Hi gurus,

I have a WD3003FZEX which has not seen excessive duty and sits in a well-ventilated case. It is Thailand made in October 2013, WD3003FZEX-00Z4SA0.
Yesterday, I received some chkdsk errors which made me wonder but everything was accessible and SMART values were all perfect so I suspected a Windows glitch.
Today, the drive doesn't come online. It spins up then it tries do do something five times (if I didn't miscount) and then it seems to give up and powers down.
What do you think what kind of error is that: Is the platter surface damaged and my data therefore probably lost or is it "just" something in the firmware that can be fixed by a specialist?

I took the drive out of the case and tried to run it via an USB adaptor but it's the same behaviour.

Any educated guesses what is going on and whether my data would be recoverable?

Best regards
weaker

Hi weaker

Does the drive click five times and spin down?

If so, your drive suffers from damaged heads most probably.
If your data is valuable, I would suggest you to not power up the drive anymore and consult a good DR company to have your data recovered.
Since this is a 3TB drive, expect the cost to be a little steep. The reason is that the cost of spare parts would be expensive for this drive, and the drive itself is a Vivaldi family (not one of the easiest to deal with).

PS. I am surprised this drive failed on you with the conditions you describe, usually these are quite reliable.
PS2. If you consider consulting a DR company, let us know your location and we'll suggest one for you.

Good luck.

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Sorry for the late reply, I obviously forgot to switch on the notification

Yes, it clicks five times and spins down.

I assumed that it is probably something severe and didn't power it up since the incident.
The drive is now at a reliable DR company for analysis. I know that prices are steep but after the analysis I will hopefully at least know what was on the drive. I have a backup but I don't know if there were other valuable things on it.



After I got burned several times with the WD green drives, I decided to buy only drives with 5yr warranty. And I had good experience with the black drives, so I bought one of them. And because I thought that the newest drive is least prone to fail, I put most of my data on it The green drives at least had bad SMART values before they failed but the black had perfect SMART values the day before.

When I buy a new drive I do a zero fill every time and check the SMART values afterwards. If there were no reallocations, I consider the drive not DOA and trustworthy.
I also wonder about the black drive failing because it is in a double-ventilated drive cage and I didn't use it really much (at least no torturing, only normal usage). Perhaps it's just a lemon.


See PN.

Best regards
weaker