Hi,

I had my first WD 2TB drive fail recently. It was a system backup drive. It had failed one day after the warranty period had expired (by date of manufacture). The store and WD warranted the drive from the date of sale (6 months later).

The store returned it to WD for a $10.00 handling fee. WD replaced it for free within 2 weeks.

The failure mode was that it was not visible by the OS and also hung the system on boot most of the time. I tried it in 3 computers Windows XP - the system that it failed in, Windows 7 Professional, and Windows 7 Ultimate), and it looked dead. It would spin up and just hang the boot process most of the time. During a Windows 7 format, it would format up to 12%, then hang. Same thing in a Windows XP. Norton wasn't any help.

I have a lot of the 2TB drives. One guy that I bought two from second hand (he uses his for RAID back-up drives too), says he has had about 40 drives with one failure that WD replaced as well.

It could be that long periods of read/write operations during back-ups could be the problem, or long motor run times. I have the power-down stuff minimized. The drive is placed in a drive shuttle, good cooling, cool room temperature. Don't know why it failed. Good thing it was just a fully loaded (about 1.72TB), back-up drive.

Was your drive failure any similar?

On the positive side, WD and the store (Software & More) treated me very well.

Ross