External HD Issue... Need some brilliance here

I brought my broken 500GB external drive back to life by putting it in the freezer (in a sealed bag) for a few minutes. It took a few tries actually, but it slowly got back into working order, but not entirely. It was enough to backup the files onto a new drive. It still works today but only reads/writes at 5MB/s.

mfo said:

I know it sucks losing 2TB or porn, but it happens sometimes.

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:crackup: LMFAO! Yeah that would suck, but begs the question, how much porn is too much, maybe the hd dying in that situation is a good thing:shhh:

@FireMyLaser - Interesting, never tried that. Next time an HD fails I'll give it a shot. Nice avatar btw, I can't stop staring at it.

Cyparagon said:

Warranty?... you mean the process where you argue over the phone with a rep and end up paying $30 to send it there and back, and wait 2 months only to lose your data anyway?

Just take it out. There's a good chance it's still working and the enclosure is to blame. That's been my experience, anyway.

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Haha, but you left out the part where the reps communication skills are so bad you can't tell what the hell they are saying or know if they even understand you.
I just replaced a failed WD HDD in my wife's notebook with a Hitachi TK500 got it loaded back up with everything and fixing to clone it to a 2nd TK500 in case of another failure.
I like Hitachi for our notebooks one has been in continuous use for 5 years with no problems. However, I have had 2 Hitachi's fail in one of our desktops over the last 4 years finally went with WD in that system which is well cooled so go figure. I thought that heat was the main killer of HDDs but there are other reasons too QC?
Good luck on the data recovery though that is always touch and go depending on what actually happened to the drive. Sometimes I can get back in if the disc still spins up but I have not used a recovery service before!

^^^Personally I've been through seagate, wd, hitachi and samsung.

Some other ones too, but can't remember them (from days when 40gb drives were the norm). Someone else already said it... seagate used to be good, but I stopped using them after two drive failures.

Wd caviar black is pretty good, but kind of pricey, and I don't find the performance to be that great vs samsung. No experience with wd greens yet, very cheap though.

For the moment I'm using samsung, bought 8 drives so far, not one doa or failed yet (over year and and a half on five of them).

I absolutely refuse to EVER again touch hitachi deathstars again. Had three drives fail in ancient times (circa 2003 is ancient as computers go), one external drive with a dearthstar in it crapped out last year, and another died in a work tower of mine. 5 drive failures from one company.

I've always trusted WD I think I even have a Green in my PC ATM, although compared to some of you guys (glances at IE) I don't bother too much with how fast the Data R/w's, sicne I've only ever had 2 WD fry at the same time, which was my fault for being stupid.

Tried to plug them back in after power was on, and the molex was backwords, and the some of the pins were sticking out far enough to allow 12V through the 5V line frying the HDD's

I actually tried the freezer thing but nothing. Haha
Yea it turns on when I press the button(It used to turn on Automatically when I plugged it in) the light turns on and I do hear it spinning faintly. So I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the USB connection but I did try with another cable the same length.
Looks like I'll just go in and swap it. Then slowly rebuild my collection.

laserpyro said:

I actually tried the freezer thing but nothing. Haha
Yea it turns on when I press the button(It used to turn on Automatically when I plugged it in) the light turns on and I do hear it spinning faintly. So I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the USB connection but I did try with another cable the same length.
Looks like I'll just go in and swap it. Then slowly rebuild my collection.

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Try one more thing... which USB drive do you connect to? One of the ones in the front?

Try connecting to a USB port in the back... some of the cheaper or older computers with shitty PSU's don't feed enough power to the front ports. I've noticed this with one of my brother's computers and a small wd pocket hd.

Can you try with another compute that has ample power?

Kmor2004 said:

I've always trusted WD I think I even have a Green in my PC ATM, although compared to some of you guys (glances at IE) I don't bother too much with how fast the Data R/w's, sicne I've only ever had 2 WD fry at the same time, which was my fault for being stupid.

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Lol, yeah, to be honest I never really ran into problems either until I started moving around massive files a lot. At the same time I've been told that I'm anal about my computers... I can't stand slow response times.

For probably 95% of the people out there, a 5400rpm hard drive will work just fine, with no issue. When windows 8 comes out I think I'll upgrade to a vertex3. Usually I just leave my computer in sleep, and it's up and running in ~7-10 seconds, depending on what's running on when I put it to sleep.

Only area where a high speed drive REALLY stands out vs conventional drives in raid is when it comes to opening files/starting programs. Once the file/program is open the gains are very negligible. Although this may have changed somewhat more during the past year. I built my current computer last august, I think about whether to replace it in december... although so far it's taken everything I've thrown at it in stride.

I know what you mean IE, About the only upgrades I wanna do to my PC ATM is get a SSD, another 4G of Ram, a 3rd monitor, and either get a new heatsink for my 4890 HD or a new Vid Card altogether, however for now my AMD Phenom II X3 720, 4GB OCZ Reapers, LG 24x DVD burner, XFX ATI Radeon HD 4890 vid card with 2 acer monitors, antec 750W, and GIGAByte series 3 (something like that) MOBO, and a 7200 WD Green and 7200 WD Black cavalier older models 300G and 500G are good enough for me, and for any curious gamers a Razer LAchresis and Naga mouse (mainly use the Lachresis, but have the naga around).

Although I still toy with the thought of making an Xbox360 into a HTPC also.

^^^I'm running i7 950, with a darknight cooler, 12gb of 1600mhz ram, with very tight timings, MSI cyclone gtx460 1gb, 3 samsung 1TB drives, and one 640gb WD caviar black. Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro sound card, and few extra fans.

All in an antec 900 case on an asus p6t se mobo, with a 650W psu.

Two HP2710m monitors, logitech z2300 speakers, although I have a total of 6satellites and two subwoofers in the setup. For a headset I use the g35, mouse is a logitech g500 - how I lived before hyperscroll and multi directional scroll wheel idk... and for keyboard, razer black widow ultimate.

Not exactly a champion setup, but it gets the job done very well, and I can OC everything quite a bit.

Unfortunately with sandybridge, I think I'm gonna have to ditch the whole setup and build fresh at some point. Although I think an SSD, and a better video card will buy this computer another year or two easily. Aside from hd, if I OC I got wei rating of 7.9 across the board, but I really have no need to oc... since doing it for experimentation I haven't had the need to at all.

The reason I got the particular wd drive for this build is that it has only two platters, and had very low failure rates. Very surprisingly the drive runs a bit warmer, and has worse read/write/seek speeds than the cheaper samsung drives.

THAT is just TOO funny, Which 900 do you have?

http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=MjMmMg==
http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=NzIyJjI=
or
http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=MjY5OSYy

^^^Links aren't working.

It's the older version though... I built the whole system very cheap, got the case and psu on newegg shellshocker combo deal, with a coupon code was $70 shipped. I remember reading a lot of reviews on both the case and the psu... and there weren't too many negatives.

One of the things that bugs me is usb 2.0 not 3.0

Btw, no optical drives. So far only had a problem not having an optical drive once

That one time was when I got my laserbee lpm... freaking mini disk. I had to dig through two closets to find my usb dvd writer.

Sorry for teh thread Jacking moving this to PM's.

^^^ I think it's gonna be a bit before we hear back.

@laserpyro - Do try plugging it in to a back USB port of a tower, preferably with a good power supply unit.

InfinitusEquitas said:

^^^ I think it's gonna be a bit before we hear back.

@laserpyro - Do try plugging it in to a back USB port of a tower, preferably with a good power supply unit.

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Tried that on multiple computers and on the media center. nothing. Ill get it swapped tomorrow hopefully with no dramas...

Cyparagon said:

Warranty?... you mean the process where you argue over the phone with a rep and end up paying $30 to send it there and back, and wait 2 months only to lose your data anyway?

Just take it out. There's a good chance it's still working and the enclosure is to blame. That's been my experience, anyway.

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I'd advise the same thing if you have no backup of the data on the drive.

Sometimes the usb-sata board just fails, rendering a perfectly good drive inaccesible. The only way to tell if its the drive or the circuit board thats broken, is to try the drive in a different enclosure.

I've done the same with a samsung drive that was in a toshiba enclosure, and in that case it was the harddrive that was broken. I just put it back in the enclosure and returned it to the store, got my money back without any questions about the broken warantee sticker on the case.

Opening up the enclosure does not void the warantee on the harddrive anyway, its a product that is also sold as a component for pc's and has factory warantee on it. You may void the warantee on the enclosure, but those things are so cheap i wouldn't care.

UPDATE: I went to dick smith today told them whats wrong he had a look and told me they have to send it to WD who'll try and recover the data and if they cannot then they'll send me a new one. What sucks is it will probably take like 6-8Weeks