WD15EARS Problems - Need opinion

OverlordOne

Reputable
May 20, 2014
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4,510
I bought my WD15EARS in 2009. From the first day I was having problems with it. I used it only for storage, and I was ok with green concept, slower speed, silent drive and low consumption of energy. However, that is when my now 5 year struggle with it had begun. Clinking sounds, freezing of its logical partition/s and/or entire system, disappearing and reappearing in bios after several tries to cold boot it or waiting for an hour or so, were issues on regular basis.
Many times I was losing whole partition (it become unallocated), and several times entire hard drive was lost, 1500GB becomes unallocated. I had to run chkdsk at least several times a month, due to problems with bad sectors. After formatting a partition, everything is good for few days (sometimes for whole month), but the main problem always persists. Over the years i had changed several PSU’s and several cables, I tried to use the drive in different combination with my other drives, i even tried to use it alone, one system partition and 4 logical. Drive was repartitioned and formatted for so many times… and of course writing zeros with wd’s data lifeguard. I even disabled head parking feature with wdidle3. It just won’t work for me like any other drive. Several days ago it was low –level formatted with data lifeguard and repartitioned and formatted again (5 partitions) through command line in windows 7. It has only around 20GB of data on just one partition i used for testing and is behaving again! When I try to read a file it just freezes indefinitely. Other files can be opened in normal way but that particular one has been corrupted in just a few days for some reason (and there are several others). 5 years of inhuman nerves and testing it and trying to use it in normal and safe way is just too much, it’s above and beyond… I know none of you can help me because it’s obviously defective hardware from day one, but I just wanted to share my painful experience and to hear your opinions. Best wishes.
 
Solution
short of replacing the drive................. do a scan disc and recovery/repair of sectors.

start/computer/right click drive letter/properties/tools/error checking............. click boxes to find and repair. even if it helps it's not a long term fix. plan on buying a new drive.
I know, i should have.. but for some reason (fool) i was hoping it will be ok (grave mistake and fool again). My motherboard is old K9N neov2. Don't know is it worth to try it on newer mobo?
 
this is a 939 set up? that might be the problem.

on the hard drive there should be jumper pins ( on the back where the data and power cables go ).... see the chart on the HD label.......... put a jumper so it runs at 1.5.

if there is no chart go on line to the manufacturers site and find out where the jumper should go.
 
It's AM2 socket for Athlon 64X2. There are jumper pins on the hard drive, however it came without jumper, on wd site they say the drive is ready for use as is. It needs a jumper only if used on windows xp(advanced format drive, for better performance) and there are just two other positions, one is for ssc enabled ant the other is for phy or opt1 enabled. Default is without jumper. By the way, i am using windows 7, and drive is partitioned under windows 7. They say for windows 7 no jumper is needed, however at this point i am prepared to try anything...
 
I just enabled 1.5 mode with jumper, it's basically SATA 1 but that's perfectly all right if she can store data reliably. I will do a low level format again with this speed, maybe controller on this motherboard can not properly communicate with this particular hard drive on 3.0 rate. Thank you my friend for this new idea. I will post here again in day or two when this is finished and tested. Cheers.
 
Unfortunately it did not work. Hard drive is definitely bad. I have tried jumper settings 5-6 and 7-8 (advanced format). The result is always the same, a lot of bad sectors (HD Sentinel report) and anomalous overall operation, clicking sounds, 5 min boot time, corruption of several files etc...
 
short of replacing the drive................. do a scan disc and recovery/repair of sectors.

start/computer/right click drive letter/properties/tools/error checking............. click boxes to find and repair. even if it helps it's not a long term fix. plan on buying a new drive.
 
Solution