Information recovery from a bad Western Digital WD4000KS hard disc

Artem Makarov aka Robin
09.12.2008
6838 views

I got a bad Western Digital WD4000KS Zeus for information recovery. As I have already mentioned in my previous stories, WD storage discs are not considered to be highly reliable. The printed circuit board is poorly protected of power unit thyristor effects, so chip of MHA and engine control burns out at any problem. MR elements of reading/recording heads are also very unstable and often fail out.

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In that case the problem to user data access was because of a large number of sectors with errors and slowdown, a forerunner of a soon failure of one (or more) heads in the set.

To my great regret, the most part of unreadable sectors was in the MFT so I opened a hermetical zone in clear room and started to reanimate a half-dead head. Reanimation was a success (It is a rare case for Western discs), and all the necessary directories were recovered.

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R Rhodes
10 december 2008, 03:41

I have 18 machines with these WD4000KS units as an extra storage volume. Over half have completely failed and the others show errors. I have 78 machines in our operation and these drives are the ONLY hardware failures in the last year. I cant find many who have the same issue but the numbers dont lie, theres somthing terribly wrong with these drives.