Western Digital WD10EADS 1.0TB very slow (and other troubles...)

FrenchGeek

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Jun 13, 2016
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Hello dear friends ! :)

First, you have to know I'm French, so my english won't be perfect at all lol.:lol:

I try to explain you what happens to me :

I have two Western Digital 1.0TB HDDs. Model : WS10EADS-22M2B0. Ok, I recognize they are not really young, but all seemed to work properly, when suddenly they both failed (in the same month ! :fou: ). Sometimes my computer doesn't even recognizes them, other times they are found but are damn slow... Only 30~300 kb/s, while it was 30 or 50 Mb/s when they worked well :(

I've tried to do as many things as it was possible to do. Actually, in French language, we don't have many websites that help well for this kind of troubles, but I managed to find some ideas.

* I've tried CHKDISk w. fix options -> no results (sometimes it takes 3 months to find a cluster, sometimes it crashes, I don't even know if it really works) ;
* I've tried the WD repair tool -> it crashed almost everytime cause i didn't even managed to start the standard test (or to read the SMART) ;
* The SMART is sometimes absent, sometimes it works well and says "everything is good" (are you kidding me ?? :ouch: ) ;
* I've tried TESTDISK, which is way more powerful than CHKDSK, but it spends two days for analysis, I tried to fix/rebuild the MBR, the FAT, boot sectors and many other things I coudn't even remember -> still nothing...

I must say that my HDDs were always used carefully (no drops, no shocks, no overheating, nothing...) They are external HDDs, but one of them was internal (Operating system) when he began to fail.

Looks like many people have (had) troubles with WD disks. I'm really frustrated, next time I'll buy Seagate or other brands, cause WD has become a real crap !

I'm seriously thinking about buying a new PCB (with the BIOS flash) to try to recover my data, cause I'm quite sure it can't be a mechanical problem. I have the P/N of this part : 2060-701640-002 REV A and I know where to buy it, but I hope it will be the right solution, cause I'm about to explode... :'(

Do you have some ideas ? Thx for your answers (good and slow english please lol :lol: )
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
No hard drive will last forever. They have moving parts with discs that run at 5400 rpm all the time (I assume, if they 7200 rpm it could happen sooner).

I had a good run with Western Digital, I only had one of them die in about 15 years and it was a velociraptor running at 10000 rpm. But before them I had 3 IBM hdd's die in about 6 months (for years I blamed the drives, now I think it was the power supply)

(sometimes it takes 3 months to find a cluster, sometimes it crashes, I don't even know if it really works)
good thing you said you were translating as months instead of what ever time scale you actually meant is a big difference I expect :)

BY WD repair tool, do you mean Data Life Guard?
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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lol I said 3 months but actually it was to say "much time" :lol:
Actually, these hard drives are not so old. I didn't use them for almost 2 years, I was on campaign (French Navy). And I also have two Caviar Black 2.0TB WD hard drives, I'm using them as much as possible (I have a big 5.000 $ gamer computer), and I've never had any troubles with them... My 1.0Tb were for my previous computer, that I didn't used a lot actually...

This is sad to know that I have a Maxtor 500 Gb which is maybe about 12 yo and has been really bad used and still working as if it was brand new... :lol: And these WD are so weak... :'(

For the WD tool, yeah it's Data Life Guard ;)
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
I would get ssd for boot and HDD for storage, though ssd suffer from a different form of wear themselves, they have no moving parts at all. And are much faster than HDD. Once you use SSD, you can't go back.

In next 5 years or so I expect that 16 tb ssd will be available at consumer level, they exist at the server level now. Then hdd may lose its edge on ssd when it comes to storage. But then with move to nvme 2 I wonder how long before sata ssd go same was as IDE hdd before them. Could have a motherboard were all storage mounted to board. Really curious what speed difference is now between ram and ssd.

I have a 12 year old PC in garage, i think the hdd are still in it, its been 10 years since it was last on as its Graphics card died and motherboard doesn't know what SATA or PCIE is so I had no choice. I don't think the hdd in it would be much bigger than 80 gb. In theory they still work, I just don't have any IDE slots anymore. My last PC only had 2 x 300 gb hdd in them, both WD and one of them had lasted 10 years. It was storage drive its entire life so spent a lot of those 10 years asleep.
 
Hi there FrenchGeek,

I'm really sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive.
Have you tried using different USB cables? Have you tried to attach the drives to another system? In case you haven't, it may be a good idea to do so.

It really looks like that the drives have some bad sectors on them. This is why, PCB swap won't help.
Another thing you should keep in mind that all these fix options(chkdsk, third party tools, etc.), could result in data loss.

Your main goal is to recover the data, so you should first try to recover it and try to repair it afterwards.(which seems not to work)

My suggestion would be to use some data recovery tools for DOS mode. One thing you can try is to boot up Ubuntu from a CD or a flash drive, and see if you will be able to access the drive and try to transfer the data. Sometimes, Ubuntu seems to handle failing drives good enough. Thread on that: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
If this doesn't work, just google some other data recovery tools for DOS mode. Save all the recovered data on another HDD.

If there is extremely important data stored on the drive, you will need to contact a data recovery company. You can check WD's Data Recovery Partners out: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=NLmXvx

Apart from all this, I just want to mention that WD Greens are designed(power saving characteristics) to be used as back up drives. If they are used as normal drives, they may have a shorter lifespan(or perform poorly) than a normal drive.

Let me know in case you have some more questions and how the data recovery goes,
D_KNow_WD :)
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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1,510
@Colif : Yeah, I have a 500 TB SSD on my "monster computer", and it's like I'm using a space shuttle lmao :lol:

@D_Know_WD : Yeah, I forgot to say I tested these HDDs with many cables, internal/external mountings, and on many computers, and nothing ever worked. :/

For the data, I was able to recover almost everything because sometimes they still work (even at a VERY slow speed), and I didn't wait more to do a backup (I was afraid they would completely die). But now I'd like to recover a normal behavior (with 20~30 Mb/s speeds, not 20 Kb/s...). Right now they are somewhat "stable", they work properly, if we don't complain about that f..ing slow transfert speed... :(

For the data recovery company, I saw the prices, and I decided to forget about it (850 $... in USA ! Way more in my stupid country ! :fou: ). Actually I was lucky I had some experience in computers and I managed to save ~95% of my data (thank you TESTDISK I suppose lol), but I'm still trying to understand why it became so slow without any reason... :??: Looks like it's just a stupid software bug or something like this which makes the HDDs having troubles to read/store data. I repeat that my HDDs never get shocked in any way, cause I'm really careful with them (and my computer too ;) ). And one of this two drives was actually a backup drive so it worked maybe 10 % of its real life. :/

Is there a weakness in the little electric motor which spins the platters ? I think write/read heads (sorry for my english) are ok, cause I don't hear any strange noise (clik clik or schlak or sccrrrrrr... :lol: ). That was why I thought about changing the PCB, but I don't really know if it's worth it... For the bad sectors I have a few, but they were already checked by CHKDSK and all went good for a while after I fixed them.

Thanks for your help :)
 

E-50

Distinguished
Jan 14, 2013
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18,660

99% sure this is what is going on. Your drive has a problem know in data recovery world as WD Slow Response. This extremely slow behaviour is caused by an overfilled module designed to house candidate bad sectors. Hard drive does not know that it can develop degrading heads, it just knows how to measure time that it takes to read a particular sector. When heads degrade their performance drops (not instantly for us to notice). However, this module #32 keeps tracking them, and as soon as it sees that it took longer then a threshold for the information to be read it logs it in. By the time this module is half way fool - your drive will be bricked just as you say. Solution is to clean out the module and disable drives ability to log further data. Downside is that without tools that use vendor specific commands you will not be able to access Service Area where those modules are. Upside is that it is a fairly easy work if you got access to those tools as you can see in this video.

Swapping your PCB to another one is not going to solve anything in your case, you will have exact same bricked drive just with a new board.
This video is about a different WD drive, but the problem is most likely identical to yours. I hope this helps

 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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1,510


So you tell me that the heads degrade their performance (because of aging I guess) and the HDD management module sees this as a big pack of errors, and so this slows the HDD speed ?

(I don't know if I translated everything well, my english is aging too :lol: )

I'll watch your video, thx alot for your answer :bounce:
 
It's good that you've managed to back up most of the data.
As for the normal behavior(transfer speed), I still do believe that the HDDs suffer from bad sectors. The chkdsk command does not really repair bad sectors, it verifies data integrity.
Could you please test both drives with some third party testing tool(as you've already tried the DLG tool) and provide a screenshot of the SMART report: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility
Just upload the image to a website and past the ulr over here.

As for the data recovery services, yeah, generally they are pricey.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD :)
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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Actually, all the programs say SMART is non existant... So it won't be possible to show you anything :(
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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I hope it won't be necessary lol
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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1,510
So I have this for my first HDD (I took these infos with HD Tune Pro, the only one which wanted to work...)



I'm trying to get data of my 2nd HDD...
 

JaredDM

Honorable
As was mentioned above this is most likely the WD Slow Responding bug. It's actually a firmware glitch which is triggered by bad sectors needing to be re-allocated. Using professional data recovery tools like PC-3000, it's a quick fix to repair the firmware so you can recover the data. Probably will only cost you around $300-$500 at most honest places. If you can find a place willing to just do the fix, and allow you to handle the copying afterward (most won't) it could be even less money.
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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This is exactly what I meant, I don't wanna pay twice the price of a new 2.0 TB HDD for fixing a 1.0TB one... And actually, if I had these tools, I could do it by myself, but I don't know where to find such a program which could access the internal firmware... :(
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
If the tools were easily available the places that charge a fortune would be out of business. Maybe they price it so high to cut down on every one using service, make it 2 times cost of hdd to deter everyone asking them to fix grandma's PC for them.

2nd drive looks slightly more healthy than first but you don't really want to see any warnings on Current Pending sector, surely not a score approaching 1000 on each.
 

FrenchGeek

Commendable
Jun 13, 2016
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lol agreed :lol:
 

JaredDM

Honorable


Problem is these are all professional tools, not just some program. A PC-3000 will typically cost $6-7K or more depending on your location, so it's not a viable option for most people. I just happen to be sitting in front of one now, but this is what I do for work.

If you're thinking of using the drive after repair, think again! Even if you fix the firmware bug, you haven't fixed the underlying problem. Issue is the media where the data is stored is degrading and developing bad sectors. Problem with your drive is that it developed so many the firmware couldn't handle it anymore. And FYI a Seagate in the same condition would have started clicking and completely died already, so don't be too hard on WD, and don't buy a Seagate next. Right now Seagate has the highest failure rate of any brand. HGST is actually the reliability winner for now.
 

FrenchGeek

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Jun 13, 2016
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So, even if I could fix the overfilled bad sectors memory, I would get the same troubles quickly again ?
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator


I wish I had known that before i made PC last year. Upside is mine is just storage and may not be used as much as a boot drive, so might last a while. Maybe I should get a backup drive...

 

JaredDM

Honorable


Yes. A drive developing bad sectors will only continue to degrade at an ever increasing rate.