A WD My Passport that can’t be seen. A WD My Book that will spin and then stop. An Elements drive for which Windows has randomly decided it should be formatted. Western Digital hard drives do fail; however, typically the failure occurs at the printed circuit board that lets the computer talk to the hard drive; therefore, there are many Western Digital hard drives where the physical hard drive itself is fine but which are being discarded because the board failed.
Western Digital sells more consumer storage than anyone, so WD drives turn up on our bench more than any other brand. And it is not because they are worse, but rather because there are so many more of them. The names matter; each fails in its own way: the My Passport is a portable; the My Book is a desktop drive; the Elements is an enclosure; the WD Blue / Black / Red / Purple are all internal drives; and the My Cloud is a NAS.
Here’s the best information there is about WD portable drives. It’s often true in WD portable hard drives that inside each one is not simply a standard SATA hard drive connected through USB via a circuit board that has a USB connector attached. Instead, the USB interface for WD portable drives is usually soldered right into the same circuit board used to run the drive itself. More than likely, your My Passport or Elements also includes encryption of the data it holds using the circuit board that runs the drive (whether or not you’ve assigned a password).
This has two consequences. In the first place, as soon as the device is no longer recognised by the operating system, we can be sure that most of the time, the failure is in the bridge board (the interface), rather than with the disk itself. As such, the disk inside may be perfect and simply has no means of communicating. Secondly, you cannot just remove the drive from its case and attach it directly to a SATA port: because there is no controller for the disk, all of the data is unreadable ciphertext. This is why so many individuals are mistaken and believe the drive has failed when in fact it hasn’t, and why a successful recovery process requires us to determine which one actually has failed.
Beyond the bridge board, WD drives fail like all other drive types. Clicking is a head problem: the heads are bad and keep re-seeking to where they were before, and every time you power on it will again drag them across the platters. Not spinning at all points at either the motor or the board. Slow, freezing, or dropping out mid-copy means bad sectors; each further read is a read that may not be returned. A My Cloud that vanishes from the network is a NAS issue, not disk related, and needs the volume built back up with images.
Whatever the problem, the procedure will be identical. First the hard drive is blocked from being written to (write block). Then the data is copied from the problematic drive sector for sector using the DeepSpar imager. This device does not hammer the bad drive at all, but rather reads the drive very carefully. When the PCB (bridge board) has failed, we can read the data off of the hard drive via matched WD electronics while maintaining encryption keys of the original. If the heads on the bad drive are dead, we open the case and replace them with a donor head stack that matches the old one. If there was some corruption in the firmware, we can use the PC-3000 to rebuild the service area. Once the repair is complete, everything else we do with this drive is run against the clone made previously, not directly against the damaged drive.
We wrote up an example case properly: this was a WD Elements that stated “access denied” and ended up being bad NTFS permissions instead of encryption. If that is your symptom, read about the WD Elements case.
If your WD drive is making a clicking noise, is not detected, or asks for you to format it: disconnect the drive. Do not run recovery software on it; do not remove it from its case and attempt to use it again; and do not continuously plug it into your computer to see if it works. Our free diagnostic provides you with information as to what actual failure you have (bridge board, heads, firmware or file system) prior to receiving a price quote by either telephone or completing a service quotation request form. After you receive your quote, drop it off at our Leeds address on Albion Street (no appointment required), or post it (insured) from anywhere in the UK.