It seems that hard drive quality has gone downhill significantly. I just had a 250 meg WD2500 hard drive fail. The drive wasn’t even used that much. It was used periodically to create Ghost images, and today, when trying to Ghost my workstation, the drive wouldn’t spin up. I remember that I’d had problems with the drive before, but I had assumed that it was Windows XP being stupid.
The drive was manufactured in October of 2004, and the warranty expired in November 2005.
As you can see, many people have been encountering failures with these drives. When I run to the store later to buy a replacement hard drive, it won’t be a Western Digital!
Western Digital – for when you really don’t care about your data!
Thanks for the heads-up. I’m using the same drive to do the same kind
of periodic backups. Given your experience, and the ones reported on
Amazon, and that I bought it about a year ago, it looks like I’m due
for a failure any day. Any suggestions for a replacement? Something
fast, quiet, easy to use *and* that will last for numerous years?
I just ran to the store and picked up a Seagate 400 gig drive with a 16 meg cache on it for very little money. It comes with a 5 year warranty, so I have to believe that Seagate has some faith in their production processes that Western Digital doesn’t!