WD Drives

Sheila Foss · September 18, 2009, 05:59:08 PM

Maybe I should put this in the regular group instead of the testing one. Anyone use Western Digital drives? We have quite a few work stations with them. Suddenly had a couple spontaneously rebooting, another working fine, then taking 10 minutes to open a window.

Come to find out, on the bottom of the drive about midway (not the edges where the power plugs in, the flat area where the controller card is), is a set of 4 prongs. There is a piece of plastic over the tops, but it doesn't hold them down, they begin to vibrate and with time over heat and cause those problems.

My friend snaps off the piece of plastic, then solders each prong down, this stops the over heating problem. Course you have to catch it before it does damage to the drives from constant rebooting, over heating and crashing.

He repaired 8 in our office, and 5 in a sister office that had 2 CPUs suddenly start to reboot with no warning. Oh, and nothing shows to indicate a problem Event Manager.

It's not all models, some have a plug connection and it doesn't cause the problem.

Hans Manhave · September 19, 2009, 12:18:18 PM

I need a youtube video to understand this. The prongs are not held down by the plastic but for some reason they fibrate, so much that they overheat the drive? What do they get soldered to? They are bouncing lose from the controller card?

Sheila Foss · September 19, 2009, 05:38:05 PM

They are not attached to the controller card, like you might be thinking. When I get to work Monday, I will send you the pictures. They aren't very clear, but you will get the idea Hans.

It's a heat build up problem, which causes the drives to slow down, then speed up back to normal, or reboot. One of ours, that kept rebooting, I think might be permanently damaged. Will have to wait & see.

He spot solders each prong in place to stop the vibration. Not a line of solder across them all, each has a tiny solder to hold it down.

This effects 40G, 80G, and others. A couple of our systems had 220 drives (depends on the model) which didn't need fixing.

Mark · September 23, 2009, 10:51:41 AM

Quote from: Sheila Foss on September 19, 2009, 05:38:05 PM
When I get to work Monday, I will send you the pictures.

Can you post the pictures for all of us to see and understand?

Sheila Foss · September 23, 2009, 05:50:35 PM

I emailed them to Hans, which helped him. They are blurry, since I was trying to snap the pics while they were being worked on. I will see if I can upload them here tomorrow from work.

If I can't upload the pictures to the forum, anyone can send me a request via email and I will send them that way.

Hans Manhave · September 23, 2009, 06:04:18 PM

Tried attaching all four pics. Won't let me because have only total limit of 192k for all four combined. I guess we won't be seeing too many uploads, just links of what is on the web hosted somewhere.

Redoing a post won't work either (I tried from being declined on four to just adding two pics) because the system thinks you posted already.

Hans Manhave · September 23, 2009, 06:08:19 PM

The other two pics...

These all have been reduced in size with FastResizer.

Sheila Foss · September 24, 2009, 06:40:12 AM

Very good, thank you Hans.

Mark · September 24, 2009, 08:55:57 AM

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!