Just received new WD20EARS. What now?

[Muse]

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB WD20EARS, just placed on my doorstep, from Dell via UPS. Packed really lousy. The drive was in a small box with a soft plastic piece at each end of the drive, for a little stability, but that box was thrown into a much-too-big box with nothing to keep the smaller box from banging around inside. Ouch!

I've read a lot of stories about dead or soon to die WD20EARS drives, and they say to test them thoroughly before putting them into use. If any bad sectors, RMA the sucker.

OK, but I don't know what to do next. I have a Cavalry external 500GB HD, and I could put the 2TB in its case. I'm curious to see if it would work and maybe I'd leave it in there. I also have a WD Elements 2TB enclosure. I can put it in there. I have a midtower PC running XP Pro with one 500GB SATA HD in it on a Silicon Image 3512A controller which is on the mainboard, a Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro, from 2003-2004. It's an old system, I figure I could put either the 2TB in there or the 500GB that's in the Cavalry enclosure. I may buy one or two more WD20EARS if things look good.

The WD20EARS is, I assume, unformatted and it supports advanced formatting with 4k sectors. I do have a laptop with Windows 7 64bit Ultimate on it. Of course, I can't put the 3.5" HD in there, but I could connect a 3.5" enclosure to it for formatting. Aside from wanting to use a 2TB drive in an enclosure with the Windows 7 laptop, I want to use the enclosure with a couple of XP Pro laptops.

I've read a bunch of posts but don't understand the issues with the advanced formatting. Should I use the Windows 7 laptop to format the drive? Should I format it in an enclosure, or should I format it in the midtower (runs XP Pro, and this is assuming it will even work in the midtower with its old mainboard and old early SATA controller, just don't know)?

I downloaded Western Digital Lifeguard today, which I guess I can use to test the drive. I read a post that said there's a WD test utility, evidently something different. Then there's Windows own drive scanning and testing functionality. Maybe I should use those. There's a utility that will help format a WD20EARS in a way that results in OK alignment when used with XP. Is this necessary when you are going to use the drive in an enclosure?

Guidance appreciated! 😉

 

[capeconsultant]

Those idiots really out to be shot. I would RMA the thing just to teach them a "how to wrap" lesson. Tell them you will keep RMA'ing if it continues to be packaged like that. Good lord!

 

[Muse]

Those idiots really out to be shot. I would RMA the thing just to teach them a "how to wrap" lesson. Tell them you will keep RMA'ing if it continues to be packaged like that. Good lord!

Dunno, but AFAIK if I RMA it I have to pay to ship it to them. Now I'm wondering if I should have bought it from Newegg instead. They sometimes package things quite badly (judging from the buyer's feedback), but I think odds are they'd do an amazingly better job than Dell just did with my drive. :whiste: Newegg would have cost me ~$14 more.

 

[BigDH01]

Dunno, but AFAIK if I RMA it I have to pay to ship it to them. Now I'm wondering if I should have bought it from Newegg instead. They sometimes package things quite badly (judging from the buyer's feedback), but I think odds are they'd do an amazingly better job than Dell just did with my drive. :whiste: Newegg would have cost me ~$14 more.

They usually come in small white boxes wrapped in bubble wrap. I recently ordered a few and had one DOA (you could hear the heads scraping across the platters when you moved the drive). I had to pay return shipping, but Newegg's RMA process was dead simple.

 

[Muse]

They usually come in small white boxes wrapped in bubble wrap. I recently ordered a few and had one DOA (you could hear the heads scraping across the platters when you moved the drive). I had to pay return shipping, but Newegg's RMA process was dead simple.

You'd think they'd train people. It would have been better if Dell had just sent the little box rather than putting it in a big rattler. Unbelievable.

In terms of preparing/formatting/aligning the drive, looks like WD's site has info, hopefully adequate 😕

http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3885

Doesn't appear to be a one size fits all solution, but it's unclear. They say they don't support installing in a 3rd party enclosure (although you can evidently do it, but they don't support it). They do support installing in a WD enclusure, so I might just do that for formatting and running their align utility. I could also do this stuff in a PC, and they suggest doing that if installing first in an enclosure doesn't seem to be working out, then removing to the enclosure. Dark mystical stuff here.

 

[Zap]

The drive was in a small box with a soft plastic piece at each end of the drive

That should be fine. That is how I've received drives back from RMA from Seagate and WD, so if it is good enough for them, then it should be good enough for you.

I've read a bunch of posts but don't understand the issues with the advanced formatting. Should I use the Windows 7 laptop to format the drive?

Yes.

They usually come in small white boxes wrapped in bubble wrap.

By "they" you mean Newegg.

 

[Muse]

I decided before messing with the enclosures to see if my XP desktop machine will see the HD. If it does, I may buy another while the sale/rebate is in effect.

The Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro sees the drive, displays it on the screen and hangs there, the SATA controller ID (Silicon Image 3512A) and its BIOS version (4.3.47) displayed as well as the model of the SATA HD, but that just stays on the screen and I have to press the power button to power off. The drive is not formatted yet. Does this mean that this 2TB HD would not work in as an internal HD in that system?

 

[Daemas]

what i want to know is why anybody is paying to RMA drives that were damaged through shipping?

you: your negligence during shipping broke this drive
vendor: too bad
~~
you: hey visa, i want to issue a charge back for this item
visa: not a problem
~~
you: hey state AG, you should investigate this
state AG: cool, more money

 

[Muse]

what i want to know is why anybody is paying to RMA drives that were damaged through shipping?

you: your negligence during shipping broke this drive
vendor: too bad
~~
you: hey visa, i want to issue a charge back for this item
visa: not a problem
~~
you: hey state AG, you should investigate this
state AG: cool, more money

You might have a point there. I faced off against ebay almost a year ago (what was I thinking? 😕 ), and regretted it. Foolish of me, I didn't know where a <$10 charge came from and I asked my CC company to challenge it. Took lots of time, trouble, faxing, emails, etc. etc. to get my account reinstated. Do I want to fuck with Dell? Maybe.

 

[azdaren]

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB WD20EARS, just placed on my doorstep, from Dell via UPS. Packed really lousy. The drive was in a small box with a soft plastic piece at each end of the drive, for a little stability, but that box was thrown into a much-too-big box with nothing to keep the smaller box from banging around inside. Ouch!

I just received 2 of the same drives from Dell also, packed exactly the same way. No shock that I couldnt even format one. I tested the other one all night and seems fine so I'm gonna keep it. Called Dell this morning and they issued a replacement that should be here in a couple days, not bad, but could have been avoided by just packing the thing properly to begin with.

 

[Muse]

I just received 2 of the same drives from Dell also, packed exactly the same way. No shock that I couldnt even format one. I tested the other one all night and seems fine so I'm gonna keep it. Called Dell this morning and they issued a replacement that should be here in a couple days, not bad, but could have been avoided by just packing the thing properly to begin with.

Did they ask you to send it back? Did they give you a shipping label (i.e. did they pay to ship the bad drive back to them?)?

My XP laptop sees the drive (I got it assembled this morning in the WD 2TB Elements enclosure, haven't formatted it yet.

Anyone know: Should I format it attached to the XP laptop or should I use my Win7 64bit Ultimate laptop? The external drive is primarily going to be attached to an XP machine. In disk management, the XP laptop is offering to format it to NTFS and I have my choice of allocation size:

Default
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16k
32k
64k

I have no idea what will be used if I choose "Default." It could be 512 or it could be the design spec of the drive, 4kb. It's an advanced format disk and after formatting and checking the disk for errors I'm going to run the WD Align tool so the disk is optimized for XP. Which machine should I use to format it and which allocation size? Or does it matter?

 

[VirtualLarry]

If the enclosure held a 500GB HD, I have my serious doubts that a 4KB-sector 2TB drive is going to work in it. I think that the controller chipset in the enclosure has to support 4KB sectors.

 

[Muse]

The enclosure I put it in is designed for it. It's a WD Elements 2TB enclosure. I bought it from an Anandtecher who removed his drive.

 

[Muse]

I'm wondering now if this isn't just trivial. I could put a jumper on the drive and I think it will default to 512k sectors. The 4kb sectors strategy is to improve performance but if the drive is going to sit in a USB enclosure I suppose the performance bottleneck is the USB connection, not the drive parameters. The WD 2TB Elements used to (maybe still do) ship with 512k sector WD 2TB drives.

 

[notposting]

The jumper if I remember right just "offsets" the first sector so things line up right. I've only used these drives with my WHS (which uses the XP/2K3 codebase) with the jumper and it's fine. Or use the WD utility after formatting in XP I think should work.

 

[Face2Face]

Just got mine and it works great. no problems here.

 

[Muse]

Bad disk. :'( I knew there was trouble when the format stalled ~67%, took a couple hours longer than the rate indicated. WD Align reports it can't resize partition, "BAD BLOCKS." RMA time with Dell. Hope they'll give me a mailing label...

 

[azdaren]

Did they ask you to send it back? Did they give you a shipping label (i.e. did they pay to ship the bad drive back to them?)?

They didnt ask or say anything about sending it back. Just issued a replacement. I didnt even ask. Ill probably get an email or something explaining what to do with the paperweight.

 

[alaricljs]

Generally you'll receive a return shipping label with the new drive and you package up the old drive in that box and send it back.

 

[Muse]

Generally you'll receive a return shipping label with the new drive and you package up the old drive in that box and send it back.

That's what they told me would happen. It took 35-40 minutes to do this over the phone. Incredibly inefficient CS operation and I'd say they were in India. 😵

 

[Muse]

If the enclosure held a 500GB HD, I have my serious doubts that a 4KB-sector 2TB drive is going to work in it. I think that the controller chipset in the enclosure has to support 4KB sectors.

I'm wondering if it would work if in compatibility move, i.e. with a jumper across 7-8 pins. Does that set it to 512k sectors? WD says to either do that or align the drive with WD Align if using with XP. Inasmuch as the drive will be in a USB enclosure, maybe there won't be any benefits to not running in compatibility mode.

 

[Zap]

The drive was in a small box with a soft plastic piece at each end of the drive

That should be fine. That is how I've received drives back from RMA from Seagate and WD, so if it is good enough for them, then it should be good enough for you.

Muse, I owe you an apology. Dell's packaging is indeed crappy. 😵 I just got my two today. They are in a box with the plastic inserts like how the manufacturer packages drives, but there is a lot less room around the drives, probably less than half.

Still, I think my experiences with Tiger Direct and Amazon trumps these by quite a bit. D: This is how a drive came to me from Amazon. Yes, it fully passed wddiag5 and is working to this day, but still I was appalled.

What you see there is a 1.5TB HDD surrounded by cardboard and NOTHING else.

Tiger Direct also shipped me some Seagate HDDs in a big box with no padding, just in a completely flat clamshell (before they redesigned them). Heck, the SeaShells that Seagate drives sometimes comes in (and the similar Samsung shells) provided more protection.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

BTW, you bolded XP Pro, and no one mentioned, but isn't the EARS drive a 4kb drive? So you would need to do some alignment crap in XP no?

For those running Vista or 7, we should be ok....

 

[Muse]

BTW, you bolded XP Pro, and no one mentioned, but isn't the EARS drive a 4kb drive? So you would need to do some alignment crap in XP no?

For those running Vista or 7, we should be ok....

4k yes, Alignment, yes. But WD Align error-ed out within a couple of minutes or so with the partial message "BAD BLOCKS." I just started WD Lifeguard Extended Test a few minutes ago, It PASSed the quick test, Will see how it fares with the Extended Test. After 18 minutes it estimates about 17 hours remaining on the test.

If it passes the Lifeguard tests, I will be suspecting that Lifeguard is crapola. The replacement drive should arrive any day. I've been using the drive with my HTPC for HDTV data, successfully the last couple of days. That's no proof the drive is OK. My HDTV program has been using a small fraction of the drive's capacity (maximum 5&#37😉. Like I said, I couldn't align it. Who wants a brand new HD with BAD BLOCKS? Not me.

Zap, that 1.5TB drive packaging in the photo is bad, but not as bad as what they did to me. I'll try to work up a photo of my own today.

I'm still wondering what happens if I put a jumper across 7-8. I believe that puts the drive in "compatibility mode" and precludes the need to align the drive for use with XP. Does that mean it would run with 512byte sectors? Does it even matter which way it runs if it's in a USB enclosure?

 

[Rubycon]

RMA time. WD is all EARS on these. 😉