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#11
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
"Band" wrote in message
... "PeeCee" wrote in message ... "muzician21" wrote in message ... I've got this WD 500 gb Firewire external My Book drive I've been using to store mostly video files for a big video project. It doesn't have an on/off switch, it powers up when power is first applied, goes dormant after a period of inactivity and restarts when you try to access it. It's worked flawlessly until today. Normally the blue light in front dances up and down during boot up as well as whenever there's data transfer but now I notice the light flashes briefly when power is first applied, the drive makes some noise like it's starting to spool up but then shuts down. The couple of h/d's I've had die in the past gave me some warning, made weird clicking noises for a while before crapping out. This one was working perfectly normally until now. I wouldn't think overheating would be an issue with this drive, the case is extensively vented unlike most external drives I've seen. It doesn't get used that much. Anyone have experience with these drives? Any chance there's a power supply inside the case that's causing the problem and can be swapped with another from an identical drive? Would be a huge Aaaaargggghhhhh!!!!!! to lose the hundreds of gigs of files. Any chance WD would do such a repair? I don't want another drive, I need THIS drive to work. Thanks for all assistance. Is it this one? http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=351 No, the OP stated it is a firewire drive, the link you posted is to a USB drive... OK so it's more likely this one http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=355 Same comments apply P. |
#12
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
"Centre Parting" wrote in message
... PeeCee wrote: "Centre Parting" wrote in message ... snip Unless a drive has a decent volume of air moved across the PCB, it's doomed to a short life. snip Google's research suggests otherwise: From http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf quote Contrary to previously reported results, we found very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels. /quote http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/m...resting-thing/ notes: quote there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot /quote best Paul. Not my experience. I used to run my drives fanless. Had about 5 failures over 2 years. Since then (about five years ago) I've been running another 5 or so with fans .... and not a SINGLE failure. All were and continue to be on high quality PSU's and mobo's. Coincidence ? Doubtful. quote The data in this study are collected from a large number of disk drives, deployed in several types of systems across all of Google's services. More than one hundred thousand disk drives were used for all the results presented here. /quote So your 10 drive 'experience' is more valid than the "more than one hundred thousand' Google used in their research. I don't think so. Yes it is good practice to have good ventilation for a PC in general. But freezing the balls of a Hard drives logic board is no guarantee it is not going to die. In fact if you 'read' the Google document and observe Figure 4, you should note that cooling the drive to much is likely to 'increase' the failure rate. Paul. |
#13
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
I got the drive free, it's a SATA drive, I hooked up one of the SATA
power connectors and the drive spins up but have to get a data cable to see if the drive is accesible. The other SATA drive I have uses some kind of different kind of cable with what they're calling a legacy power connection. |
#14
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
PeeCee wrote:
"Centre Parting" wrote in message ... PeeCee wrote: "Centre Parting" wrote in message ... snip Unless a drive has a decent volume of air moved across the PCB, it's doomed to a short life. snip Google's research suggests otherwise: From http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf quote Contrary to previously reported results, we found very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels. /quote http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/18/m...resting-thing/ notes: quote there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot /quote best Paul. Not my experience. I used to run my drives fanless. Had about 5 failures over 2 years. Since then (about five years ago) I've been running another 5 or so with fans .... and not a SINGLE failure. All were and continue to be on high quality PSU's and mobo's. Coincidence ? Doubtful. quote The data in this study are collected from a large number of disk drives, deployed in several types of systems across all of Google's services. More than one hundred thousand disk drives were used for all the results presented here. /quote So your 10 drive 'experience' is more valid than the "more than one hundred thousand' Google used in their research. I don't think so. Yes it is good practice to have good ventilation for a PC in general. But freezing the balls of a Hard drives logic board is no guarantee it is not going to die. Freezing ? Even with a fan, they're still quite warm. But ultimately, you appear to be unaware of the class action suite bought by the US gov.t against IBM for HDD failures. And totally oblivious to the vested commercial interests at play here. This study was not conducted by any kind of academic institution - or subject to any kind of peer review. We have no knowledge of who funded it - or any way of qualifying its veracity. Anyone can claim to have conducted a massive study - and go on to draw whatever conclusions they choose. I would rather believe the evidence of my own experience than some bull**** 'study' (read : commercial propaganda). Other than which, any overclocker will tell you that nothing kills a chip faster than heat. Try removing the heatsink from your GPU. It's common sense, if nothing else. In fact if you 'read' the Google document and observe Figure 4, you should note that cooling the drive to much is likely to 'increase' the failure rate. Paul. |
#15
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
muzician21 wrote:
I've got this WD 500 gb Firewire external My Book drive I've been using to store mostly video files for a big video project. It doesn't have an on/off switch, it powers up when power is first applied, goes dormant after a period of inactivity and restarts when you try to access it. It's worked flawlessly until today. Normally the blue light in front dances up and down during boot up as well as whenever there's data transfer but now I notice the light flashes briefly when power is first applied, the drive makes some noise like it's starting to spool up but then shuts down. The couple of h/d's I've had die in the past gave me some warning, made weird clicking noises for a while before crapping out. This one was working perfectly normally until now. I wouldn't think overheating would be an issue with this drive, the case is extensively vented unlike most external drives I've seen. It doesn't get used that much. Anyone have experience with these drives? Any chance there's a power supply inside the case that's causing the problem and can be swapped with another from an identical drive? Would be a huge Aaaaargggghhhhh!!!!!! to lose the hundreds of gigs of files. Any chance WD would do such a repair? I don't want another drive, I need THIS drive to work. Thanks for all assistance. can you take the hard drive out of the case and hook it up internally ? |
#16
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
muzician21 wrote:
I got the drive free, it's a SATA drive, I hooked up one of the SATA power connectors and the drive spins up but have to get a data cable to see if the drive is accesible. The other SATA drive I have uses some kind of different kind of cable with what they're calling a legacy power connection. My advise to you is bye a separate external drive enclosure that way if HDD fails you can change it. |
#17
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
muzician21 wrote in
oups.com: I've got this WD 500 gb Firewire external My Book drive I've been using to store mostly video files for a big video project. It doesn't have an on/off switch, it powers up when power is first applied, goes dormant after a period of inactivity and restarts when you try to access it. It's worked flawlessly until today. Without reading the rest, or the replies, I will just say one thing. HD's fail, especially external ones (3x the price for the $10 Chinese box and a $2 Chinese power adapter with the same drive inside that you could have put inside you machine). DVD's (or expensive tape drives used by corporations) are the only way to backup safely. |
#18
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
thanatoid wrote:
muzician21 wrote in oups.com: I've got this WD 500 gb Firewire external My Book drive I've been using to store mostly video files for a big video project. It doesn't have an on/off switch, it powers up when power is first applied, goes dormant after a period of inactivity and restarts when you try to access it. It's worked flawlessly until today. Without reading the rest, or the replies, I will just say one thing. HD's fail, especially external ones (3x the price for the $10 Chinese box and a $2 Chinese power adapter with the same drive inside that you could have put inside you machine). DVD's (or expensive tape drives used by corporations) are the only way to backup safely. Wrong, as always. |
#19
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
"Centre Parting" wrote in message
... class action suite bought by the US gov.t against IBM for HDD failures. I take it there is some sort of heat related failure? do you have a url? Most of the searches I did found financial securities and other business actions. I would rather believe the evidence of my own experience than some bull**** 'study' Fair enough, one can only live life as one has experienced it. On that basis however 'my' experience tells me having a fan blowing on a Hard drive does not extend it's life. In fact just the opposite. (Unfortunately my sample has only two failed drives out of 14 installed. This covers 7 PC's from 2002 to 2009. ) In case #1 the single drive in the case had a fan directed at the underneath from new, it died at about 24 Months. Case #2 has 3 drives in it, two had a front mounted fan blowin air over them (again from new), the third was buried in a 3.5" cage under the floppy drive. On this machine it was a drive in the fan air stream that died, again at about 24 months. Cases 3 to 7 didn't have any drive failures and none of those had a fan blowing over the hard drives. Paul. |
#20
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500 GB WD My Book external H/D suddenly not wanting to fire up
PeeCee wrote:
"Centre Parting" wrote in message ... class action suite bought by the US gov.t against IBM for HDD failures. I take it there is some sort of heat related failure? do you have a url? Most of the searches I did found financial securities and other business actions. I would rather believe the evidence of my own experience than some bull**** 'study' Fair enough, one can only live life as one has experienced it. On that basis however 'my' experience tells me having a fan blowing on a Hard drive does not extend it's life. In fact just the opposite. (Unfortunately my sample has only two failed drives out of 14 installed. This covers 7 PC's from 2002 to 2009. ) In case #1 the single drive in the case had a fan directed at the underneath from new, it died at about 24 Months. Manufacturing defect ? That heat causes HDD failures does not somehow exclude other factors from doing so too - as you are inferring. The Google study presumably polled a lot of PC users about HDD failures. Unfortunately, there is a component of the population that refuses to accept things they cannot understand - a typically left-brain-dominant characteristic that derives from an ability to see the bigger picture. Techies are predominantly left-brain thinkers and as such, frequently express frustration when unable to understand WHY something happens. This is frequently manifest as an autistic-like, stubborn refusal to accept what they see before them - indeed, it can even be manifest as a need to prove the opposite of what they see before them, so irksome do they find their failure to understand. But then, left-brainers are not big on understanding because they lack the vision and imagination required to see the wood for the trees. Of the laptops I have to repair, I'd say 80-90% are down to failed HDD's. My desktop repairs have nothing like this failure rate. Draw your own conclusions. Case #2 has 3 drives in it, two had a front mounted fan blowin air over them (again from new), the third was buried in a 3.5" cage under the floppy drive. On this machine it was a drive in the fan air stream that died, again at about 24 months. Cases 3 to 7 didn't have any drive failures and none of those had a fan blowing over the hard drives. Paul. |
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