Has anyone had one of these drives fail? How many hours of usage did it have ( according to S.M.A.R.T. ?
1013008
I've had this drive for 2 years, and though the use has been intermittent as a backup drive, it has performed perfectly.
1013009
Western Digital is one of the best hard drives. I can tell you that I always buy western digital hd I have about 6 hard drives and only one failed but the great news is the kind of warranty about 1 to 3 years for replacement and that hd that failed I sent it to the warranty and they gave me a new one...
1013010
No failures, but I have 2 of these drives and both of them have seen 1000+ hours of use as I use them for video storage, editing, and viewing with no problems.
1013011
I have purchased 4 WD drives in my lifetime and all 4 have crashed within 5 years time resulting in 100% data loss.Specifically, this drive I purchased in 2010 and crashed Christmas 2014 with 100% data loss.
248976
The drive is used for dvd backups and picture storage. When the old drive failed, I purchased another USB 3.0. That didn't help. I recovered almost 1 TB in two days. Then, since I had not yet received the new 3.0 card, I tried using the USB 2.0 to transfer from another backup (a western digital) to the Seagate. In 3 days, I moved about 300 Gb. That was left on 24 hours, too. After I got and installed the new 3.0 (I still doubted the old one), all remaing 500 plus Gb moved in less than 3 hours!. I never measured or recorded the speed. And the old 3.0 USB worked similarly.
544505
There is an article on Ars Technica you may want to read called "Putting hard drive reliability to the test shows not all disks are equal". I don't think Amazon allows URLs to posted here so you can use Google to search for the web page. There are interesting results shown for the different drive manufacturers.
2062744
I've had the best luck in any NAS or NAS-type device (home-built PC utilized as a NAS) with the WD-Red drives. Any other 2-4TB drives I've tried have failed within the first 12 months of use. If this is going to be a 7x24 device, then I highly recommend spending the little bit extra for the Red series - they have better vibration isolation for multiple drive installations and always-on access. Drive failures were drastically reduced once I switched over to Red drives - this is across three different NAS devices, different vendors (Thecus, WD, and home-built).
2010724
I have two of them for my servers. Both units are functioning well. I have one unit that I used to clear out some 200 disk and the unit is still working well.
513138
I would use nothing BUT these drives in anything I built or upgraded. They're a bit pricier, and no one ever thinks about it, but the warranty on THESE hard drives, the WD Black series, is a full 5Y. VERY few other mfrs even offer a 5y warranty. And WD drives earn that warranty reputation, I haven't had a WD drive fail, EVER. In each case -- over a dozen -- they've become useless through increasing capacity, never mechanical/electronic failure. That is, I probably have an 80gig WD drive that's still functioning. It's just not worth plugging in and taking up a SATA channel when I can get that capacity on a freaking flash drive nowadays... Yes, they're that good. You can "save money" by buying something cheaper. But you'll pay in the long run with headaches from lost data, or time spent rebuilding your windows/software/os and tweaking it back to the way you had it. The HD is the soul of your machine. Everything else fails, you can practically swap a part back in and you're up and running. But the HD fails and you've got a multiday to longer term headache to get things back to "normal". And, for general purposes, they're among the best drives in performance terms, too. Tom's Hardware may rate something else marginally faster, but not by much. And not by enough to drag you away from WD Black. As the old saw goes, once you go Black, you'll never go back. :-D
93126
I found that the drives are several years old. I bought a bunch of them (10+) it was a mistake. I tried to get warranty from WD and they did not honor the 5 year warranty and in fact when I returned the drive, they claimed it wasn't manufactured by them. I ended up returning the drive to the seller for a replacement. Don't count on the 5 year warranty, better yet buy it from another manufacturer. I've had too many failures of WD drives in the last year or two. I have switched to Seagate.
1548170
It could be a bad drive. I had to return a brand new 4TB WD drive because it wouldn't format. Try to format it and if it fails, return it like I did. I always thought WD drives were more durable with long MTBF times but this one was a dog from the start.
1761416
If this is the case, what happens if the original drive fails? Can you just replace that drive or do you have to reinstall everything?
342317
The one I bought failed in 4 months. The seller would not replace the drive due to the 90 day limit. I recommend shopping For a longer Warranty
2028219
I have two of these drives and have had them for a minimum of 18 months. I have never had any problems with them. They work fine. They came with an AC power adapter as well as a USB cable.
1502980
It's hard to say. I've had varied experience with Seagate drives. Some have lasted 7 or 8 years; and one lasted only 2 years. I've only had this one for a few months. I don't take chances. I back up my computers daily to this drive; and I back it up monthly to another large drive that I keep away from the house.I hope this helps.
150005
You likely already figured it out by now but for others searching for answers it more likely than not as it should average about 119gb of data. I did have a pny turbo that had 126gb of data but when encountered errors with it the represenative told me 128 drives average between 115-119gb of data so is likely that one was corrupted. . .
6223
Yes, I have had similar issues with other external, enclosed USB hard drives. That is, they get VERY hot, and then shut down after about 30 minutes of operation. These enclosed drives are pretty much useless unless they have a vent and cooling fan. I really don't know how anyone uses them successfully. The only way I have been able to use them is to keep them completely open, which means removing all the casing and just laying the bare drive and it's connenctors out in open. Pretty ugly, but it will run all day like this :-)
204694
Hey Mark, well the funny thing is that I sent this thing back. It just wouldn't format. No matter what I did, or cable I used it didn't work. It also had problems with using the firewire cable. I think I got it to recognize the HD ONCE, and then it said it would take almost 17 hours to format it. I honestly think something was wrong with the drive itself, but I didn't want another one to try. I figured I'd wait.
926434
Although I don't own this particular drive, I am here as I am looking to buy this one also to add to my two other Seagate 500gb Freeagents that I already have that have been working flawlessly for me for over 12 months now. I honestly think that your experience was most likely caused by a faulty unit. Without knowing your computer configuration (windows, mac or linux) it's hard to say if any extra steps would need to be taken to set it up, but for a windows or linux based pc it should be simply plug and play in my experience. As you see on this site, there is only one bad review of the product. If you think about how many of these must get sold every year, one bad review is pretty good as almost everybody will take the time to complain, but very few will come back to write a positive review as a working product is what most people expect. So I guess the short answer from me is yes, I would give this drive a second chance, but then again, i may be biased by my great experience. I hope that this is of some help to you..
2010725
Mine never worked. I heard it running but would never read the disk. I was worried my disk was bad until it worked in a different drive.