Western Digital Blacks .. poor quality ?

[Anteaus]

I have had very good experiences with the numerous WD Black drives I have purchased over the years. That said, I will never buy a bare drive unless I have no choice. I have heard stories of bad drives coming from Newegg, but they were usually bare drives. Other problems I have heard were from people using them in Raid 5 arrays which these drives aren't designed for. Today I'd still recommend WD Black drives all day long, but only the retail box kits.

 

[ronbo613]

I have at least 5-6 WD Blacks, mostly 1TB, drives. Some of them are at least five years old, I use them nearly every day and have never had a problem with any of them.
Western Digital would be my first choice in hard drives, usually it is cost that makes me look elsewhere. I have the Blacks and RE4 drives in my workstations, Reds in my NAS and a couple Greens in external enclosures, all working fine. I also have a few Seagates, which I don't trust 100% because I've had a couple fail, a couple Samsungs that are good drives but they don't make them anymore and I've started buying some Hitachi 4TB drives that seem to be pretty decent.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Some information on WD drives here :

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2367971&highlight=

 

[Rhezuss]

I alwasy bought WD drives and never had a single issue with them. My small 320gb blue that is still running survived a moving and 6 months in a closet before being installed...and it was 6 years ago.

I also run a RE4 black and it's a great drive.

Flawless so far *knock on wood*

 

[Zxian]

If the weight is different then you weren't using 1TB platter Greens. A WD10EZRX should weigh the same as a WD10EFRX.

Also here are some noise tests: http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/355...tb--3tb-review-special-nas-disks-noise-levels

The 1TB Green in those charts is the WD10EZRX (1TB platters) and it edges out the 1TB Red.

I have the WD10EZRX and it has almost zero noise and vibration, even when I hold it in my hand.

You're right that I haven't compared the 1-platter versions of both drives. I could have been making an apples to oranges comparison.

However, there's only one site that I really trust for accurate low-level noise measurements - SPCR. The small differences in noise measurements on other sites likely don't take into account the changes in the surrounding environment, which can and will have an impact on the reading from a simple decibel meter. Having worked for them for about a year and a half, I know that the primary focus in the end was noise measurements, so ensuring a consistent environment was key. Commerical aircraft flying overhead were picked up and threw off dBa readings by as much as 2 dBA (when measuring extremely quiet equipment).

For an interesting read, look here.

 

[Smoblikat]

Never had a 3.5" WD drive fail on me. Especially not the blacks, they have always been rock solid performers. I have had 2 WD velociraptors fail, but I got them used, so I dont know what kind of abuse they took before I got them.

 

[JechtShot]

I have never had a WD hard drive fail on me. I am running 3 WD Blacks on another PC. 2 of them are about 5+ years old and 1 is couple months old.

 

[npaladin-2000]

For desktops and laptops, the only mechanical HDDs I'll buy are Western Digital, and 90% of those are Blacks. The failure rate I've experienced on the things is absurdly low, even when used in a RAID setup on a rigged up pseudo-server.

FY I manage about 150 user desktops and laptops. And while we're now slowly switching to SSDs where storage needs aren't more than 250 GB, I've still got a lot of WDs out there. I've had Greens and Blues fail, but the failure rate on the Blacks have been well under 5%.

 

[88keys]

I've purchased many variants of Western Digital HDDs, and they all have held up extremely well.

If you're still having problems, I'd be looking at your Power Supply.

 

[Meghan54]

Have two Blacks in service, one for a couple of years. No issues at all with them. Have had one Blue failure in the last few years, but hd's are getting more reliable, if anything. Of course, I remember having several RMA's for the infamous IBM Deathstar hd. Now that was a POS! Quick when they worked, but 3 mos. between failures was horrible.

 

[Mfusick]

I have RMA every WD hdd I have owned in the last 5 years. That's 15 hard drives, I'm disappointed

 

[ronbo613]

I have RMA every WD hdd I have owned in the last 5 years. That's 15 hard drives, I'm disappointed

100% failure rate for hard drives from any manufacturer is unusual, to say the least. 100% failure rate for WD Blacks is hard to believe, not sure how you are using those things.

 

[Torn Mind]

To me, it either going all out on enterprise caliber or just the cheapest "non-Green" HDD from whatever manufacturer, shorter warranty be damned. Shipping damage or manufacturing damage seems to be more batch related than a specific company, and I doubt the Blacks get special treatment when on the ship, truck, or train compared to their other counterparts.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have RMA every WD hdd I have owned in the last 5 years. That's 15 hard drives, I'm disappointed

Do you live is a fault zone? Does your UPS carrier hate you?

 

[Eug]

My low cost 3 TB Seagate 5x00 rpm drive died yesterday. I'm sick of these consumer drives dying every few years in my NAS (well cooled).

So, I replaced it with a WD RE4. It has a Black label but isn't the traditional Black, as the RE4 is a so-called enterprise line. Hopefully it will last longer, but this thread is not very encouraging.

The 1 TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 and the WD RE4 were the same price at CAD$89.95, or ~US$80. However, the salesman recommended the WD so I just went with the WD. The specs are near identical, although I think the Seagate has a 6 Gbps SATA interface vs. the 3 Gbps on the WD, but that is probably irrelevant in real-world performance.

BTW, I had been planning to archive some of the data onto BD-R this week, but the old drive crashed just days before that. I had up to date backups, but let this serve as a cautionary tale to those of you who don't back up often. Sometimes these things can happen at the worst of times.

BTW, are these two WD RE4 drives the same?

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=15_1086_218&item_id=034943

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=15_1086_218&item_id=065162

I was going get the first one for $105, but the sales guy sold me the second one for $90. I notice they have the same part number WD1003FBYX, but the description isn't 100% identical. I think it's just the same part entered into their system twice at different prices but I'm not sure. Neither is retail boxed though.

 

[alkemyst]

Most of time these kinds of failures are due to poor shipping methods or user error.

OP, you could have just got unlucky. I have had a couple WDD fail and a couple Seagates. The worst was my Samsung F3, failed in like 6 months.

All had easy-peasy RMA processes.

 

[Compman55]

Have some one you been underground in the last 10 yrs? Maybe in hibernation? Everything today is hit or miss. Stuff is designed just on the "edge" of durable to allow for planned obsolescence.

A new car, will last 10 yrs. Some will have MAJOR failures, some not.
A new furnace, will work great for your neighbor, and the service man will be at your house 5 times a year.

Hard drives are no exception. Have owned seagate, WD, Hitachi for years. Some fail, some don't. The old WD's I had all died from loud spindle motors.

When a single person experiances mass failures with brand X drives, look for something else causing it. Bad power, bad power supply, bad SATA controller. Port# 4 of an old nForce 4 motherboard will corrupt every hard drive you plug into it. How, I have no clue.

 

[Bearmann]

I recently bought a new WD Black 2TB drive. It's doing fine so far as is my 5 year old 650GB Black. However, the main reason I'm posting is to point out that I was able to get the new Black in retail packaging at B&H for the same price or less than the bare drives sold by Newegg and TigerDirect. It's worth a price check there before you order. By the way, the Blacks are called Performance drives when sold in the retail packaging.

 

[thilanliyan]

My 2 640gb BLACK drives have been fine for the last 4 years. But I have had 2 regular WD drives die on me back in 2005. I was running them in RAID0 though...so maybe they were under more stress than usual.

 

[silicon]

Its interesting that quality problems in WD drives seem to come and go with some saying these are the most reliable and others having to RMA every other week. I have several seagate drives with almost 40,000 hours on each of them with no problems on either. It must be a batch problem.

 

[ascalice]

Oh for heaven sakes :smack:, the WD Blacks are the best of the best. In fact, all WDs are good. You think those are bad, go buy yourself a cheap HDD for $20 that has 1TB .

 

[spat55]

I have a a 1TB BC and it has been fine for 2 years running every day. For the first year it was my only drive but now I am using a SSD.

 

[jkauff]

I have four Black drives that have given me zero problems over the last four years, but I also have a high quality power supply with way more capacity than I need, and a UPS with a line conditioner. A few months ago, these drives survived an external electrical problem that fried an SSD, my motherboard, and an optical drive.