Perhaps it’s just bad luck or could it be that the Western Digital myBooks simply aren’t that capable of functioning as a full-time hard disk? So far this is number 2 out of 3 which is failing on me.
Western Digital, one of the major names in the game of hard disks, has been a player in the field for many, many years. Where as in the early days practically everything may have been internal discs these days a lot comes externally as well e.g. in form of the myBooks and their passport sized disks.
Myself I took the leap into buying one back in January last year as a previous hard disk died due to water damage, the case was lying open and it simply rained right onto it as the roof started to leak. An unfortunate setting of events from which one definitely learns and it gave me this new myBook which offered a lot more space.
All ran smoothly and during the last summer I decided to buy a second myBook as one of my other hard disks died, this time not due to water damage but most likely just old age. I didn’t really care to test it anymore as it was an 80GB drive from somewhere in the year 2000 or 2001, a respectable age I’d say and funny enough it was a Western Digital.
Unfortunately about 2 months later my first myBook passed away, it began giving CRC errors and quickly couldn’t be accessed anymore. A life span of less than 9 months, that’s simply not acceptable for a hard disk. Returned it under warranty and without any issues I got it replaced.
It’s roughly 9 months again since then and once more a myBook is giving issues, yesterday it simply became unreadable. Nothing could be opened and as I removed it and reconnected it it didn’t get recognized. Rebooted my computer and still no luck, so I just plugged it out for some time and tried again. Booting up worked again but very slowly and with giving SMART error during the POST.
When entering windows the drive was recognized as unformatted, that just gives joy to my heart, having to reformat a disk again and knowing everything will be gone. There wasn’t much of importance on it though, it mainly served as data holder. After that several quick spins of the WD diagnostics tool gave the following results:
06-Quick Test on drive 3 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 65 (Error Log Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 3!
08-Error was detected while repairing bad sectors.
06-Quick Test on drive 3 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 73 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 3!
08-Error was detected while repairing bad sectors.
Well, as you might understand that doesn’t promise much good news and according to the WD diagnostics error codes the status code 7 indicates the drive is defective and to be replaced.
