY suggest buying TWO drives to replace them.

I just saw a 2 TB drive on sale for $110!! Get 2 of those and you will be golden for a long time.

In regards to your issue I have heard that external drives can sometime have issues with the electronics that a part of the case that die, and then the computer can't read the drive.

You can remove the drive from the case an install it inside of a desktop or a known good external case and sometimes read the data off the drive.

Hopefully you have backups of your shows. It drives me NUTS when I read about someone that lost all of their recordings because they only had one copy. Hard Drives WILL die. It's not a matter of IF but WHEN. Only having your data in one place is exactly the same as just erasing it.

+1.

Never have only one copy of your shows.  I found DVD media rather flakey for storing my shows because it would fail over time (even if stored in a dark, dry environment).  That said, I have a portable 320GB drive that has all of my shows on it and then copied that to another 500GB full-sized portable.   That 500GB drive is stored in my locker in a rubbermaid tote and I pull it out every two months or so and update.  I keep "secondary" copies on my home computer until they're "backed up" to the second drive.  This way, if I ever lose the one drive (fire, won't spin up, etc.) I have the second drive avaialble.

The $110 for 2TB is great.  I believe those are "green" drives which run a little slower but also run cooler and have a greater life expectancy.

[coloartist]

I got a 2tb Seagate drive about 4-5 months ago. Good so far. Crossing fingers.

[junkyardt]

please don't tell me there are people on here who actually keep only one copy of their masters on one hard drive. i have all of mine backed up on 3 different externals...no way 3 drives will fail all at once.

[coloartist]

please don't tell me there are people on here who actually keep only one copy of their masters on one hard drive. i have all of mine backed up on 3 different externals...no way 3 drives will fail all at once.

I have my masters in 2 places, and one of the places is raided.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

The $110 for 2TB is great.  I believe those are "green" drives which run a little slower but also run cooler and have a greater life expectancy.

Pretty much all wrong, except the cheap price.

They are newer technology and they are less reliable.   Major changes to the heads were required for the higher density.

They aren't selling well.  That's why they are cheap.

They aren't slower - that's just a sign that you aren't using the 4096 byte sectors correctly.

Of course when the solar storm hits, we'd better have that stuff on optical!

[mmedley.]

I burn my masters to DVD, if I keep them. I usually just burn a 24bit and 16bit FLAC. I can just reassemble teh 24bit FLAC if I need a master again. 

[adrianf74]

The $110 for 2TB is great.  I believe those are "green" drives which run a little slower but also run cooler and have a greater life expectancy.

Pretty much all wrong, except the cheap price.

They are newer technology and they are less reliable.   Major changes to the heads were required for the higher density.

They aren't selling well.  That's why they are cheap.

They aren't slower - that's just a sign that you aren't using the 4096 byte sectors correctly.

Of course when the solar storm hits, we'd better have that stuff on optical!

Incorrect.  There has been some bad press on the newer high capacity drives.  The SAMSUNG STORY STATION drives have gotten pretty good reviews.

've got 4 x 2TB WD Caviar Green EAD20 drives running in a JBOD config.  With a small tweak, the drives are good without issues as far as head parking. 

They are selling well... and if that's the case, how come you can buy a 1TB drive (bare that is) for less than half of that?

[it-goes-to-eleven]

The $110 for 2TB is great.  I believe those are "green" drives which run a little slower but also run cooler and have a greater life expectancy.

Pretty much all wrong, except the cheap price.

They are newer technology and they are less reliable.   Major changes to the heads were required for the higher density.

They aren't selling well.  That's why they are cheap.

They aren't slower - that's just a sign that you aren't using the 4096 byte sectors correctly.

Of course when the solar storm hits, we'd better have that stuff on optical!

Incorrect.  There has been some bad press on the newer high capacity drives.  The SAMSUNG STORY STATION drives have gotten pretty good reviews.

've got 4 x 2TB WD Caviar Green EAD20 drives running in a JBOD config.  With a small tweak, the drives are good without issues as far as head parking. 

They are selling well... and if that's the case, how come you can buy a 1TB drive (bare that is) for less than half of that?

It's a lot more than bad press.   Look at the most popular 2TB WD drive on newegg.  25% of the ratings are one or two stars.  These densities require significant changes to the design of the drive. It's new tech and it hasn't matured yet.   And for those who aren't aware - you can find that same higher density tech in 1TB drives - so you have to watch out for those.

Samsung is a small player compared to wd and seagate (who I avoid; they've been close to bankruptcy for years).  The power consumption (and heat) on the samsungs is also higher than wd or seagate.

1TB Western Digital WD1001FALS, my preference, are still $90 street price.  I wish they were half...

[mmedley.]

You can't trust the reviews on NewEgg at all anymore. Most of those people have no clue what they are talking about. The low reviews usually are almost always due to user error. I have bought 20-30 HDD's in my lifetime and I have NEVER had one show up DOA or fail within a week as alot of these claims indicate. OEM or Retail. I can only recall 2 of my drives totally failing and they were well out of warranty (5-6 years old).

The only thing drive manufacturers are doing is cramming more platters into same drives and updating the firmware. More platters means they are more prone to failure. The Green drives ARE slower, regardless of sector sizing. Most every major OS uses 4096 sectors by default. The Green drives are meant to be economical and used for storage that is not heavily accessed for writing purposes. The Green drives are not expected to yield longer service life either. Not sure how that conclusion was arrived at, unless Green = Less Power = Less drive strain.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

The only thing drive manufacturers are doing is cramming more platters into same drives and updating the firmware.

Wrong.  But I really don't care.

[rjp]

Most every major OS uses 4096 sectors by default.

The problem with the Western Digital EARS-series drives is that they lie to the operating system and say they use 512-byte sectors. The OS blithely trusts this, and if you aren't careful when setting up your drive, it'll perform very poorly. You must make sure to align the partition to a 4 Kbyte boundary, and force your filesystems to use 4K (or multiples thereof) blocks.

The other nasty problem with WD Green drives is that they will park the heads automatically after eight seconds of inactivity. This can result in ridiculous load cycle counts if you use these drives for anything other than the storage of backups. I'm not sure whether or not they tend to spin down after short timeouts, but if so, that would be another reason to avoid these drives for working storage.

[Johnny Thunder]

Using Linux is ok for some of us, but for thoise that don't have the experiance to do that, Acronis True Image is a good solution. Not only are you booting into a very small OS of it's own, (I beleive it's a version of the old Dr. DOS), you immediately have cloning options in a menu driven system that is very easy for someone with limited computer skills to use. Further, the software can be had at pretty reasonable cost.

-JT