3rd WD GP 2TB drive failed, out of 5...

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devil22

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So I'm now RMA'ing my 3rd WD GP 2TB drive, out of 5 I have owned. What the hell. In the future I don't want to buy WD again, but I may have to because I need a 3TB drive and WD is the only one who makes an internal. :( Anyone else having bad luck with these? I bought them from newegg and best buy, I know at least one failed drive came from best buy (instant click of death on first boot) and one came from newegg (system stopped booting until I unplugged the drive after a few months/year of use), not sure if the third is from newegg or best buy though, but it has bad sectors, which I was alerted to when file copies started stalling, causing my back up program to hang until the system was shut off forcefully, as the process could not be killed nor would the system shut down through windows with the hung process running.. sucks. Probably a good thing I have 3 of the drives, with 2 as backups, with this failure rate.
 
Did you buy them all at the same time? Were they properly shipped? You probably just got a bad batch?

And when you talk about failed are you running these in a windows or hardware raid?
 
I've lost 4/8 1.5TB WD Greens (TigerDirect earlier this year and not the best packing.)

BTW on the subject of 3TB drives 2-3 months from volume shipping (Jan 2011) from multiple vendors.
 
drescherjm said:
Did you buy them all at the same time? Were they properly shipped? You probably just got a bad batch?

And when you talk about failed are you running these in a windows or hardware raid?
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No I bought them all seperately, over a long period (months - year) from, as I said, best buy and newegg. The drive packaging appeared undamaged on each (I look for such things.) And no RAID of any kind. Each is/was a seperate volume in Windows.
 
pjkenned said:
I've lost 4/8 1.5TB WD Greens (TigerDirect earlier this year and not the best packing.)

BTW on the subject of 3TB drives 2-3 months from volume shipping (Jan 2011) from multiple vendors.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info regarding release dates, I may try to wait a few months before I go 3TB to get it from some other company. Unfortunately I only have 120GBs left on each drive, and HD video eats that up pretty fast.
 
I used to love WD but reliability seems to have dropped somewhat with the 1.5 and 2TB drives. This is based purely off of user reviews and posts I've read on forums, since I don't have my own farm of 10,000 to run and record statistics on...but it's the vibe I get. Lots of people have good luck with them; but the percentage of people who do have problems seems to be greater than with the smaller capacity drives.

I switched to Samsung for my high-cap needs based on price and reviews. I have four 2TB F3s and four 2TB F4s. All have been flawless so far. I wouldn't rule out Hitachi either, as tons of people are having good luck with those as well.
 
I have a number of WD 1.5TB and 2TB drives. None have failed. I have no concerns about the reliability.

Small samples are worthless for building failure models.
 
GeorgeHR said:
I have a number of WD 1.5TB and 2TB drives. None have failed. I have no concerns about the reliability.

Small samples are worthless for building failure models.
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Certainly true. I am mostly convinced that the failures were induced by poor shipping since these drives are ~10 months old.

Too high of an AFR to be a representative sample of the drives.
 
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I have a mix of 40 20EADS, 20EARS, and 10EADS without any outright failures so far. It's made my 2 backup servers with parity protection, ones even offsite with a dedicated wireless link, a bad investment so far. The peace of mind coming from 5 out 8 Seagate 1.5tbs failing is great though.
 
[LYL]Homer;1036353997 said:
Were these drives running with decent airflow, at a decently cool temp?
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Two of the 3 failed drives were in my HAF 932, which runs a 230mm intake fan at the front right by the hard drives, and another 230mm fan that blows air out the top.
The third was in a RaidMax Ninja case, which doesn't have great airflow, but it's only a htpc, with a mere gt 220 video card, generally medium to light load most the time.
Right now HWiNFO says my other two 2TB GP drives in that htpc system are at 50c and 45c, I presume the 50c is the main data drive that I usually play movies off of. The one that failed was a rarely accessed back up of a back up drive. I just can't see that I'm doing anything unusual here, with the drives, but this does seem odd. That's just too many, and then other people with many more WD drives have no problem.
Then, there's the fact that no other hard drive from any other manufacturer has ever failed in my personal systems, going back to my 286 MS-DOS days, for the duration that they were in active use. Probably ~15 drives total in all that time, with WD being 8 of them, and 4 of the WD drives die. I dunno.

I know it doesn't prove anything, but I'm avoiding WD in the future if possible. Don't know what else to do.
 
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