1TB WD My Book Essential Edition, screeching noises!?

[Xeogred]

Well yesterday I was playing emulators for a long time until some screeching noise popped up around my computer. It went on for awhile and I could not tell where it was coming from. But it just happened today, and I'm 99% sure it's coming from my 1TB WD My Book Essential Edition external HDD. I have not heard any clicking or spinning problems, but this has me pretty worried now.

I'm doing an Error Check at the moment which will probably take hours and I will admit, it's only got like 30 gigs and I have not done a defrag on this one in awhile, so that's my fault there. After the error check I'll probably go ahead and clear up hopefully around 100gigs and defrag it, but I figured I'd post this to throw this out here and prepare for the worst.

If this becomes something more serious I gotta say this is the second WD that's given me issues. My previous one was a 500GB Essentials that started clicking. I was pretty pissed and did everything I could to fix it, broke it out of the case and hooked it up internally, then put it in another external enclosure... nothing worked. But magically, I went back to it months later out of the blue and it worked. That was pretty annoying but a nice surprise in the end I guess, was able to back everything up from it, then I reformatted it and backed up things again to that one and stored it away for the heck of it.

What annoys me though is that I don't move my externals at all. This 1TB drive is probably only 2-3 years old. I also bought a WD 2TB Elements last year and that one damn well better hold off.

It's just embarrassing that I have this enormous Seagate brick 160GB external that has been knocked around, moved, and everything, and has been working flawlessly for probably ~7 years I'd wanna say. Haven't even bothered to convert that one from FAT32 either. Maybe it's time I stay away from WD.

[EllertMichael]

Well yesterday I was playing emulators for a long time until some screeching noise popped up around my computer. It went on for awhile and I could not tell where it was coming from. But it just happened today, and I'm 99% sure it's coming from my 1TB WD My Book Essential Edition external HDD. I have not heard any clicking or spinning problems, but this has me pretty worried now.

I have that same HDD and haven't experienced any problems yet...
please update this thread on how this turned out, I'm definitely interested to know...
Good luck!

[Hatta]

With hard disks, it's just the luck of the draw. You're actually more likely to lose a hard drive in the first year or two you have it than any other time. Not all of them are built perfectly, and the ones with loose tolerances die relatively quickly. The rest should run just about forever if kept isolated from heat and vibration. It's actually pretty amazing how durable modern hard drives are.

Oh and FWIW, Google did a comparison of how different vendor's hard disks fared in their data center. There were no statistically significant differences between hard disk manufacturers.

So back up your disk to a large disk, and exercise your warranty. Western Digital still has a 3 year warranty right?

[Xeogred]

A single one year warranty according to the box...

[Ziggy]

With hard disks, it's just the luck of the draw.

Yeah, it's true. I'm sorry that you've had troubles with your past two WD drives, but that's no reason to swear off the brand for life. I've had both Seagate and WD drives fail over the years. Honestly, I'll buy a WD over a Seagate, but that's probably because the last half dozen or so HDDs I've bought have been WD and they've all been solid. But go on NewEgg and search a Seagate or WD drive and sort by highest rated. Even the highest customer rated drive has lots of reviews that say it came DOA or died soon after. It sucks, but it seems that's just how the world of hard drives works.

What kind of drive is in the WD "Essentail" or whatever externals? I always thought those externals where some what cheaper than they should be. I doubt they have a high end WD drive inside. I assume it's a cheaper drive, but maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

If you end up having to replace the drive, here's what I would do. Go on NewEgg and get an internal HDD. I would suggest WD Caviar Black (I currently have 3 Caviar Blacks and they've been solid). As soon as you get the drive in, test it for bad sectors, run WD's diagnostic software or whatever. NewEgg is pretty well known for easy returns. If the drive turns out good, slap it in an external enclosure and you're good to go.

[Hatta]

That's shitty. The only possible reason for reducing their warranty is to screw over their customers. If people aren't returning drives in the 2-3 year time frame, then extending the warranty that long costs them nothing. If people are returning drives in that time frame, then WD is getting away with selling faulty goods.

I'd avoid WD in the future for that reason alone.

[Xeogred]

@Ziggy: Understandable argument, though I sure did see a lot of bad karma coming from WD when I was having that huge issue with my 500GB drive and scavenging through the internet, kind of like their one year warranty thing here.

Don't quote me on this as this probably wasn't exactly my model, but one of the posts here says the 500GB Essentials was a: SATA WD5000YS WD Caviar RE2 WD5000YS-01MPB0
http://rebootdaily.blogspot.com/2007/03 ... -book.html

All I remember is it was a pretty generic HDD.

Do you guys have better experience with flat external cases? Just curious because my newer 2TB WD Elements sits flat horizontally, while the 500GB and 250GB WD's were vertical cases (with the lights in the middle). I guess on that note I can say I've had the 250GB one for well over 5 years or so and it's been working just fine. I did read a lot of reviews about the 2TB Elements before purchasing that one though and it seemed pretty good. So far no issues...

It just sucks if something goes wrong here I don't really have the money to deal with it now. On that note I've regretted buying this slim model PC I have since I looked inside of it and there's no way I'd be able to fit another drive in there haha... Internal drives always sound safer in the end.

[Ziggy]

That's shitty. The only possible reason for reducing their warranty is to screw over their customers. If people aren't returning drives in the 2-3 year time frame, then extending the warranty that long costs them nothing. If people are returning drives in that time frame, then WD is getting away with selling faulty goods.

I'd avoid WD in the future for that reason alone.

Maybe it's only with the externals? I just checked two different WD's on NewEgg and they both had a 5 year warranty.

[isiolia]

That's shitty. The only possible reason for reducing their warranty is to screw over their customers. If people aren't returning drives in the 2-3 year time frame, then extending the warranty that long costs them nothing. If people are returning drives in that time frame, then WD is getting away with selling faulty goods.

I'd avoid WD in the future for that reason alone.

The "standard" length of HDD warranties dropped across basically all manufacturers a few years ago...though I think they sort of rebounded a bit.

A 1 year warranty is pretty common for "low end" external drives, and not just from WD. There are other WD externals with 2 or 3 year warranties.

Most internal drives have 3 or 5 year warranties though, even though the drives themselves are probably the same as what's going into the external.

More in general, every manufacturer has issues from time to time, model to model - or even particular production runs or shipments. If I refused to buy from every HDD manufacturer I'd personally had problems with...I'd basically be unable to buy a drive.

[Hatta]

Quality is statistically equivalent between manufacturers. Warranty length is not. You should refuse to buy from WD because of their deliberately anti-customer warranty.