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WD 1200JB - the new "DeathStar"??

S

sykopath79

Senior member
Okay, so I'm on my third Western Digital 1200JB drive (120 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache, etc.) and not because I enjoy buying them. It's because the first two I had flat-out died. The first one, actually a 1200JB sold white-label under the brand MDT, died within a week of installation - and it didn't simply die, it was clicking, scraping, and grinding like nothing I'd ever heard come out of a hard drive before. Sounded like a quieter version of putting a quarter in the garbage disposal. So I RMA'd it and got an identical replacement, only the replacement wouldn't even format successfully the first time. First one dead in a week, second one DOA. So I thought, alright screw the rebranded white-label drive, they must be rebadging their crappy drives on purpose... I'll go buy a Western Digital branded drive. I eventually did so, about six months after the incident with the MDT drives, trotted down to the local PC Club and picked up a WD-labeled 1200JB. It's been running pretty well in my machine since about March or April of this year, so not even six months yet.

However, it is now really starting to worry me. It has been performing much slower lately, Windows is taking much longer to boot (with no change in the number of programs loading at boot) - in fact just now it took upwards of 2 to 3 full minutes to show me the logon screen from a cold boot. I ran the full system check at PCPitstop.com yesterday and it reported the uncached write speed as 0.4 MB/s, when it should be something like 4.5 MB/s (cached speed seemed fine though, comparable to my second HDD, a 3+ year old 20GB Maxtor that has never had a problem). Also, in the Windows event log I have this nice little message saying "The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." Oh yay. Another dying 1200JB. WTF?!?!?

I'm getting the feeling that I need to replace this drive NOW or risk losing a bunch of data. Has anyone else had or heard of similar horror stories with this drive? Any suggestions on a decent replacement? I don't want to waste money on another short-lived drive.
 
I'd say you've just had bad luck.

Looking at Storagereview's reliabilitydatabase, the WD1200JB series has a percentile of 84%, that is, it's more reliable than 84% of the drives with sufficent samples in their databse.

Thise database is of course open for anyone to enter data in, so results could be skewed due to users who feel like making one manufacturer look good and another look bad, but I doubt there's much of that, seeing as you have to register, and entering a drive takes a minute or two, so I doubt many people would waste their time.
 
I've read that Western Digitals 120GB sized drives are weak in reliability compared to the rest of there drives for some reason. I wouldn't know, I've used Maxtor or Seagate my whole life
 
Now I'm gettin' scared. I just bought one 🙁?


I left WD because of reliability issues, i found i was RMA'ing a drive almost every 6 months, so i switched to IBM, and havent looked back, but i figured i'd give them another try. Hope all is well.....
 
Anecdotal info is worthless. But you can get a slice of the pie by going to Storagereview.com and checking out the user submitted reliabilty reports.

If you have trouble with WD drives, switch to a different brand. Don't expect any one drive maker to be perfect though. Once you've been around a while, you'll figure out that just about anything with circuits and a power cord will crap itself sooner or later.
 
I am about to be on my thirdWD1000JB in as many months...I've gotten the click (in one case the "clank") of death each time. This was a brand new drive in May. Does not fill me with a lot of confidence.
 
I've been using mine since Dec 02. No problems here except its not as fast as the rest nowadays.
 
I really think its due to user problems (insufficient cooling) than OEM problems. The odds of getting several HDD's in a row die should be very rare.

I've had dozens of HDD's from GXP75's to 200JB's to Cheetah X15's that have never died on me.
 
Originally posted by: AMDHardcoreFan
I've read that Western Digitals 120GB sized drives are weak in reliability compared to the rest of there drives for some reason. I wouldn't know, I've used Maxtor or Seagate my whole life
Click to expand...

Any brand can have problems. I got the "clank" of death on a Seagate recently. Fortunately there were 4 years of good use out of it first.
 
my 80GB WDC800BB has been clicking for a few months now... just slows down.. and clicks... and then everything is fine.. this happens once every few minutes...
my drive is still running without much problems...
 
I've only had 1 HD actually fail (and I've had HDs since my 486DX2), and that was a SCSI Seagate. I have all WDs in my comp now (Raptor and 80GB SE) and am not really happy with performance, but there's a known issue with this MoBo (P4P800-D). Thing is, I contacted WD about my problem with speed, giving them benchmark and anecdotal explanations of the performance loss and their response was "We do not support 3rd party benchmarks". I wrote back explaining that the benchmarks were to explain what I'm seeing (slow load times, etc.) and their response was "We do not support issues of HD performance". Huh?!?! My response, what do you support? Their response, well, they didn't respond.

Needless to say, I would not recommend WD to anyone any longer.
 
However, it is now <EM>really </EM>starting to worry me. It has been performing much slower lately, Windows is taking much longer to boot (with no change in the number of programs loading at boot) - in fact just now it took upwards of 2 to 3 full minutes to show me the logon screen from a cold boot. I ran the full system check at PCPitstop.com yesterday and it reported the uncached write speed as 0.4 MB/s, when it should be something like 4.5 MB/s (cached speed seemed fine though, comparable to my second HDD, a 3+ year old 20GB Maxtor that has never had a problem). Also, in the Windows event log I have this nice little message saying "The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent." Oh yay. Another dying 1200JB. WTF?!?!?

I'm getting the feeling that I need to replace this drive NOW or risk losing a bunch of data. Has anyone else had or heard of similar horror stories with this drive? Any suggestions on a decent replacement? I don't want to waste money on another short-lived drive.
Click to expand...

Bummer. My 2 year old IBM 60GXP slowed down as well. After searching the net with Google I found the answer. If windows detects errors on the drive it will change the Mode of the driver from Bus Master to PIO. At this point the drive will run at about 10% of the normal speed. You can validate this in system/hardware/device manager/IDE.../Primary IDE Channel/Advanced Settings. To fix it just uninstall the Primary IDE device and reboot. This will force windows to reinstall the IDE controller and the drives on that controller. There may be a registry hack, but this just seems easier.
I would also recommend going over to WD web site and getting the disk testing utility. If it detects an error WD will RMA the drive. I ran the IBM/Hitachi equivalent on my drive, but it did not find any errors. I run nightly backups and hope for the best.
 
I now have a brand new 120gb drive in my pc. I will be getting a laptop that has dvd-r in the next month. I will then backup everything that is important onto 5.2gb disks. This should calm my worries of a hd crash


Lou
 
I have 2 WD800JB drives and they both have been wonderful since I got them at the end of 2002 or so.

I would say switch if you aren't happy. WDs have always been good to me, but then again, none of my IBMs ever crapped the bed either...

Maxtor is the only brand I used to fear, but that was in the pre-Quantum days when I used to shudder at friends buying those drives a BJs that had cast-aluminum shells....ick...those things still give me nightmares 😉

Don't think I'm discouraging the maxtors, I'd buy one now if I needed a new drive.
 
Seems like out of the 8mb SE WD drives. The 120GB version has the most failures. From seeing posts about it. More than the other sizes they have. It could be more users are buying
that version. I got the 80mb version and it's working alright and it's quiet.
 
Look, if you have a HDD failure rate of like 3 in asmany months*, take the hint that its not the HDD but something else killing them. If you get a SINGLE HDD that is actually bad in every dozen you buy you can consider yourself unfortunate, and bad includes drives that only last a couple of years. Try a new mobo or PSU, one that doesnt go around killing HDD's, or stop hitting them with a mallet to wedge them in the drive bay.
 
Mine's been working fine since January '03. I'd like to point out that numbers of posts doesn't necassarily mean anything with respect to how often the product fails, you need to look at how many there are in use and compare percentages. A poll would probably give us the real deal if anyone cared enough to create one.
 
A good friend of mine just bought a retail 120GB version, and it was DOA. Rumor or not, I think I'll avoid the 1200JB 😉

On the other hand, I have never had a hdd fail, and the odds have had many to choose from, including two of the 60GB 60GXP variety. Only 1 of his is working (80GB JB) out of, I think, 5 total hdds.
 
I have WD 120GB drives, they have worked fine, I have them for over a year. amd they are in a RAID 0 configuation. No problems yets. 🙂
 
have my jb for over a year now, and i run my comp 24/7, and it was a hot summer too. (only reboot to update drivers and crap), and i download 1 gig average a day, occassionaly downloading 2-3 gigs a day (don't ask what i download).

still going strong.

a matter of fact, my ibm deathstar in my back up comp still going strong after about 3 years of use. it gave me a scare a month ago when it had trouble booting, i reformatted though and the problem went away.

guess i'm lucky.
 
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