I bought this drive in less than 2 months ago, and the mobo is already having trouble detecting it. My mobo is GA-X48 with ICH9R running raid. The scanning by Intel Raid/AHCI post screen takes about 1 minute to detect the drive, and comes up with SMART READ FAILED, and it won't be included in the hdd list after the scan.

It kinda has problem before, it disappears and re-appears in windows, then I change port and cable, it works for a while, much less disappearances. First I thought it could be a PSU issue, not enough juice. But then through Everest, it shows constant 12.6V for the 12V section. And why does it have to be this new HDD?

The problem right now is I have at least 1.2TB data inside, which would be a great lost if they cannot be recovered! If I do a RMA, will WD repair the IC board and leave my data intact? It would be even worst if they return a refurbished drive, cause they usually don't last more than 6 months and the same problem arises again!

Is there anyway to recover the data without costing me an arm and a leg?

BTW, OS is Win 7 x64 Ent.

Strangle, I cannot find the edit button for the 1st post!

Try on another motherboard/system and check if THERE it is stable : if the problem persist / same symptom, the drive is failing. RMA it after you have moved the stuff to a new drive, as fast as you can and if you can. There's nothing else to say.

(At lab level it is possible to do some extensive and more technical tests to judge and eventually tweak the drive, where I usually find some common problems and common causes of failure, but that's it. in my opinion these monsters in terms of storage at low price are time bombs).

Thanks BlackST,

I remember few years back, most hdd comes with 5 yrs warranty. Now the cheaper models, seagate comes with 2 yrs and others with 3 yrs. That kinda says alot!

I have different experiences : despite the fact I can repair on my own the HDDs, I don't use WDs anymore because the biggest problem is downtime and disservice , not the loss of data itself (redundancy and centralized backup on more reliable media do wonders), nevertheless I have WD drives IN CONTROLLED , STABLE ENVIRONMENT working flawlessly since 2003 and some even before. WDs - at least here - were more performing and fast. Decided to sacrifice some performance and concentrate on quality / resiliance, so didn't use WDs anymore for critical storage (oh... I had customers that ask WD only, even after recovering data from a failed WD.... "please put data on another WD , nothing else" - maybe they are into sado-maso, who knows, but "tie the donkey where the owner say" )
After years, now the common and many hidden causes of failure are well known to us pros. That's the market.