A long long time ago I decided to buy a WD10EACS because of its price. I didn't find it to be as slow as people who whined about it in forums and reviews. Of course I noticed the inside and outside of this drive has a huge speed differential but I wouldn't call the drive slow, until a couple of months ago when it started writing at blazing speeds of 800 Kbytes/sec. Reads were still fast, over 70 MBytes/sec on the outside tracks. I bought a new disk and tried not to write to it anymore in the meantime.

When I took it out of service the SMART attributes shows no write errors, no reallocations, no UNC, only 44,000 hours and 1.5 million load cycles (I'm happy to see its replacement, wd red not parking so much)

The drive also passed offline scans, and extended test.

I thought I'd erase the disk with MHDD and that this would take about two weeks. It wrote about 20 GBytes before it started sticking. Now it is reallocating every time it's written.

I found tarnish all over the copper on the PCB, including the pads that are pressed against the head connector. Did this contribute to my experience?