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Unusual Disk Failure Rate on WHS - Western Digital Drives RRS feed

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    My WHS seem to experience an unusually high rate of disk failure. Can anyone suggest what I can do to diagnose or correct the problem?

    I have verified the most common reason for failure, heat, is not a problem. And the 450W power supply is good and should be more than ample for the application. And the server has two gigs of memory.

    I think I am using WHS as intended. I use it primarily for backing up 3 computers and occasionally for music or video playback. But I have had five separate disk failures in the last year. They all manifested themselves by reporting CRC errors. And in some cases, the event log showed a bad sector on a disk.

    These were all new Western Digital green drives ranging in size from 1gb to 2gb. I've been using these same drives in desktop configurations without a single failure. In fact, I've been able to take some of the drives WHS said had failed and reuse them, without errors, in desktop PCs.

    If this had been two, or even three disks, I might be able to convince myself this was just bad luck. But with five separate disk failures, something else must be a factor. Does WHS have corruption or false error reporting issues? Is WHS just more critical than desktop Windows? Am I overlooking some basic required maintenance?

    Or can you suggest what might be causing this or how I can troubleshoot it?

    Thursday, November 18, 2010 9:59 PM

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    Just following up on some of my old posts. Apparently I was unlucky and had some discs from a bad run. Western Digital RMA'ed the discs for no charge since, even though the discs were never registered, they were younger than the warranty period. That was mighty nice of them I must say. And there have been no failure problems with the replacements they provided.

    I suspect the quality was marginal so they functioned in a desktop but could not stand up to use in a server.

    Wednesday, July 18, 2012 4:13 PM

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    i have 12 WD Green drives in mine and i dont have that problem... However if you got the earlier bunch, there were firmware issues that sometimes made the system think the drive was going bad. It was worse on some controllers than others.  WD will replace those no problems as long as they are still under warranty.   
    • Proposed as answer by DrX69 Thursday, November 18, 2010 10:25 PM
    Thursday, November 18, 2010 10:25 PM
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    i have six drives, three of those are wd greens, 2x 1tb and 1 2tb.

    i had few disk failures however on other drives. i tend to run chkdsk as sugested on one of the posts, ken warren wrote a little script, with to check all drives. Running this seemed to help me.

    Thursday, November 18, 2010 11:47 PM
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    I also got stuck with CRC problem on a WD green 2TB.

    http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whssoftware/thread/d7157fc8-0a3e-4376-91f7-4c83a7fcbaed

    Even worse, I bought as replacement again a WD Green 2TB. Hope you are not right and it's just a one time issue.

     

    Friday, November 19, 2010 2:29 AM
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    Mt Wadington

         I've had 2--500 GB, Caviar blue, fail in a few weeks, Jan/Feb, 2011 and also a failure of 1--250 GB, C. blue in the past 3 days and in 3 different computers. These HD's were being used very little and may have been in their respective computers for 6 weeks.

         The warrantee is really worthless when considering the time or expense required to first figure out the trouble, I thought a virus initially, then removal of haywire HD, buying another HD (somewhat under duress), puting the new HD to work in a computer, and sending it back to WDC.  By the way, I paid $10.00 to send it to WDC via UPS because that is what WDC requires.

          I'd move up to Caviar black if it made sense for the extra $10.00 or $15.00. Does someone have an opinion on C. black as opposed to C. blue

    Sunday, February 27, 2011 1:53 PM
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    Hi,

     

    I have been using quite a number of Western Digital drives over the years, mostly Caviar Blacks and RE3's. I've only had one failure, a 1-year old Caviar Black 1TB that I am replacing right now, using WDC's Advanced Replacement policy (they sent me a replacement disk by UPS and I have 30 days to return the defective drive)... So I am quite happy with the Blacks.

    I am using a 500GB RE3 for the WHS system drive as I figured that this was the drive that had most work to do...

    I prefer the Blacks to the Blues because of the much longer warranty: 5 years instead of 3, which tells me that WDC has more confidence in them...

    I have no opinions on the Greens as I only have one, an external 2TB drive used occasionally.

    Hope this helps,

    Stephen

    Sunday, February 27, 2011 3:15 PM
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    Just following up on some of my old posts. Apparently I was unlucky and had some discs from a bad run. Western Digital RMA'ed the discs for no charge since, even though the discs were never registered, they were younger than the warranty period. That was mighty nice of them I must say. And there have been no failure problems with the replacements they provided.

    I suspect the quality was marginal so they functioned in a desktop but could not stand up to use in a server.

    Wednesday, July 18, 2012 4:13 PM