Hello everyone

I have registered on this forum with the hope of finding a solution to a hard drive problem. I don't know much about hard drives in general, so hopefully knowledgeable people may help me.

Here is the context: one month ago, I purchased a hard drive for use in a Playstation 3 game console. The drive I purchased is a Western Digital, 320 Gb, 2.5", Sata 2.

After receiving it, I installed it in the console, which quick-formatted it. I then restored the backup from the original HD.

It worked fine for a few days and then I started having problems: while playing a videogame, the image on the screen would start to slow down and freeze the game. The only solution was to reboot the console.

I noticed that the yellow led of the PS3 (which is the one that indicates hard drive access) stopped working when those freezes occurred. So I figured that it was a hard drive issue. I reformatted the drive multiple times via the PS3 and it didn't solve the issue.

A complete system restore of the console seemed to solve the problem for a while but now it is back.

Now, recently, another WD drive died on me and I'd bought a USB dock for SATA hard drives to test it. So I used the dock to connect the PS3 new hard drive to my computer and run some tests. I first had to quick-format the drive to FAT32 since the PS3 uses it own file system which no computer can recognise.

The first thing I did was to install the WD diagnosis tool.

Now, the first thing I noticed was that the drive fails the SMART test. Here is a picture showing it:



Now, when I ran the "Quick Test", I got the following error message almost instantly:



Then, I ran HDDScan 2.8 (higher versions don't seem to work on my system). This is the result:



Now, I know that it is normal for a hard drive to have slow and bad sectors. However, for a drive to fail SMART tests 1 months after purchase doesn't seem normal to me. Plus, the original hard drive of the PS3 (Seagate 40 Gb) never gave me any in-game problems.

So now, I would like to know what experts think would be the best course of action.

- Is the drive really damaged or even dead?
- Considering that it doesn't pass the basic test in the WD utility, is this enough to claim that the drive is bad and that the store should replace it?
- Is there something I should attempt (full format, full erase or anything else) to try to correct this issue?

I do think that something is wrong with this drive since it worked it my PS3 for a few days. Since it's brand new, I still have good chances to have the store take it back if it's faulty but I need solid arguments to back this up.

I'll be very grateful if anyone can help me.

Thanks

Age is irrelevant. The Drive is bad.

Lemon. Return and get a Samsung instead, if possible.

Yep, the drive is failing.

Get it replaced, show the shop the error report.

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Thanks people for confirming this. I've already contacted the store to explain the situation to them. I hope they will take back the drive without making a fuss.

Anyway, I'm over and done with WD. After the MyBook that died after only 15 months, now I have the 2.5" HD that fails after 1 month!

Thanks to the people who helped me.

If you need to convince the store, tell them WD's own utility said it failed. That's usually more than good enough.

That's what I did . I put the emphasis on the fact that the drive doesn't even pass the most basic test with the WD utility.
However, I'm dealing with an online store with which I've never had any problem before, so I don't know if they're good sports or mean people when it comes to taking back faulty articles