My WD HD goes bust after FUCKING TWO MONTHs
 

I am outraged. this is beyond fucking ridiculous. why does anyone on this board fucking recommend Western Digital
two months? you got to be fucking kidding me.
data recovery is said to cost $2000
:mad::mad:
/rant

Ouch. Not good. Everything I have is WD now, my main drives, my portable drives, my back up drives, my NAS storage.

WD is like any other manufacturer, they are not infallible.

How big was it?

I know in the past WD has had some problems with the largers ones.

It happens, dude. That's why every time I do a shoot, I back it up once to my desktop, and another 2 times to my external drives. Only after the data is completely replicated across all drives do I format my CF cards.

And then I disconnect both the drives, and put them in padded cases on a shelf.

The drives are turned on only when I'm transferring data.

1.5TB, 2 months is fucking unreal
unacceptable for any manufacturer
they should pay for restoring my fucking data

I always recommend tape backup, OR a RAID 1 enclosure with 2 mirrored disks, each from a different manufacture hooked up to a power flux absorbing UPS [uninterruptable power supply]; as power fluxuations are a big cause of hard drive problems. I know a guy that has had external drives powered up most of the time for the last 6 years with no problems because he has them hooked up to a UPS for very stable power supply.

If you only backup to a single external drive, then delete the originals from your computers internal hard disk, you're asking for a lot of problems.

Hitachi hard drives are very good BTW. I always recommend those. Seagates and Maxtors are the worse.

This program has saved 2 drives for me. Last resort.

EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard 5,0,1

just because a drive go bust doesn't mean its unrocoverable
try the program recommended above
try another one after doing some research
if none help try this company ( http://en.tictac.co.il/ ) ive used them before, paid around
$650 and they returned %90 of the data back

does the program work with drives not recognized by windows? i somehow cant imagine this working but am definitely going to take a look
thx for comments so far

I feel your pain. Have a WD Blue 640 with bad sectors that sometimes Windows 7 goes blue on.. need to exchange it and start run raid1 instead
of being cheap (I mean ME being cheap)

If it's the spindle, try buy another drive and exchange it, did it a few years ago. Exchanging the 'motherboard' on the hdd can also work, all depends
how faulty your drive is. Does it start ? Only read errors, bad noice ?

The only brand of drive I will no longer buy is WD, their portables are by far the most unreliable brand I've ever used.

I take pairs of drives away on shoots then use Synctoy to keep them synced during the trip. One drive comes to dinner every night and gets to travel in hand baggage, the other stays in the hotel then travels in the hold.

Once we get back I copy one drive to an internal to work on, the other just gets checked then stored in our storage unit.

The one time I lost both drives and everything on them both was my sisters wedding. I kid you not. I did in the end get them recovered, but it wasn't cheap and I still looked like an idiot.

Sorry for your loss though.

The drives I recovered could not be seen by anything but the EASEUS program. The program recovered around 90% of the files. The corrupted drives that I have can only be seen by the program as all it does is recover the files. It does not repair the drive. In fact, one of the drives I recovered was so whacked, I could not even reformat it. You have nothing to lose trying this program.

If you think the partition is corrupted you can try EASEUS Partition Master 4.0. Drives have gone to shit in the past couple of years. I have had more failures than I have ever seen lately. I am the backup master now. It's a hassle but the drive quality has gone down with the price.

Why do so many external drives fail? I've never owned an external drive but want to buy one but always hearing about them fail makes me worry. I've never had an HD fail on a computer before..

One of the reasons stated above is sensitivity to voltage fluctuations. The other is being careful in disconnect. I use USB Safely Remove (http://safelyremove.com/) program to shut down an external. You cannot hot swap them.

I have also started buying external enclosures that have a fan now. That goes a long way to dropping temps.

Fuck that sucks!!!

Are you using an external HD on a laptop and the hd uses the usb for power? I couldn't tell you how many times I come across this, but people think their usd hd doesn't work anymore. When the reality is they are drawing too much power from other things. For example laptop+hd works fine but then they go and plug in an extra monitor, keyboard n mouse, etc, and the hd and the hd doesn't show up. Because it doesn't have the capacity to draw the power it needs from the usb.

That's a good method, but I would recommend adding cloud storage.

321 rule.

3 copies of everything, on 2 different types of media, 1 off site.

What's a good company to use for this service? I've been wanting to do this.

For the offsite? There are a few, I use http://www.carbonite.com/

Offer code TWIT will get you a free trial and some discount. Mac and PC clients.

Go with EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard. I use it all the time to recover 'dead' drives that Windows can't see. All the data is still there, the 1s and 0s didn't magically vanish.

Its going to take a few days to run the whole thing on a drive that size, but you will likely recover 90% + of the data, unless you had a colossal failure where a platter got struck.

It sucks big time... :(

That really sucks, I only buy WD now... really odd to hear a story like this.

It can happen. More than likely the drive was defective in some way when it was manufactured. But you should also make sure your cooling system is in good shape as well as your power supply since these can also cause drive failure. Especially if this is a replacement hard drive. As for your data, you know what I'm going to say here regarding backups don't you? :)

:2 cents:

Does the hard drive get detected in the bios? If so, data recovery software may work. I have 700gb or hard drives (2) that are completely dead and they're both WD. The drives don't get read at all. Wonder how long my new 2TB WD hard drive will last.

I have had WD in my PC for around 3 years. No problems.

Also have three external WD drives, they are actively used every day, I hotswap them all the time, they work perfectly.

I think its just a matter of bad luck. I have seen people bitch on every brand of HDDs. I tried Maxtor and Seageate, experienced problems with both.

I think the biggest problem with harddrives is that they get very very hot. I have my PC case open all the time, so I am sure that helps.

Cooling + RAID 1 would do the trick in regards of data protection.

As for the recovery, if the hdd is dead, than its a hardware problem and no recovery software will help you. If it just doesnt get detected by Windows, but the electronics is OK, then it might be a damaged partition or MBR, which means it does not have to be the HDDs fault at all. The partition may get damaged by sudden power outage or when the PC freeze and you restart it.

Have you tried the diagnostic tools from WD?? The proggy from WD website will create a bootable CD with an application which may help you discover the problem.

I have electronics fail right out of the box. The first two months are the hardest, one it gets past that it will be good for years.

Never ever ever buy WD. They are the biggest piece of crap you can buy.

i think i may be able to help. i purchased some data recovery software when i ran into this problem a few months back. usually its only a bad sector that causes the problem.

hopefully in the future you do backups more often :(

raid1 on all drives, problem solved, it sucks to buy 2hd's but thats what you gatta do....

damn, i have wd 500gb 32mb cache...... gotta buy some backup.
best luck for recovery.

I bought some piece of shit 2TB Lucie drive that looked cool (blue led lights to match my entertainment center), the fucking thing seized the first night I used it.

Since then I have purchased 5 1-2TB WD My Book drives and have had zero issues with them. Some have been running for well over a year, streaming content multiple times per day.

This looks awesome. Thanks. Recently had most of my computers stolen so something like this would have came in handy.

i have dozens of WD drives.... only ever lost 2 or 3 I think.

ok so i dropped one of my 1.5TB external drives on the floor.
i can hear it turns on but the hdd doesnt "load" just kinda sits there.
it sounds as if the coil got bumped off the plates basically.
any recommendations for recovery?

I have more than 20 Seagate drives, some so old they cost $1 plus per gig. I've never had a failure.

.

I had one go bad a few years ago and sent it back to them and they sent me a new one no questions asked. I will say that I did unplug it and then plug it right back in really quick. Guess you still need to wait 10 seconds before you plug electronics back in

you're screwed - driveheads are out of sync.
No software will fix it - your only option is to pay a recovery service to remove the platters and pull the data off them....

OMG. Another year old thread.