1 yr old WD Scorpio Black 2.5 SATA failing mystery help!

[TC Fulton]

Hi, I bought a New Egg refurb WD Scorpio Black 750g 2.5 SATA about one year ago.
Now before you say "well you did buy a refurb" I've had some good luck with refurbs before.
The one previous lasted 5 years.

Either way this was my main Macbook drive. Never had any issues, ran Onyx and Disk Utility regularly. I was just watching a video one day and got a spinning ball hang which froze up the computer. So I did a hard restart and got the dreaded white screen with question mark folder.
no OS found

Immediately took out the drive and connected via usb. Drive sounded normal, no clicks, beeps just wouldn't mount to desktop. I ran disk utility, the drive could be seen but error message was "Invalid Node Structure, disk needs to be repaired"
I tried to clone the drive with Diskdrill, took 8 hrs but then went to scan the dmg and it was just jibberish 1's and 0's.
I had run Diskwarrior over the dmg before scanning, but still that wouldn't mess up the image would it?

Long story short, I unplugged it and took to a friend's tech shop. They used DDRescue to image the drive, they said it got to about 300 of the 650gigs and slowed way down to 1 gig read a day!
I'm no expert, but I have rescued drives before with Spinrite and slow reads were usually from hitting bad sectors. They didn't really update me, but apparently they changed tactics and imaged in smaller chunks. Either way the bill was $250 for less than half of my data back. Is that a fair price?
Since it's a friend's business I'm not going to say anything. They contract out to Drivesavers who quoted me $2700 to open the drive if necessary.

I asked if they knew what was failing, they said there's no software that can accurately diagnose what is failing in a drive without opening in a clean room. Don't know if that's true but I sure would like to find out what is failing.
I know the cliche all hard drives will eventually fail, but this one was pretty sudden without the telltale warning signs. Anyone with experience here know what the possibilities are?
I probably will never buy another WD refurb now for sure, lesson learned

thanks

 

[Saga Lout]

You might just be unlucky this time. Do you know if your friend's shop folks tried a different circuit board? I ask only because of the lack of tell-tale noises from the disk while spinning.

Some people say each PCB is unique to the disk and I say I've had some success using that process and it's well worth a shot. The board has to come from an identical disk but if Newegg altered some basic firmware in the refurb process, it may not work.

Someone from WD will be along soon with better advice.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, TC Fulton!

I'm truly sorry to hear about your issues with the WD Scorpio Black but you might as well have bought a new drive, rather than a recertified one. @Saga Lout is right that if a third-party has been tempering with the firmware, it might damage/corrupt the drive furthermore.
My recommendation is to always keep backups of your data on several different locations/drives and avoid the headaches and cash for data recovery. :/ I'd also suggest you to check in with the nearest to you WD Data Recovery Partner here: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=AB3if6
Maybe you could contact them, explain the damages and see what price they will be estimating. However, your friend is right in saying that it's close to impossible to determine what exactly went wrong with your WD Scorpio Black, basically because it's a recertified drive and my guess is nobody knows what exactly happened with it in the first place, in order to become a recertified HDD. Speaking of the price, truth is that physically opening the HDD in order to retrieve the data is a lot more costly, indeed.

Hope I was helpful. Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[TC Fulton]

Thx for the reply SuperSoph

I'm a little confused though. Are the refurbished WD drives sold on New Egg rebuilt by WD, or some third party?
I know at the time $45 was a great price, but I still believed it to be rebuilt to specifications by WD.
If not, their ad was deceptive. This was the ad for the drive I bought last year.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236664

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there again!

Western Digital's recertified products may consist of customer return units and may have been repaired. All products are tested and determined to meet WD's stringent quality standards before they are sold as recertified to third-party resellers or returned to customers. Usually all our recertified products carry the manufacturer's limited warranty of 6 months.
I'd recommend you to check more about our warranty services & policies here: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=bD6kCP

Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Saga Lout]

I don't wish to sound harsh but if I could have bought a quality branded 750Gb in England a year ago for £28.65, I would also have bitten off the hand that was selling it. The cheapest price I can find today is over £50 GBP.

That said, I would not have used it as a system disk.

 

[TC Fulton]

Lesson learned believe me,

It's just been a nightmare. I was so happy that this data recovery place was able to get at least half the drive data recovered, but when I started to go through some of the music folders, the music tags on the left were very slowly popping up as I scrolled. I use a Macbook, so it's the little black music symbol. The mp3s etc that have white tags won't play. The weird thing is that I can scroll through the folder and a random white one will turn black and be fine. So I don't know if the headers are messed up, or just some bits got corrupted, or if my Macbook 2.0 USB is unable to read them fast enough (54g folder) from a 2tb WD My Passport Ultra.
So frustrating

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hi again, TC Fulton!

Well, this is very unfortunate, indeed! I'd recommend you to back up any data from the WD My Passport Ultra somewhere else ASAP!
Once you've done this, I'd recommend testing the external HDD using Disk Utilities on your Mac. Here's a link from our KB that explains how to perform this: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=BFhurh

Keep us posted!
SuperSoph_WD