Question 4TB WD hard disk activity light always on, partitions visible but cannot mount, no matter the OS or port (USB/SATA) ?

[ben123123]

Hi, been using computers for over 20 years, first time this happens to me and I'm at a loss here, so I hope somebody has new ideas for me to try :-/

4TB Western Digital Blue hard disk (SATA) only 15 months old. Last year, I upgraded from a 3TB WD Blue (approx. 4 years old, never had an issue with it) to get a little more storage space and to rotate HDD so that it lasts longer... it looks like it didn't! But it did work flawlessly until 2 days ago: I was using the computer and an app reported it couldn't write to that hard disk. I rebooted the computer and it never rebooted ever again (with that drive attached). Restarting without that HDD attached, the computer boots absolutely fine.

NO WEIRD NOISE: The HDD does not make any weird noise at all, no spin up weirdness, no grinding, no clicking.

SPIN UP AND DETECTION IS QUICK: Spin up is fast, the 2 partitions on the HDD show up in Linux no problem, not even slow to detect at all. I CANNOT mount any of those partitions in Ubuntu (most recent stable build).

ACTIVITY LIGHT IS ALWAYS ON, HDD WORKING 100% OF THE TIME: If the HDD is attached to any port (tried all SATA ports and 2 different USB ports via an external HDD enclosure) to ANY OS (Ubuntu, Win7, Win10), activity light immediately goes to 100% solid and every 3 seconds I can hear it read or write a tiny bit (like 0.01 second) and every minute, I can hear it read/write a little longer like 0.1 second. This happens without me interacting with the disk at all, the partition does not even need to be mounted.

RE-ATTACHING HDD TO MAIN RIG SPAWNED CHKDSK: After trying with an USB enclosure, I re-attached the HDD to its original location on the internal SATA port and powered on the computer. CHKDSK spawned and it has been scanning what appears to be that HDD for 40 hours now. It is at 72% and I can see it fixing some index errors. It is slow since the beginning but I could see approx. 100 files scanned per second at the beginning of the scan. Now at 72% I can see approx. 100 files scanned per hour. It is still progressing, but at this rate, it's going to take months to finish. I wonder if this is just a couple bad sectors in a row and then it will get faster once it's done with those sectors...

Since I cannot seem to be able to mount the partitions on that drive, I wonder how I could copy files onto another 4TB disk that I have handy here. I understand Ubuntu has a disk image command in the DISKS app but when I tried this, it was copying at a rate of approx. 40KB/s and it said there were 1 year 10 months left... like... wtf... If I could mount the drive, I could at least just grab the most important files first and leave the rest there for a year to copy (lol)

Any ideas for me to try gentlemen? (and/or gentlewomen)

Thank you for reading

 

[ben123123]

Couldn't be any more obvious that it's 1 defective head out of 6 thanks to this dd analysis. I ordered another of those horrible quality WD 4TB drives to pull the head stack and transplant it into this P.O.S. failing drive to try and get the last files out of it before I throw both of them in the trash. The sixth head gave up a handful of weeks after the 2 years warranty has gone out. I'm never purchasing a WD drive ever again. I've never seen an internal, secondary drive last that short of a lifespan in over 22 years. I've used all sorts of hard drives both in towers and laptops, many brands including Quantum, Maxtor, Hitachi, Toshiba and Seagate. I've never ever seen a 5400rpm, SECONDARY drive in a well ventilated TOWER fail like this in 2 years for no reason. I'll remind readers here that the drive makes NO SOUND whatsoever, no clicking, no grinding, speed up time is super quick, transfer speeds are above 170MB/s on SATA. The drive appears in perfect shape, except for the sixth head, almost completely failed (copies on that platter at 1.8KB/s)

 

[USAFRet]

I'm never purchasing a WD drive ever again. I've never seen an internal, secondary drive last that short of a lifespan in over 22 years.

The last 3 storage devices I've had fail:
1x Sandisk 960 GB SSD - 3 years, 33 days
1x Seagate 2TB HDD - ~2 years
1x WD Green 3TB - 5 weeks

Physical drives die. Warranty replaces.
Backups replace your data.

 

[ben123123]

The last 3 storage devices I've had fail:
1x Sandisk 960 GB SSD - 3 years, 33 days
1x Seagate 2TB HDD - ~2 years
1x WD Green 3TB - 5 weeks

There you go. You proved my point. Besides, warranty is apparently kind of useless with WD drives. People on Amazon have reported not being covered when they should have been. WD is over for me. Not that it was a brand I purchased more than Seagate before, but, now those drives will stay in Thailand for me. No thanks.

 

[USAFRet]

There you go. You proved my point. Besides, warranty is apparently kind of useless with WD drives. People on Amazon have reported not being covered when they should have been. WD is over for me. Not that it was a brand I purchased more than Seagate before, but, now those drives will stay in Thailand for me. No thanks.

I'm not sure what that proved to you, except that "fail" is not unique to a specific brand.
All 3 within or very near the warranty. All replaced via the warranty.

 

[USAFRet]

Want fail data across multiple brands and models?
Look into the stats from Backblaze.
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

 

[ben123123]

I'm not sure what that proved to you, except that "fail" is not unique to a specific brand.
All 3 within or very near the warranty. All replaced via the warranty.

Ah, come on, look at your numbers! [WD fan detected]
Furthermore, you consider 5 weeks near the warranty?!
Anyway, I've decided against buying WD in the future. I've had 2 more people near me report that they have purchased a WD Blue drive and got F by it after a short period of time for no reason. I could understand if it were dropped as an external drive or if it had a power surge (my rig is protected against power surge, BTW) but none of those scenarios happened here. As a matter of fact, nothing happened here. 1 head out of 6 just decided to stop working full speed. It's just Thailand quality, that's what it is. And that's just not worth my time to continue buying this brand. I much prefer investing 10$ more to get a higher quality drive, such as a Seagate (OR ANOTHER BRAND) and move on with my life rather than save 10$ and be stuck in this situation.

 

[USAFRet]

I said "within".
Its replacement is still working 4 years later.
I'm not a "fan" of any particular brand. In or attached to my NAS, I have a selection of Toshiba, WD, Seagate.

The Sandisk SSD was "near"....33 days past the 3 year. They gave me a new one anyway.

As mentioned, look at that Backblaze link. I see mostly a 1-2% difference in fail rate across brands.

 

[ben123123]

The WD digust is not against WD directly. It's not exactly a brand boycott I'm doing. They are CURRENTLY producing their WD Blue line in Thailand, it's written on the hard drive. A number of things could go wrong at that factory. Have you ever purchased a diner set made in Thailand? They look sweet AF and after a year, they completely fall apart and I mean the chair posts break, it's absolute garbage. QC might not be done properly, they might not be tuned and/or trained enough to do that kind of QC tests. Either way, it's shameful for WD to let those drives leave the factory and be shipped (perhaps at a very very cheap cost, shipper might be tossing those at full force onto walls and floors, who knows?) but something is not OK. I had WD drives 15 years ago that last a very, very long time, like 10 years old. I would trash the drive just because 120GB was not useful anymore. A 10$ USB stick would be larger, so at that point I would just send the drives to recycling, but THEY WOULD STILL WORK. You know what I mean? I'm at a point where I want to pay extra to get decent quality. I didn't know it was OK in 2019 to ship out defective drives. It's not 1987 anymore.

Anyway, I'm barking at the wrong tree here, but it's good to let a little steam out. Plus, what I post on here will surely help future readers. I should receive the replacement drive (head stack) on sunday. I'll keep posting, eventually we'll how this ends.

 

[USAFRet]

A factory in Thailand is by default "bad"?

From 2017:
"After Seagate shuts down its plant in Suzhou, China, it will have two vertically integrated HDD production facilities in Wuxi, China, and Korat, Thailand. "

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants


Whichever make/model/size you purchase, backups are the key here.
I don't trust my data to any single device, no matter who makes it, or what factory it came out of.

 

[ben123123]

A factory in Thailand is by default "bad"?

In reality, yes, for some additional reason, it is. I'm sorry for any Thailand worker reading this but what leaves your factories for North America is sub par quality. I understand this is shocking, but it's what I pay for with my hard worked money and I always ended up losing with what was made in Thailand. Nothing that I purchased lasted a normal amount of time. Diner sets made in Thailand are no exception. It might not be your fault, but anything I purchased made in Thailand has been a scam in terms of quality. Simply put, there is no decent QC in Thailand factories, it seems.

If I had got a WD drive made in China, I probably would have experienced a different amount of drive life time. But who knows... your stats grids don't show the provenance of the drives, so... we'll judge by the brand I guess?

This reminds me of what Apple did when producing the iPhone 4, remember when they split the manufacturing into 2 different providers? The end product should have been of equal quality, but unfortunately, one of them rendered all the iPhone 4s unreliable and battery was not lasting more than 3 hours. IRC, it was FOXCONN vs PEGATRON manufacturers. My GF unfortunately got the wrongly manufactured model and had to replace it. Apple sent her a brand new one for free (1.5 year after purchase) without too much hassle. QC is everything. It's what makes consumers want to go back to your products. Failure after failure is just unacceptable.

 

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Based on the collective experience , every manufacturer has better and weaker series (actually, manufacturers produce only few types due to production optimization, and then sort them in tests to see which piece gets which label): of the WDs, Gold, RED and RED Pro are the most reliable, most frequently those (Green and Blue) dies out of all WDs whom designed for office work (just 8 hours a day, only with few on / offs), with Purple falling between the former two groups. In my servers e.g. I only use REDs (32 of them in the last 8 years) and none have ever died before (OFC I disabled the agressive head parking and they're on UPS).

I'm sorry you ran into this multiple times, I trust you will make the right choice next time.

 

[ben123123]

(Green and Blue) dies out of all WDs whom designed for office work (just 8 hours a day, only with few on / offs)...

As stated before in this thread, that WD Blue drive was a secondary drive (no Windows, no apps on there) and that computer is on 24/7, no spin down on screen saver (only the display shuts off, I have it so nothing else powers down). It was mostly used as a backup drive in a stationary tower (not in a laptop, not in as an external drive) in a well ventilated case along with 2 other (OLDER) hard drives that still are working perfectly well to this day.

I'm sorry you ran into this multiple times, I trust you will make the right choice next time.

I did not run into this multiple times. This is the first/only time in over 20 years that a hard drive fails like this for no reason and I used perhaps over a hundred hard drives of different brands. But thanks for reading.

I have just received a brand new WD Blue drive that will be the donor for the head stack. I'm now waiting for the head comb kit to arrive from China. This plastic piece is worth 15$ I just can't believe the profit margin on those, it's incredible.

 

[img]

As stated before in this thread, that WD Blue drive was a secondary drive (no Windows, no apps on there) and that computer is on 24/7, no spin down on screen saver (only the display shuts off, I have it so nothing else powers down). It was mostly used as a backup drive in a stationary tower (not in a laptop, not in as an external drive) in a well ventilated case along with 2 other (OLDER) hard drives that still are working perfectly well to this day.

There are always exceptions that strengthen the rules.

I did not run into this multiple times. This is the first/only time in over 20 years that a hard drive fails like this for no reason and I used perhaps over a hundred hard drives of different brands. But thanks for reading.

My fault, I'm tired and mixed someone's post with yours in my head.

I have just received a brand new WD Blue drive that will be the donor for the head stack. I'm now waiting for the head comb kit to arrive from China. This plastic piece is worth 15$ I just can't believe the profit margin on those, it's incredible.

You can use a piece of plastic or a shrink tube, but not the headswap is the big deal (if you do it with proper equipment and in clean room), but to find a donor with exact same preamp and with the closely same microjogs, 'cause if the differences more than 200 (rule of thumb), the new heads 'll read close to nothing. I wish you luck, my fingers crossed for you.

 

[ben123123]

I forgot to specify, but I ordered the exact same hard drive model from the same source. The model number is identical.

 

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I forgot to specify, but I ordered the exact same hard drive model from the same source. The model number is identical.

I was in a hurry before and couldn’t wrote it, the following should match: microjogs, head map, firmware version, drive information table - and most of them not visible outside on the stickers. If a correspondent part (5th-6th-7th, like media, headstack and preamp) of the DCM code identical, site code identical, date of manufacture closest as possible, and you are very lucky, you can even be successful.