I Lost my third Western Digital drive in a row over the weekend, and it‘s not due to a cooling issue from what I can tell via SMART readings over the lives of the drives.
This one was a 160GB SATA which has failed for the second time. I‘ve also lost a 120GB PATA “Special Edition”. Luckily the SATA one is still under warranty, the 120GB one was one month out of warranty. Luckily the SATA drive was part of a RAID setup, so the machine isn‘t down and I didn‘t lose data.
Oddly enough, I‘ve got several Maxtors (used to be my least favorite brand) that have hummed along just fine for many years, and Seagates as well. Of course now one of those will probably go bad soon :(
I‘m going to be throwing more drive cooling in the machine in question that has held these Western Digitals, but I‘ve had that brand of drive in other machines that ran much warmer without issue….If I get problems again I guess I‘m going to have to re-evaluate my choice of hard drive vendor….Doesn‘t anyone stay consistently good at this game?