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8TB Western Digitinal external spinner doing bizzare things

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Opus131

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 29, 2016
Messages
301
So i'm making a full back up of this external drive when i suddenly get a blue screen of death, where the top screen is the usual Windows 10 blue screen but the bottom half of the screen is wierd glitches. So i reboot the system, make all sorts of tests to see what the hell just happened, and i tried to continue my back up, where it happens again.

Now, i then proceeded to continue my backup one more time and went through fine (the back up took five hours after the second reboot, no issues). All the files are good on both drives. I've used the drive on and off almost daily without an issue, until i got the same type of crash last week. Again, after rebooting everything seems to be fine and it's been working until now.

So this morning i was checking out my device drivers while installing something else and i noticed for the first time that windows has actually a problem with the driver of this drive. I'm getting an entry called WD SES Device USB Device with a yellow mark on it. I tried reinstalling the driver, but nothing. According to windows, the drive is not installed properly, except everything seems to be working, aside for those screens of death i got couple of weeks ago.

This is what the drive looks like under CrystalInfo:

Crystal-Disk-Info-20210814095356.png

I'm not good at understanding any of this, but whatever problem the drive has, i'm guessing it's not actually the drive that is the issue but the electronics in the external enclosure? Is that possible? Why would windows have problems with the driver otherwise?

I suppose if the issue persists i could attempt to take it out the encloure. Or just keep using it as see if it fails eventually and then shuck it out.
 
Yeah it does sound like a USB issue or a controller issue. If the drive was actually failing, that would not result in BSODs or corruption on your screen unless it was your boot drive and your system files were getting corrupted.

It could be a USB issue. You might try connecting it to a different type of USB port. On many systems for example, the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0/3.1/3.2 ports are handled by totally different controllers. Like on some older Intel chipset motherboards, where you have Intel USB 2.0 ports from the main chipset, but the USB 3.0 ports came from some 3rd party add-on controller. Some boards have integrated USB 3.0+ ports in addition to more USB 3.0+ ports from a 3rd party controller.

It could be an issue with the controller inside the enclosure. Whatever controller handles the USB/SATA conversion. It could be overheating, or just poorly designed.

Sometimes with external drives, the external power-brick is barely adequate to power the drive and an cause issues.

It could be a bad cable. Not all USB cables are created equal, especially when it comes to USB 3.0 or higher.

The sad fact is that unless you are using a laptop, external desktop hard drives are simply more trouble than they are worth. Shuck the drive and stick it inside your computer. You will get faster speeds, lower temperatures, better reliability, lower power consumption, and even less noise in most cases.
 
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