Well I am gonna be honest.
Most (not all,but most) WD drives are known by the "click of death" which occurs very often in a very short period of time.In one part of the following video,the person who is repairing dead WD drive says that this is very common with the WD drives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul97jWv2PKY
I had about 100 WD drives and all of them died because for some reason the head was not able to read the platters anymore and I would hear that terrible "click of death" sound.Here are the WD types to which that happened to me for the past 3 years:
-caviar green
-caviar black
-caviar blue
-red (the one you want to buy)
-raptor
-other types...
As for the WD red,I had only 2 of them and they both died within 8 months.And I have no idea why since I was taking care of them so well lol.
Raptor looks cool and all that,but it's not worth it if it dies so fast :/
However those old PATA/IDE WD drives I have were good and they still work even after 10 to 12 years of every day usage.Those WD drives are great,but unforcenately their size is very small: 20 GB to 80 GB and are not being made anymore already for a long time.You can still find them at eBay though.But like I said the capacity is just too small for today's needs.
As for these today's WD drives...,I honestly have no idea what the hell they are doing with them,but they die so often on me and many other people I know.Mostly the reason is that the head cannot read the platters anymore and sometimes it is a circuit/logic board,but mostly it's the head.
Why that happens to them???
I have no idea lol,but that is why I am not buying them anymore at all lol.
Many people would not agree with me when I say that Seagate is better than WD,but the reason why I say that is because only 2 Seagate drives died on me for the past 10 years.Not to mention that one of those 2 Seagate drives was not even mine.It was from my friend and all that was neccessary was to replace the circuit/logic board with the new one from the same model.As I remember I even made a post on this forum many months ago trying to find that circuit/logic board.As I remember the size of that drive was 200 GB.And it was SATA if I remember right.
And as for WD drives,more than 100 of them died on me for the past 10 years.I have no idea why lol,but they just did.And as I already said above,same thing happened to all new WD drive models:
-caviar green
-caviar black
-caviar blue
-red
-raptor
And here is the strangest thing lol.Every time when I go into a local store or the online WEB shop to look for a new hard disk drive (HDD),those drives I find the most (95%) are WD drives and barely Seagate drives (5%) or other models.
I honestly have no idea why WD which dies so often on me is being sold so much and Seagate which lasts much longer sells so damn rarely.
But I did notice that the price for WD drives IS smaller than the price for Seagate drives.
I guess that explains everything lol...
Here is an example from my local store in Croatia:
-WD 2 TB costs around 120 dollars approximately
-Seagate 500 GB costs 135 dollars approximately
It is true that WD drives have 5 years warranty and that's great,but the hell with that if you lose your data lol.
Any this is just my experience with WD drives.Maybe you will have much better luck.But I am staying with Seagate
One more thing for ALL drive types I would like to say:
If HDD works in a vertical position,it is bigger chance it will die sooner rather than being in a horizontal position.
HORIZONTAL POSITION:
Hold it in a horizontal position so that the label stick is down and circuit/logic board is up.
Sounds funny and strange I know,but it's true lol.
Few of my drives which are about 8 to 10 years old do not work if I hold them in ANY other positions anymore,but do work perfectly like new if I hold them in a position described above.
Reason (if hard drive is in horizontal position with the label stick up):
When hard drive works,it becomes VERY hot inside after few hours of rough usage and after few years (depending how lucky you are) that heat can actually change the position of the head needle.By that I mean that it can twist that head needle for 1 or 2 microns down closer to platter.Later that causes the head moving all over the platters closer than it's supposed to and after many read/writes that can even cause the platters to become magnetized and that attracts the head to platters even closer (plus the gravity which makes everything even worse unless if the HDD is in opposite horizontal position so that the label stick is down and circuit/logic board is up like I said above) and once it becomes very close,it can stratch/damage the platters and once that has been done,the HDD becomes completely unusable and data unrecoverable.So when a hard drive suffers a physical failure (such as a head crash) the platters can sometimes become scored due to the head coming in contact with the platter and grinding the surface.
I don't know if you understood what I was trying to say.It's kinda hard to explain,but that is the reason why so many hard drives die to people so often.
Sorry for the long post by the way
Cheers!
