Common Western Digital hard disk failures
Disk failures are not exclusive to Western Digital. The failure modes described are common to all disks but some are more prevalent.
- Firmware corruption may occur, indicated by detection by notebook BIOS as disk of different size, blank or strange characters instead of the correct disk model.
- In others, clicking sounds may occurs with the drive not recognised by the notebook system BIOS. This is indication of possible head crash.
- The drive may be recognised, but the performance is stuttered, access time to files and folders is affected, and the laptop may hang. Clicking sounds may accompany this failure. This may be early sign of read write head failure and normally accompanied by development of bad sectors.
