WD not reliable?

[Rocki]

I have WD Elements for few years and the drive sometimes works and sometimes not.. and dont recognized with the computer..
I see some good deals at amazon like WD Book 4TB for only 65$ but I dont know if WD was a reliable company.. and I read some bad reviews on amazon..

What do you think? My drive was bad?

I search for new drive with higher capacity so I ask...

[LukeSavenije]

HDDs these days last around 5 years with a good use

 

i think you got a little unlucky, WD (and Hitachi because they're now part of it) aren't bad from what I've seen, some simply lose trust in them after a failed one

 

that's why people should read professional reviews, not user reviews

[BrinkGG]

5 minutes ago, Rocki said:

I have WD Elements for few years and the drive sometimes works and sometimes not.. and dont recognized with the computer..
I see some good deals at amazon like WD Book 4TB for only 65$ but I dont know if WD was a reliable company.. and I read some bad reviews on amazon..

What do you think? My drive was bad?

I search for new drive with higher capacity so I ask...

Gonna be honest, a lot of enterprise systems are moving to Toshiba or HGST because of the recent decline in quality of WD's drives. 

Here are backblaze's test results that show a sample of what seems to be best so far. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/

 

Personally, I've had WD Blues in 320GB to 4TB, WD Red 2TB, Seagate Ironwolf 1TB-4TB, and Toshiba N300 2TB-6TB drives, all save 1 have not failed in less then 3 years, and that one that did fail was a 2.5" drive that was used as a scratch disk and expected to die quickly. 

Until the next wave a backblaze results come out, I'll add the N300s as they seem to be the best lower capacity (under 6TB) drive in terms of durability. 

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

i never had issues with drives at all, not with seagate,not with wd,   i think its just bad luck

[aisle9]

The big HDD companies these days are all basically the same. Seagate had some defective 3TB drives go out a few years ago and (imo) the WD Black and most Toshiba drives make some extra noise, but that's it. I just go with whoever's cheaper or has the longest warranty, depending on what I'm buying for.

[Bishop Crane]

You may find that the drive itself is fine, but the enclosure is at fault.  Happened a lot with the Elements we had at the office.

 

You can only really tell if you take it apart though.

However if its spinning, but not showing up in the system that's a good sign.  Although not spinning doesn't always mean it's dead.

[TheDelphiDude]

2 hours ago, Rocki said:

I have WD Elements for few years and the drive sometimes works and sometimes not.. and dont recognized with the computer..

If it is an older Element model (grey metal with rubber ends) it's fairly likely that it's the HDD to USB interface part that has failed. I had two of them die due to a leaking capacitor, the same on in both cases. So your best bet is to open the enclosure and connect the HDD directly to your mainboard.

As for HDDs in general, there isn't a single manufacturer that has a perfect track record. And sometimes you just get unlucky with buying one of the few items that are crap. DOAs and things slipping through the cracks of QA do happen you know.

[Kisai]

I've had my worst experiences with Seagate. Quantum used to make excellent drives, then they were bought by Seagate and things never really got any better.

 

Western Digital has gotten better since the late 90's, but they were known for super-noisy drives back then. However as far as I'm concerned, you should never buy "blue" or "green" models of their drives, as they are slow and noisy for what you get. You may as well just buy the black model. The green models are the single worst drive WD makes and they're primarily what you see in external drive enclosures.

 

Point of interest, I've had nothing but bad luck with external drive enclosures, and have gone through more enclosures than the actual drives. I've killed at least four non-WD models. One WD was DOA and I sent that one back to WD and got a replacement. At present I have three external WD Mybook's, one on the PC, one on the Mac and one on the WiiU. 

 

The drives that came out of the old USB2 and firewire enclosures were all 5400's, toshiba, seagate or wd green. They still work in the PC with the SATA controller.

 

The issue with external drives is that they all come with rubbish-tier power supplies, so it's always the power supply or the PCB of the enclosure that dies long before the physical drive. As long as the drive doesn't have some kind of nonsense encryption partition, you can just drop the drive into the desktop after the power supply fails and keep using it. I've done that with every drive. Never enable encryption on a cheap drive. That's a guaranteed way to lose the data when the drive fails.

 

 

[TheDelphiDude]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

you should never buy "blue" or "green" models of their drives, as they are slow and noisy for what you get

To be fair though, those models aren't supposed to be fast or quiet. The green ones are targetted towards long term, non-RAID storage rather than performance, and the blue is little more than a cheaper version of the black without the longer warranty.

So unless you need performance and a longer warranty there's no real reason to get a WD black, certainly not given the extra costs.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

2 hours ago, TheDelphiDude said:

To be fair though, those models aren't supposed to be fast or quiet. The green ones are targetted towards long term, non-RAID storage rather than performance, and the blue is little more than a cheaper version of the black without the longer warranty.

So unless you need performance and a longer warranty there's no real reason to get a WD black, certainly not given the extra costs.

The WD Greens are no more; they were replaced with "5400" Blues. The early ones had problems with premature failures. I don't know if they have gotten better yet since I don't use HDDs anymore and haven't been checking reviews anymore. It's a pity WD phased out the Greens becasue I had excellent luck with the later model ones (the first ones had problems).

 

The original Blues were 7200 rpm HDDs that were pretty good quality but only had a three year warranty vs. the five year warranty of the Blacks. I had several Blacks and never had any problems with them (with the exception of one that arrived DOA; that could have been from rough handling in shipping).