After about nine hours of trying to random-fill the drive, it only managed the first eight percent. The drive refused to report write errors, instead becoming very very excruciatingly slow at writing, accompanied by the troubling presence of constant “clicking” and “clunking” as the heads were loaded and unloaded repeatedly as part of a retry mechanism. The drive was probably toast, but to make sure of it, I decided to do a full random fill on the drive … The next day, it came back, much the same as before but now with twenty pending sectors. Usually in these circumstances, the drive will retry the pending sector on the next write and reallocate if necessary, thus if the drive was still sound it should be workable. if the pending sectors were caused by an improper power-down during write, for example, or a one-off marginal write).Īfter a bit of struggle, I managed to rewrite the partition table and quick-format the drive on a Linux machine and returned the drive to my Dad. This didn’t look good for the drive, but there were no reallocations and some drives can be saved by a full rewrite (e.g. I tried to grab the SMART data from it which took forever, but it said it had twelve pending sectors. First plug and the drive just started to blink non-stop as the OS was trying to enumerate the partition table and the only one partition on it. Trying to get it formatted or even read was a nightmare. Other than that, it feels quite similar to a Toshiba Canvio or countless other basic 2.5″-based “thick” external hard drives. The interface to the drive is a microUSB-B port of the USB 3.0 variety with a hole for the drive activity indicator. This drive was Made in Malaysia with a part number of WDBJRT0040BBK-0A and a capacity of 4TB. The drive is a WD Elements SE – those who know technology have reason to pause for the “SE” branding, but sometimes is believed to stand for s*** edition. It’s rounded a little around the edges and tapered slightly.
The drive in question is pretty basic – a matte and gloss black plastic shell with the WD logo on the top … Unfortunately, that proved to be more difficult than expected … and eventually led to the drive being taken out of service permanently.
It seemingly stopped working properly and he wanted me to just reformat it – to hell with the data that was on it as it wasn’t so important. Just this week, my Dad came to me asking for help with an external bus-powered USB hard drive that just seemed to be stuck.
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