Western Digital Hard Drive Failures
by Stuart Livesey
In the last 10 days there seems to have been a mini surge in the number of computers coming into the shop with failed Western Digital 80 gig hard drives. Ironically the first one Rick, at the best computer shop in Hervey Bay, saw was his own office desk top and five or six others soon followed.
Each one of the hard drives that failed was built by Western Digital in 2003 and installed in machines in that year or early 2004.
When a hard drive fails there is very little if anything that anyone can do to repair it. Once it fails it’s gone and, in most cases, so has all the data that might be stored on it. There are some specialists who can recover lost data but their services are very very expensive.
These particular drives all came with a one-year warranty but no matter how long the warranty might be it only ever covers replacement of the failed unit - no hard drive warranty covers recovery of the lost data.
In one of the instances that came into the shop one family lost thousands of family photos and several years of research into their family tree.
You have to remember that hard drive failures are inevitable. Every hard drive will fail and the only way to protect your data is to back it up regularly. Back up at least weekly and don’t back it up to another sector on the same hard drive.