I've had a WD MyBook 300gig for over a year new, and i supplemented this with an additional 500gig MyBook prior to Christmas....

The 300gig has given me no trouble at all, and the 500gig has also been trouble free (once i realised the plug wasnt into the wall socket right - too late for the main button it which got totalled in a fit of rage - ahem..)

However, the 300gig one is starting to play up more and more.
It seems to indiscreminetly hang whenever its asked to do more than idle. This manifests itself by way of a minute long delay within a movie clip / music track before it sorts itself out... or alterintively hangs the whole b*****d pc.

I left it merrily downloading 2 large files this morning, only to discover on my return that there had been a write error on both - again likely due to a terminal hang.

I refuse to beleive the damn thing is gubbed after little more than a year of (near constant) use.

Anyone had the same problem? Off to run integrity check on it.

Believe it mate

Retail external drives do not last as long as what they should. I believe this is due to the drives not being brand new. Every OEM hard disk that gets returned with bad sectors, read/write head failure etc, the drive will be reconditioned and then probably put into a Retail external disk clad in cheap plastic and lights.

IMO the only reliable way to own an external hard disk is to make it yourself.

waranty replacement requested

That surely cannot be true, do you have a link?

Ive had 4 external hard disks and none have missed a beat.

No link, just personal experience from dealing with Western Digital and Seagate/Maxtors RMA department and what they've told me.

I may be wrong, but I dont think you could sell an external drive as brand new if the main component in it is second hand.

The main component in a hard disk is the platters. Platters is what the data is written to, and that along with the read/write head is what is replaced to make it a reconditioned drive.

I had the 500GB version of this, and its now gubbed too.

I tripped over the usb cable one day and lost everything

Having read this thread I now fear for my porn collection.

I trust that you're all doing backups.

Yes?

Yup - my MyBook is full of them.







Oh...

Ive got 2 external drives. Basically one is a complete copy of the other.
You can never guarantee that they'll last so if one dies, I have another.
And Ill buy a new Ext drive to copy too before using it.

Its the only way to be sure.

To be honest the only thing ive lost that cant be replaced is my outlook deep archive. media downloads can all be replaced given time (or mates who have the stuff already).
Lost a folder of archive Forfar pics i'd scanned in though. kicking myself about that one. - However again it can be replaced given (lots) of time.

I dont have the space to do parallel backups either. Bought the 2nd Mybook to house Forfar match footage.. at nearly 2 and a half gig a half it's not compact!

When I build a new tower later in the year i think i'll spend a good bit extra on ensuring i can wedge in as much internal storage space as possible.

Perhaps worth implementing RAID 5 if you've got a lot of data you don't want to lose?

yes likely worth the investment.
Course if i just extracted the forfar goals out of the footage - id prob get that on a floppy disk!