Late last year, my Western Digital mybook hard drive stopped working. I had bought it less than 2 years ago for the purpose of backing up and archiving my data on there. I don’t know what the deal is with Western Digital. They used to be the best hard drive company for a while, but I won’t ever buy another one from them. I’ve had a couple of their internal hard drives die on me before this one, and this is the last straw. I read up on the Internet about this and found that are issues with this external hard drive. Apparently, the average use people were getting out of these drives was 2 years. The majority of the people were having problems with the hard drive enclosure not getting power. Ironically, these drives were advertised as being big relaible drives that you could store all of your important stuff on for a long time. Guess you can’t trust anything made in China. There was nothing earth shattering that I had on my drive. Come to think of it, I doubt there’s much of anything earth shattering about my life anyway. In fact, I can’t remember much about what was on there. The only thing I could really remember that I wanted back was about 4 years of email that I had archived on there. This is another reason why I stopped using email clients and have gone to email in the cloud with gmail.
So I figured I would try to recover my data. I bought a new enclosure for the drive, as it is just a regular 3.5″ WD drive that can operate in your desktop, but has a fancy box that goes around it. It uses a SATA interface, and my old desktop only does IDE. The new enclosure was about $30 from newegg. I plugged the new drive in, and still it didn’t work. The problem I was having is that it wasn’t being recognized by the computer. When I turned it on, I heard the drive spin up, then click, pause, click, pause, click, pause, click, then the drive stops spinning. Obviously, something physically wrong with the drive. I don’t know if the heads were sticking or what, but it was looking like a paperweight at this point. I did some more research on the topic and found where some people who have had physical hard drive issues have been able to resolve them by putting the drive in the freezer. I figured, the next step in this drive’s life was the trash anyway, so I gave it a try.
Last night I put it in the freezer. This morning, I got up to try it. I plugged it in, and the same thing. Clicks with nothing. I tried turning it off and on several times, still nothing. I even resorted to the Irish screw driver (hitting it really hard) and still nothing. Well, its officially trash. I found another site that talked about opening the drive. I figured I had never seen the inside, I might as well try. The torq screws were odd, I couldn’t get a driver that I have here at the house to work with it. I have some torq screw drivers, but they weren’t the right size. So, I resorted to another simple machine. The lever Enter my hammer, flat headed screw driver, and a pry bar. I got the top off of it, and manged to put some good scratches on the platters. I also got the magnets out of there. Those were some damn expensive magnets, but that is all that is left of it. So, no more Western Digital drives. Now I’ll have to save up for another drive to use for backing up my data. In the meantime, my web host Dreamhost offers 50 gig of space to backup your data. That should be enough for now for my important stuff.
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