Serious Flaw in WD's Raptor Hard Drives

[Lord_Devlin]

I can't get a Raptor drive that doesn't destroy itself. I'm going on to my 5th drive now, 4th RMA. The drive will click, the arm will hit the inside track of the drive and it will spin down. Sometimes it spins back up, sometimes it won't. It will do this just about everytime I boot windows XP and other random times. Sometimes the drive even gets stuck and goes click, click, click. I've swapped motherboards thinking it might be the controller. Same problem. I swapped power supplies. Same problem. Tried different SATA cables. Same problem. If I keep running the drive it will develop bad sectors and become unusable in a few weeks to a couple months. I have a 500GB Caviar RE2 drive that i have had running on the same system, same controller and it has had NO problem what so ever. Has anyone else had this problem? Might I be missing something obvious? Or have a stumbled across a serious design flaw? I can see getting 2 drives in a row maybe that are faulty, but 4 drives in a row, right out of the box?

 

[michiganteddybear]

most drives returned to customers under warranty are actually NOT new drives. they are refurbs/reconditioned/ whatever you want to call it.

they have been tested, repaired as needed, and SHOULD be good. but after one (or more maybe) people have had them fail, who knows whats gonna go next.

One thing that CAN cause premature drive failure is a flaky power supply (or even just one connector on it). while they dont draw as much current from the supply as a vid card, they do need clean reliable power.

 

[plankmeister]

I'm sure you've just had unimaginable bad luck. However, the law of averages means that you should never have another problem with a hard drive for MANY years!

(alternatively, make some kind of mark on the hard disk that's very discreet... A tiny scratch on the case in a very specific location or something. Then check for the mark on the next drive they send you. Perhaps you're getting the same drive over and over and over again!)