New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

[dood]

I'm doing a bunch of laptop upgrades at work, and we've been using the Western Digital WD800EVE drives to replace aging 30gb drives. Normally, these drives are very quiet. However, I just installed one that's much louder than normal. The bearings are quiet, but seek noise is much louder. SMART has not yet registered any faults, and the speed is right where it should be.

Should I be worried about premature failure with this drive? I'm going to do a full error scan to make sure there's no bad sectors. I'm very tempted to just RMA the drive. I'm already nervous because I just had one fail after 9 months in use.

[dood]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

Drive tests good, but I still do not like it at all...

[willawake]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

i think it will fail.

[i4004]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

clone it, and then let it die...

because somehow i doubt wd will send new drive just on basis of sound...or am i wrong?
if they will, sure, return it...

>I'm already nervous because I just had one fail after 9 months in use.

out of how many drives?
you don't expect that all drives will make it thru first year, do you?

[Toasty]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

Noise is never good and not acceptable today. Plus, you have the advantage of comparing to the others that are silent.

RMA it.

Toast

[Krankshaft]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

I had a Maxtor 80GB it's motor emitted a high pitched screech I can't really describe it. Like a weeeeeeeeee sound.

I ran it until it became intermittent as you can already guess the motor functionality became hit and miss eventually.

I had my WD Sata 500GB purchased early 07 fail this year luckily it had a 3 year warranty.

No motor noises it ran quiet as the day I bought it just one day the computer crashed and bad sectors appeared in just the right places to prevent XP from booting. I did a fdisk to repair the drive and make it readable and made off with my data.

WD replaced it with a 650Gb model. I upgraded the PC to a 1 TB Seagate put the replacement HDD in a USB enclosure and use it to backup my important data. No way I'm getting caught with my pants down like that again that was too close.

[ratdude747]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

one of my wd 40gb deskto pdrives died like this. made loud noise even since i got it. dead now. i bet the allied pos is to blame (hooked to it before i got it)

[dood]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

I've got maybe 15 of these drives in service right now. None older than 9 months. So the count is, 1 failed after 9 months, and 1 noisy right out of the packaging. Other than that, these drives have been great... cheap, quiet, fast, and that 3 year warranty, which is great for a laptop drive.

I should mention; their RMA process is quite painless. Enter the Ser #, if it's in warranty, you enter a short description of the problem, hit submit, and voila, you've got an RMA. I'm guessing I won't have a problem sending this noisy drive back. I'll let you guys know how I make out.

[bgavin]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

The Western Digital RMA process is a model for others to follow.
They allow you to do a cross ship, secured with a credit card.

Seagate makes you wait a whole month while they fart around receiving the old drive. You cannot get a replacement until after they receive/check out the old one. No cross ship possible.

Assholes.

I will buy another Seagate about as soon as I buy another Antec power supply. I hope they don't hold their breath while waiting...

[dood]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

Sending in the loud drive today.

Just got back my replacement for the one with bad sectors... they sent a WD1600BEVE (160gb) drive as a replacement for the bad 80gb. Drive is dated Sep 30 2009 and has no "refurbished" stickers on it. Every Seagate drive I've ever gotten for RMA has been a refurb.

[Topcat]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

I've ran many HDD's with ungodly loud bearing whine, and they still worked when taken out of service. A clicker on the other hand, its days are definitely numbered.

[ratdude747]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

kinda off topic, but...

the hd cooling in the emachines t5026 is non-existant. my 250gb maxtor gets a bit warm i notice. no obvious way to cool it without changing cases, which i do not have a worthy one right now... i have yet to see a case with twin front firewire ports other than the stock one...

am i killing my drive by using this case, or should i stop using it? ironically, its my gaming computer right now... 4gb of ram helps!

[toastygoodness]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

use a dremel tool or something and drill holes to mount fans

[ratdude747]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

nope, the way its built, it would be a PITA to make work... and i would weaken the case in the process. the case is beat up but i have no uATX case with front usb AND audio... and im too cheap to buy a card reader. also, i custom wired the psu to match the case setup...

[dood]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

What's "a bit warm"? What does the SMART reading say?

[ratdude747]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

no smart readings, warm enough to be noticable. still runs fine, i just wondering if i could be slowly killing it.

[dood]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

My old Maxtor 200gb drive ran at over 40*C for years and it's still fine. Now that I have a proper case, my two hard drives only run around 30c

[ratdude747]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

hmm... so im okay then

[dood]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

Just an update on the original drive in this thread. WD did replace it, and it came back as a 160gb like the other one I returned. So, even though there was no bad sectors and the drive worked fine, they still approved the return based on the face that it was louder than it should've been.

[ratdude747]

Re: New WD laptop drive louder than normal - Trust?

good. they did the right thing. they probably figured it was on the way out.