Western Digital’s Odd Drive Failures
Recently I have both been witness to and heard of a series of odd WD drive failures. The first was a personal experience with an eBay special computer I had purchased for my parents. Naturally these things wait to fail until you are out of state and unable to help the person. The computer was humming along nicely, then just died. They turned it off for about a day and it started running but complained about a couple of corrupted files. I thought they had a virus of some kind or the power supply which made more noise than it should was failing. Once I got home and started diagnosing the problem, I found the hard drive simply hung during a Linux install. The machine would not boot until you unhooked the drive. Replacing the drive with a non WD drive fixed the problem.
When I returned to my client site I found they had experienced the exact same problem with an Enterprise class drive. Then I started hearing about others having the same problem. This has to be a logic problem with the firmware. It harkens back to a time when MFM drives would just “stick”. Those drives wouldn’t restart unless you used your finger on the exposed shaft to get it spinning again. These drives don’t have such a condition. The place where they stick appears to be random. As a result I have been buying drives from other vendors since this sounds like a lack of testing. As always, buyer beware.
About The Author
seasoned_geek
Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc. A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born. Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy: Infinite Exposure Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.