We’ve had several of these drives in for recovery now and noticed some common failure symptoms in some cases.
It appears that if power is taken from the drive suddenly the drive “kicks back” and moves the head assembly so violently that pairs of heads twist and dig into both the applicable platter surfaces leaving a “half moon” scrape across a substantial extent of the platter radius.
The platter damage is often acute enough to stop any data recovery work being completed successfully. The price of compatible spare parts for all these drives is, in addition, a problem with prices now around £400 (Oct. 2013).
For more information, head over to our Western Digital data recovery section.
Of course, all hard drives fail in many different ways and the WD1002FBYS is no different – it’s prone to all the usual types of failure.