Do Newer Western Digital Drives Hide Faults?

[ShadowMeow]

TL;DR: Yes. Aggressively. Cleverly. Frustratingly.​

​

Silent Sector Remapping​

WD drives—especially SMR and helium-filled models—remap weak sectors in silence:

• If a sector fails a read but can be rewritten successfully, it’s quietly moved elsewhere.
• No SMART error is triggered.
• No notification. No log. Just vibes.

So when you start seeing pending sectors? It’s not the start of problems—it’s the end of the cover-up.

​

Delayed SMART Reporting​

WD drives are notorious for:

• Only incrementing Reallocated Sector Count, Pending Sectors, or Offline Uncorrectable after multiple failed attempts.
• Sectors may get flagged internally, but SMART won't show changes unless things get dramatic.

WD’s motto might as well be:
“Let’s not concern the user with a little corruption. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

​

Proprietary Vendor Logs​

There are internal logs the WD drive keeps:

• Reallocation logs
• Read error history
• Write failure trends
• Vibration/temp events

But here’s the catch:
You don’t get to see them.
They’re buried in vendor-only tools, encrypted logs, and undocumented registers.

​

Drive Slowing = Silent Failure​

Modern WD drives—especially WD Blue, WD Red SMR, and external models—tend to slow down dramatically when encountering:

• Weak sectors
• Cache overflows
• Background error correction tasks

But SMART will still report "Good" across the board.
So what feels like “my drive’s being weird today” is often "I'm dying and hiding it from you."

​

Firmware-Level Background Healing​

WD drives often try to “self-heal”:

• Rewriting bad sectors with ECC correction in the background
• Reallocating sectors silently
• Skipping over marginal sectors with “adaptive read” behavior

But none of this gets logged in SMART unless it fails entirely.

​

USB Enclosures Are an Extra Layer of Secrets​

WD external drives? The ones with the built-in USB interface?

• The controller intercepts SMART commands.
• Some even strip or block SMART passthrough completely.
• Others show “synthetic” values meant to make the drive look healthy.

And you thought you had visibility? Ha.

 

[ShadowMeow]

 

[peterblaise]

Though my experience as an end user correlates to the
frustration you bear testimony about, do we have any
authoritative references to the vendor or lab reports, with
testimony and evidence we can scrutinize, such as 'look
at this oscilloscope output'? Thanks.

 

[ShadowMeow]

This short video talks about what road blocks are put in place to make data recovery more difficult, the relevant segment starts around: 1:07:00

 

[peterblaise]

Ah, Serge from DeepSpar - a Canadian company
dedicated to manufacturing hard drive data recovery
tools, as they say, "read instability handling hardware for
forensics and data recovery professionals" - noting the
evolution of the industry, where each new generation of
hard drives is harder and harder for tool makers to
reverse engineer, and perhaps vendors are intentionally
making their hard drives more challenging for the tool
makers to reverse engineer.

I was just mastering MFM/RLL when IDE and S.M.A.R.T.
arrived, and it's been downhill ever since - this situation
is perennial.

Remember the challenge to get diskette drives to handle
5 1/4" 360 KB and 1.2 MB diskettes?

And then 3 1/2" diskettes came around and started the
descent into alignment hell once more, 720 KB, 1.4 MB.

Endless.

I had the same problems with 1, 2, and 4-track
reel-to-reel tape, then with 1, 2, and 4-track cassette
tape.

All industries move on.

All tool makers retire, eventually.

 

[ShadowMeow]

Hard Drives and SSD's should be around for a long long time. But with encrypted firmware and locked terminal ports. Basically drive vendors do not want anyone recovering data from failing/failed drives. R&D and Reverse Engineering is the only way forward. Maybe in the future no-one will be able to recover data at all. *Shudders*

What if the vendors put in road blocks to stop a head swap from a donor drive working in the failed drive, if that happens, it would really be game over!

 

[ShadowMeow]

This 10TB WD101FZBX-00ATAA0 is my main drive for holding drive image files during data recovery work. SMART is happy. A 10 hour scan with Victoria found most sectors had a read time of 25ms, but some had a read time of 100ms, and a few had a read time of 250ms. That tells us the drive has already started it's slow walk of bit-rot. Drive is still good to use, but needs monitoring now and again.

Drive runs hot and need constant cooling. My plan is to watch the health of this drive and see what problems the drive hides from the user.

Health Status: GOOD
Temperature: 47 °C
Power on Hours: 336 hour
Power on Count: 51 count
Rotation Rate: 7200 RPM
Standard: ACS-2 | ATA8-ACS version 4
Features: S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ

      ID  Attribute Name                Current  Worst  Threshold  Raw Values
Good  01  Read Error Rate               100      100    16         000000000000
Good  05  Reallocated Sectors Count     100      100    5          000000000000
Good  07  Seek Error Rate               100      100    67         000000000000
Good  0A  Spin Retry Count              100      100    60         000000000000
Good  C4  Reallocation Event Count      100      100    0          000000000000
Good  C5  Current Pending Sector Count  100      100    0          000000000000
Good  C6  Uncorrectable Sector Count    100      100    0          000000000000
Good  C7  UltraDMA CRC Error Count      200      200    0          000000000000

 

[ShadowMeow]

I'm actually getting back into floppy disks. Going to pair a Greaseweazle V4.1 with a TEAC FD-235HF. With the goal of creating perfect flux images of floppy disks, and linking it to the Amiga Forever emulator to be able to read/write Amiga Disk Images to DS/DD floppy disks.

 

[peterblaise]

(47°C × 9/5) + 32 = 116.6°F

I prefer no higher than 88°F peaking at 99°F
in constant use - supplemental cooling fans
to the rescue.

- - - - -

Regarding diskettes, find a Central Point
Software PCTools Copy II PC Deluxe
Enhanced ISA diskette drive interface card.

Sorry, I let go of mine a dozen years ago,
along with my oscilloscope, signal generator,
drive exerciser, and distortion analyzer - waaa!

Though everything can probably be
emulated in software nowadays.

You are definitely having fun as an technology
archaeologist!