Western Digital External Hard Drive Failures

[Matt Andrea]

I have several WD external hard drives (160 & 200 GB). One after
another, they have "died" in recent months. What is the most economical
way to recover the data on these drives?

 

[Impmon]

I have several WD external hard drives (160 & 200 GB). One after
another, they have "died" in recent months. What is the most economical
way to recover the data on these drives?

Regular backups on DVD burner is probably the cheapest data
protection. If you never backed them up, you could be looking at 4 or
5 figure price tag for data recovery.

External hard drive may be OK for short term backup but it should
never be used for long term backup, they can fail easily especially
with cheap enclosure and no fan.

 

[Peter]

I have several WD external hard drives (160 & 200 GB). One after

another, they have "died" in recent months. What is the most economical
way to recover the data on these drives?

Restore from the backup. If you don't have any, hand over "dead" disks to
your good friend (who knows a lot about computers) and ask him for help.

 

[MB]

Also, try as often as possible to spread your data around in case of
disaster.

For example, I have a great purchased (legal collection) of MP3's from
emusic.com. I have a large folder just for them on my "data" drive and I
also have another duplicate folder on another external firewire drive. I
have "financial" Quickbooks data in my XP system drive and a duplicate
of that on another IDEE drive which I use primarily for video editing.

By making sure you always have at least 2 copies of a folder, housed in
different physical drives (not partitions in the same drive) you reduce
the risk of losing data if your drives goes down.

It's a bit of a pain, but doing this has saved my ass dozens of times.
Just a workflow thing you get used to, once you do it for awhile.

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have several WD external hard drives (160 & 200 GB). One after
another, they have "died" in recent months. What is the most economical
way to recover the data on these drives?

Depends on what "died" means. For a first diagnosis you could
remove them from their enclosures and check whether a computer
recognises them when they are directly connected.

If so, try to get the smart values form the drives. That should
give some insignts into what exactly the problem is.

If the drives are not recognised, I would say the most economic
way is professional data recovery. Any other way is very likely
to fail snd/or make subsequent professional recovery more
expensive.

Arno