New WD Harddrives failing - freaking me out.

[LittleRachael]

Hey Brian!

I did a quick search for my question and couldn't find this topic, but please direct me if I missed it somehow. Backstory - I have been working of pairs of two external hardrives for years. Essentially I copy my Raws to both harddrives at the start of a project (labelled for example, 1A & 1B, 2A/2B - and so on and so forth...I'm on Harddrive 8A & 8B now). One drive of the pair (A) gets a little more use than the other, as I edit off of it. Once the project is completed I copy the final files over to the B harddrive of the pair. And so on and so forth. No idea if this is a good technique, but it's kept my macs running well as I'm able to keep the harddrives mostly clear.

In the last 2 months I've had two brand new-out of the box WD 2TB harddrives fail straight out the gate. I was able to format them both using Disk Utility. I setup as Mac OS Extended as I normally do (maybe that's a poor choice??). After a few minutes of initial use they would crash and any files I copied to them would be corrupt. 

My question is, could this just be a weird coincidence or could it be time for a file management process update? Perhaps there is a better way to do this than working off of portable harddrives?
 

I purchased my iMac based on your specs years ago and it runs very well. It's a 27" iMac, 2019, 3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, with 64 GB memory. I'm still running Catalina 10.15.7.

Thank you in advance if you can point me in the right direction on this! This User Group has been an incredible resource for me over the years!

 

Rachael


 

[Brian]

8 hours ago, LittleRachael said:

I setup as Mac OS Extended

You want Mac OS Extended (Journaled). But it sounds like you are already there.

How fast are these drives? Do they have their own power connector or is it just a USB? How old are these 2TB Drives?

Three things are coming to mind:

1. You have a Crappy "Eco-Friendly" or "Green" Drive. The only difference between a working one and a bad one is about 3 weeks. You want your HD big and beefy and enterprise-grade.
2. Your USB port could be defective and it's killing the drives.
3. Catalina has an issue, I had Catalina issues myself and I was forced to upgrade to Big Sur to fix them. The good news is, the world didn't end. The current versions of Photoshop work just fine, and my iMac is a 2017 version of yours.

Generally, I like Western Digital Caviar Black Drives. They are the only ones that I trust. Unfortunately, you have no idea WHAT is installed in a external. It could be a low-end drive that's practically pure-profit for the manufacturers. That's why I always recommend a G-Drive (Thunderbolt Version.) Here is one that I use: SanDisk Professional 12TB G-DRIVE PRO External HDD. If you are looking to "work" off an external, you want to be using your Thunderbolt 3 ports (the USB-C looking ports) on your iMac AND use a TB3 EHD. TB3 is way faster than any USB 3.0 out there.

How can you tell? WD Caviar Black drives spin at 7200 RPM. They require more power than what a USB 3.0 port can provide, so they will almost always have their own dedicated power supply / power brick. If you have a EHD that has one cable, chances are it's a slower 5400 RPM "Green" Drive.

I hate those suckers. "Green" means absolutely nothing if it ends up in a landfill somewhere because China no longer takes our recyclables. I've also found that sometimes the drive inside the case is fine, but WD uses the absolute cheapest USB port that money can buy. Or to put it another way, they use the best USB connector that 4 cents can buy.  

 

8 hours ago, LittleRachael said:

In the last 2 months I've had two brand new-out of the box WD 2TB harddrives fail straight out the gate.

It's all cheap shit...made in China. New means absolutely nothing; all "New" means is "Different." Especially in 2022 / 2023. It's all crap, across the board.

 

8 hours ago, LittleRachael said:

My question is, could this just be a weird coincidence or could it be time for a file management process update? Perhaps there is a better way to do this than working off of portable harddrives?

I don't think this is a coincidence,  two different drives of the same type (make / model) seem to be having issues. I'd recommend to not buy these 2TB drives again. So what can you do? I'd replace the two faulty drives with a different make/model. Make sure you always-always-always EJECT each Hard Drive, each and every time. If you are just pulling the EHD out of your Mac without Ejecting, you can corrupt stuff. Possibly damage the USB Port. You could upgrade to Big Sur and see if that helps things. Then get two new EHDs and format them with Big Sur and see what happens. Oh, here are a set of Western Digital EHDs that belonged to a former customer of mine. (5 EHDs out of 10 that were dead.) All of them had similar issues that you are experiencing and this convinced me to never buy a external Western Digital Product:

Full disclosure: Sandisk now owns G-Drive and Western Digital. So who knows what is going on?

[LittleRachael]

Thanks so much Brian! This is helpful. I think I will explore some new drive brands and see if there is any issues with the USB ports! 

[Brian]

I'm a big fan of G-Drives. They come Mac Formatted as well.