In 7-8 months I´ve had three (3) WD harddrives crashing. They suddenly start to get bad sectors and from there the problem only gets worse.
Is it only me that has bad luck or are there anyone else that has/had the same problem as me?

theres one thing i would reccomend you try is going into teh bios and turning on S.M.A.R.T ....then download a program called HDDTemperature...

http://www.siguardian.com/

Your HDD's may be running way to hot. I've got a desktop case - AOpen and the hdd's on a 45C day can get as hot as 65C...in which case i usually take off the case and wait a few mins for them to cool down.

Theres also another proggy on that site that uses teh SMART to estimate the life of your hdd....rahter interesting little thing...mines suposed to die on saturday....we'll c if it does..hehe.

Try this out anyway...if ur drives are running over 50+C then i'd reccomend either changing cases or just getting more ventilation in there...

Catchya

@ voy74656

Thx for tip, but I dont think that is the problem.
I had two other HD:S before this one in the same case, same cooling and had no problems.
I have three computers, one at home and two at my work.
And when upgrading at home I move things to my first comp at work.
Mentioning this if you wonder why I seem to change drives often.

edit/ And by the way, unfortunatly we never see temperatures like yours here in sweden. It was -12 this morning /edit

All harddisks, and WD in peticular, are sensible to powerfailures. If the power to the HD gets cut off (in what way doesn't matter) a headcrash may occur and a bad sector is born....

As I've read, for the time being, WD is the brand with the highest failure rates.

According to the WD website, you have to format the HD with their format utility to make sure the drive is defective!

yaya -12C!!!! OMG! so cold!! so very very cold!..oh what i wouldnt give for a -1C day....its been so long since we've had a cold day! Today was the first day we've seen an inch of rain in over a year! So good to finally freshen everytihng up!

Hmmm..well..what else could it be...ur not rough with them or anything??? treat them with respect... what about power surges or something like that???

failing that...you may have just gotten the dud ones of the batch...i cant see what else it could be...

hehe Dee-ehn got in b4 me.

I've got 2 seagates...30.6 and 80...they run extremly hot in my box cause 1) its so damn hot here all the time 2) i have a desktop case with the worst ventilaiton possible and 3) ...theyre seagate...they always run warmer than other drives...to my experience. Back to teh point...heat can be a problem, but a power failure or surge can do all kinda of weird and winderful things.

Great tool is R-Studio NTFS or R-Studio FAT32 for rescuing damages hdd's due to corruption, power failure etc..i use it all the time on hdd's i get brought in which are screwed.

Here's an idea... why don't you just buy a better case, ie, cheiftec/antec, to eliminate any future possibility of HDs dying from heat stroke? If your HDs are hot, can't imagine what kinda tempt your CPU's cooking in.

Well adding some cooling could do the trick, without buying a new case (1x intake fan, 1x outtake fan and 1x fan blowing on the hdd's)... saves some money!

heat may be the problem...but as he said.....his average temp is -12C! He should download the SMART sotware and try to get that working so atleast u know what temp the hdd's are running at....if they're running at like 10C then no prob.

@ Dee-ehn

This is what I´ve suspected
"As I've read, for the time being, WD is the brand with the highest failure rates"

About cooling: I have two extra fans so temperature is not an issue I think.
At this moment I have 7 harddrives in my three computers, but it is only WD that I ever had any troubles with.

I think when turning this one in I will get another brand and hopefully everything is OK.
Getting quite tired of reinstalling, this time as the last time I forgot to clone the drive when it was working. I think the bad sectors will follow to the new hd if I clone it now?

my indoor temp is not -12 :-)
it is about +20

hehe...yeah..i know... but ur not gunna have the indoor temp at 40C+ when its -12 outside...hehe.

I tihnk u just got the bad ones of the bunch ... or sometihng to do with power surges...are ur comps on surge protectors??? ...thats all it can be....unless ur rough with them...but i dont think thats the case.

No, dont have any surge protectors. But I have had computers since 93 and this thing have not happened earlier. And we have very stable energy in Sweden :-).
Cant remember when the electricity was out the last time...maybe 2-3 years ago!?
I am close to convinced that WD has problems, that is why I posted about it here, to see if someone else had similiar experience.

When you have to switch off your computer the hard way (system crash) will your harddisk is running, a head crash my occur.

I've had a problem that looked a little like this, with one of my 80gb WD drives. As I formatted it with the WD util, the error was gone and my harddrive is rockstable .

well...it must be just faulty hdd's...i recently had problems with my seagate 80gig where it'd work intermittantly..when the hdd warmed up..it'd stop working then the name would change all over the place....like,,,it'd change from teh normal name to "st30H456gt,,,,,,,," took me weeks to figure out that the ide cable was screwed....

One day i hat it out of teh case and was in teh bios detecting the size of the drive (said it was 3004gig hehe) then i moved it..and it changed to 74gig...moved it again...it changed to 80gig...

So when i finally changed teh ide cable...i'd lost most of my stuff but managed ot rescue most of it...but having teh didgy cable screwed most of the stuff on there.

@ Dee-ehn

So you did not turn in your harddrive for a new one, you just used this tool (low format?) and it has been running ok since then?

By the way, I like the first line in your signature!

a low level format goes through and physically resets all the 1's to 0's on the drive..it takes hours but it scrubs the drive completly clean like it was a new one.

The utility i got with my drive is also supposed to run diagnostics to make sure theres no bad sectors while its doing the format. Apparantly it allerts you to let you know theres a bad sector and whether it was repaired or not etc.

I downloaded the program and can' t make it work, The service is keeps stoping when i open the program and a error message appears. .

hmmm.in mine...i had ot make sure SMART was turned on in the bios...as well as going into msconfig and turning it off to automatically start with windows or windows would load the program before the service has started.

so goto start...run... type in msconfig and turn off the startup HDDService program. But leave on the service HDD Temperature.

Give this a go and see if it helps.

Well SMART is on, and i checked what you said, even if i manually start the service before the program it keeps stoping.

I show the error log and my HD is not supposed to support the tempurature monitoring.

I 'll search for another program like this.

activesmart is another program..give that a go....may work... i used it a few times before i found HDDTemperature.