I needed to write this article about the 2021 Western Digital hard drive fail rate. When I google the problem I find absolutely nothing and I wanted to create a resource for other people who use a lot of hard drives. As a professional photographer and videographer, I have at any one time around 50 hard drives. I keep 3 copies of each drive, and as drives get older, I run tests regularly on them, and replace them when necessary.
I started buying hard drives in the late 90s.. Of course, storage wasn’t what it was today. I used to buy a mix of brands and wasn’t loyal to any particular brand. The most common brands being Seagate, Western Digital (WD), and Toshiba.
As of the Seagate crisis of 2014 I have exclusively been buying WD only and have not had any problems. I have some 500gig WD drives from the early 2000s that are still working fine, and I have probably 2 dozen or so 2TB WD drives that range from 3-9 years old that are also fine and functional.
It all began when 2 5TB WD drives I bought in Dec 2019 both started clicking within a month of eachother. Both are in Warranty until Dec 2021, so I knew I could do a warranty claim with Western Digital. I did a warranty claim for 1 WD drive prior to Covid, and their customer service was excellent.
However… of course I needed to backup my data before sending the drives back to WD. This meant that I had to buy a new 5TB drive to copy my data to. I went to my local Best Buy, and I bought a brand new 5TB WD easystore hard drive. I didn’t see any problems with it upon first plugging it in, and began moving my files from one of the drives to the new drive.
Here’s the big problem, and the reason why I’m not finding any information on this problem yet… If you just bought one of these drives, copied or moved data to it, and then put it away, you’re not going to know you have a faulty drive, until the 3rd or 4th time you go to use the drive. So there are probably hundreds of people who have bought faulty drives and don’t realize YET. I deal with thousands upon thousands of gigabytes of data per day, hence my need of dozens upon dozens of hard drives.. Well after 2 weeks (by the time I had plugged in the drive maybe 4-5 times) the drive began clicking. If you know anything about computers and hard drives, clicking is something you would expect either a dropped hard drive, or a 5-10 year old hard drive to do. Clicking typically means there is a physical problem with the plate arm that reads the drive, and once that happens it’s all downhill.
This time I got out about 5 of my older blank and no-longer-used 2TB WD drives and began moving data in sections onto those to keep it safe in the meantime. Then I went to Best Buy and exchanged the drive. I was not suspecting that I would have any issues with the replacement drive, and began placing data on it. Once again, it was about 3 days this time before it began clicking. If you’re wondering why it wouldn’t click right away, my thoughts on this are that something is wrong with the quality control right now, where basically the drive is good for a few start and stops, and then failing after that. What’s terrible about this is that the average person buying these drives is going to place data on them, put them away, and forget about them and have no idea they have a faulty drive. I then spent almost 3 days letting my desktop run the WD diagnostic ‘long version’ test on the drive only for the test to fail mid way with an error saying the drive was too corrupted to test.
This time I went to a different Best Buy store 45 minutes away to do my 2nd exchange for a 3rd hard drive. I wanted to rule out the possibility of maybe a pallet of hard drives being damaged upon delivery or something. I exchanged the drive, for a third Easystore WD 5TB hard drive, and this time I spent almost 48 hours running Western Digitals diagnostic software on the drive to check for errors. The drive responded with no errors, and I began to trust it. Big mistake. Once again this time it was about 8 days of having the drive and organizing all my files on it before things began to go wrong and the clicking began. This time I went back to my local store and purchased a 5tb WD Video Game hard drive PS version. These are windows drives that are just formatted in Exfat for video game console compatability as opposed to NTFS, so I reformatted this now 4th WD 5TB drive (but video game model instead of easystore) and moved all the data off the 3rd 5tb WD easystore drive from the second Best Buy store.. didn’t seem to have any problems.
I went back to Best Buy and exchanged the 3rd WD 5TB easystore drive for another 5TB WD video game hard drive. So now I have 2 of the 5TB WD video gamer drives. So I finish moving the data I want onto the first drive… It seems good.. but GUESS WHAT? about 10 days after having the drive it began clicking! The clicking was not constant, just intermittent, but I cannot afford to EVER trust a clicking drive, especially within the first month of purchase. I ran 2 different quick hard drive testing softwares, and quick testing softwares will not pick up hard drive corruption on a drive of such a massive size in a quick test, but they can tell you some things, and both programs said this drive was running hot at 51 degrees. Most of my hard drives run at 19-34 degrees so this was another red flag for me. On top of that, User BenchMark read the hard drive as reading and writing so slowly that it was in the lowest 15% perecentile and “performing poorly”
I had left my desktop computer copying 2 of my older no-issue 2TB WD’s onto the other new 5TB gamer drive, and all seemed well until the copy finished… then it appeared that this other drive was also running hot at 50 degrees, and as soon as I plugged the drive back in to access the data I placed on there, it was taking 40 minutes to copy tiny folders that had say 10 jpegs.
I left detailed reviews on Best Buys site about both drives, expressing the problem. Both drives have an average of 4.5+ stars, but when I look for the bad reviews on the easystore drives, I am finding other users who documented that they got a clicking drive, and exchanged it for another clicking drive.
This is a business emergency for me, because the time wasted dealing with this has been nightmarish, but on top of that, there are no alternate hard drives to buy! I stopped using Seagate after the Seagate crisis of 2014. In 2014 I bought about 20 2TB slimline Seagate drives, and I bought them from 4 corners of Earth. None of them were shipped to me. I don’t EVER have hard drives shipped to me because of the risk of physical damage, and I don’t ship hard drives to my clients unless they live 2+ hours away and it’s unavoidable, because the risk of physical damage is so high, and unnecessary.
I bought some drives in person from JB HiFi Perth Australia, JB Melbourne Australia, BH Photo Video New York City, and both Best Buy and Costco in San Diego. All of these drives were purchased in person, and none were shipped to me. Yet more than half of them corrupted within 3 months of having them. Apparently it was all related to the tsunami in the Phillipines which affected quality of production or something like that, and the hard drives were protected under warranty, but that didn’t help me with the dozens of hours of time wasted dealing with warranty replacements and backing up failing data at the time, and for this reason I have NEVER purchased seagate again and I have always advised my clients to choose WD or Toshiba.
Well fast forward to 2021, and my long trusted WD seems to not be long trusted anymore… Toshiba hard drives seem to have disappeared off the market and even Best Buy staff told me they didn’t know why, and I refuse to go back to Seagate… so now I urgently need 2 new 5TB drives, and don’t know what to do..
3 5TB easystore WD drives, 2 5TB gamer WD drives, all clicking, all seriously faulty within 2 weeks of ownership…. No Toshiba drives on the market to buy, and refusing to trust Seagate again (who still have the highest documented rate of hard drive failure, and are documented s having the fastest hard drive failure among all drives.
I’m going to talk to a manager at Best Buy tomorrow to let them know what is going on. However a good photographer/ videographer friend of mine in Perth said he and his business partner recently got stung by WD drives, and they bought 4TB drives (as opposed to my 5TB drives) their drives died and they lost weeks of time with data recovery.
I hope other techy’s find this post and find it helpful
