WD Raptor Hard Drives

[Sorez]

Has anyone else had problems with these ?

Had two faulty ones in a row now.. work fine initially but after an hour or so of use they loudly spin up then click and cause a machine to bluescreen, tried off multiple boards / os's etc so its defiantly the drive at fault. Eventually they'd get to the point they wouldn't even format anymore

Been told by a guy who used to build systems for a living that he had alot of problems with faulty batches but once he got a good one they were near bulletproof (so to speak) but trawling the web I can't really find to many people having problems..

Starting to think I should just stick with normal (non wd) drives

[[GSV]Myocardial]

Never had any problems with my Raptor 36Gb drives, had the old 8 meg and the newer 16meg varieties and they have all been bulletproof.

What actual drives are you having problems with, ie model number etc?

[chuckskull]

WD's RMA service is pretty good, just RMA it and you should get a tested and working one back, also you might want to check their not overheating, it takea a lot of heat, but i've seen it happen on many drives.

[alsenior]

every manufacturer suffers from faulty batches sometimes.

on a side note if you do go back to normal drives. i have 3 seagate 7200.10 drives that nearly equal the performance of raptors. there nice and quiet too.

[this_is_gav]

I've got 6 scattered across multiple machines at the moment and all have been, as [GSV]Myocardial said, bulletproof.

[TooNice]

WD's RMA service is pretty good, just RMA it and you should get a tested and working one back, also you might want to check their not overheating, it takea a lot of heat, but i've seen it happen on many drives.

They must have improved their RMA service a lot since 2004 then.. although, that couldn't have been too hard - I had to wait *2 months* to get my drive back.

[pollaxe]

I've got two 150 versions and both have been fine for several months (about 4 for one and around 10 for the other.)

Of course, typing this will have just jinxed at least one of them!

[aidanjt]

I have 2, 5 year old 74GB raptors still going strong. Try a different supplier and see if you get a good batch.

[Taz]

I also have two of the old (3+ years) 74GB WD Raptors and they are still going strong. I did have to buy the WD SecureConnect SATA cables for them as I did have problems in the early days with using standard SATA cables.

[Sorez]

Its the 150gb version i'm having the troubles with...

Unforunatly scan's testing has found no fault with the 2nd one with their basic tests, really wish i'd not used my sata to usb converter to try a format before I sent it back as it wasn't formatting in the bios / op sys setup, now of course it does and they don't test thoroughly enough to get it to lockup again

[ikonia]

have you thought its a problem with your machine ?

Power ? cable ? vibration ? too much heat ? too cold ?

[peterb]

While hard disks (like any electomechanical device) mcan suffer from premature failure, to get two would be unlikely, unless it is a batch failure. Even then, manufacturers batch testing would normally detect that. The Raptors are enterprise grade devices, so the built quality and testing would be more rigorous than with desktop devices.

So while not discounting the fact that they may both be faulty, Ikonia's suggestion is worth investigating. The sysmptoms you describe are typical of low power. It is more commonly seen in external USB caddies where the USB port isn't providing enough power, but it could equally well happen in a normal installation if the power supply is being overloaded, or there is a poor connection somewhere. Is the SATA power cable continuous back to the PSU or is there a connector in the line?

The fact that you could format it via a USB convertor (was that externally powered?) might also point to a problem in the main system.

I haven't looked at the mfr's specs, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Raptors had a higher current requirement than other drives, purely because of the better performance and the fact that the build quality will be heavier.

[aidanjt]

Raptors need 20W of juice for spinup, USB by itself (only provides 0.5A of current) simply cannot provide the needed power to ordinary 3.5" disks, much less raptors.

[LuckyNV]

I had problems with errors and WinXP needed to keep scanning and recovering files, I just ran the WD diagnostic tool and it fixed it.

drive is a recent 74GB model.

[Sorez]

Thanks for the info.. i've thoroughly tested the machine out and isolated it to the drive, its been tested in 3 seperate machines and built around 2k, xp and vista multiple times, it does the same thing each time, the all 3 machines work fine using other hard drives, both ide and sata, its purely the raptors I have the problem with

The formatting issue was weird yes but it only comes about after 15-20 formats and rebuilds of the drive, it just won't format anymore, gets to 20% then just stops... not sure why it formatted within windows on the usb convertor, the other thing that pointed to a dodgy drive was that hdtunes speed test only ran at 24-25mbps as opposed to the 70-90 range of most others, both on usb and directly in the systems