New HDD dead?

[kuru]

I'm assuming the answer is 'yes'...

I've had this 3,5" WD blue 1TB HDD lying around since when I bought it over a year ago. It's been sitting on a wooden shelf with only a stack of paper envelopes resting on top.
Today I mounted it in the tower along with a 2nd, older and used one that's exactly the same model. The latter works just fine.
As soon as I try booting with the new drive connected I am stuck at my BIOS' boot options screen. The one where you can hit F2 for BIOS options, F11 to select startup device etc. It will not accept any input and I am forced to shut down and unplug the drive in order to get past this point.
I then enabled SATA hot-plug in BIOS, started Ubuntu, hot-plugged the drive and ran gparted. It tried reading partitions on the disk, then went on to, I think, "confirming sdc" which I haven't seen before in its status bar, and it produced a loop of i/o error messages.
I've tried different cables and ports with no change.

Any ideas, is this 'new' drive dead?

 

[Farox]

It's a similar experince that i had with an almost new (and hardly used for more than a year...) 2.5" HardDrive from a Laptop of my sister (it was my birthday present two years ago...and she never used much for more than a year). One day i decided to power on again to check the battery and do windows updates...but the drive don't respond, and i was stuck at the BIOS messages like you.
I the end i "resolved" buying an SSD.
I think the latest mechanical drives are really weak...maybe they have lowered quality, seeying how many SSD are selled, trting to have some sales, but it's only my speculation.

 

[FBnil]

Hold your ear to it, does it spin? Then the platter is probably OK, but the board that drives it could be dead.
If it does spin, but does not click, maybe the engine of the read-needles is still in park mode. In parked mode, the heads are far away from the platter, and that is good, but sometimes, when you bump the HDD, it "locks" into that position (and no, opening up the HDD and manually loosen the needles is not a good idea, as dust will lower the life of the platters to months even weeks)
About the quality, it could be the board on the harddisk that was more sensitive to fingers with electrical static, as these get smaller and are less tolerant for power surges than the old ones. Do you have a mother or wife that could have used a wet towel to clean the shelves?

Plug it in! Are you sure the tower is giving power to the harddisk? Use a multitester. Cables get worn, some get loose. Check if the transport current.
Maybe yours need a power AND a sata connection to work (unlike low powered harddisks).

Maybe it's a weird 5Volt eating drive and can't run with 3.3V?

Maybe during connecting a pin broke or did not make it into the hole of the connector. Check for bend pins (although modern drives have a different connector).
Any EMP's lately?

Tell us more. Pics and such... all I did was speculate..

 

[levi]

I am amazed how cheaply large capacity spinning disc drives can be sold for these days. And so far, touch wood, I've not had a bad experience with one yet. Maybe 2.5in discs are more commonly made to a budget which isn't quite sufficient, I dunno.

But yeah, most things even SSDs either fail at installation or after 50 years.

 

[kuru]

It definitley needs both power and SATA to work, and I've tried different cables for both. The pins look good. I heard it doing something, but I'll have to compare the sound to its sibling, preferrably out of case...
A pic won't do anything, it looks like its twin, like new. If this thing wasn't just dead on arrival I have to assume ESD killed it. I'll try asking my trusted seller for a partial refund.

Re: price/performance, it's really quite amazing that you can get 10TB drives starting at around 260€

 

[FBnil]

I've been wary of too high TB drives, because they need more platters, and the space between the platters is less, and the heads are more close to eachother... and more fail factors... So for my data I stick to 2GB, now got a 3GB I bought last year, and it's overdue to install a new Debian on it.

 

[Nintendo]

This is a worry, I think I might start buying SSD from now on.

 

[levi]

I've been wary of too high TB drives, because they need more platters, and the space between the platters is less, and the heads are more close to eachother... and more fail factors... So for my data I stick to 2GB, now got a 3GB I bought last year, and it's overdue to install a new Debian on it.

2GB? That's impressive. I'm currently running with a 3TB drive in my backup caddy and a 1TB drive internally on my server which contains all the backup data from my other machines.

 

[Nintendo]

We might have to start using 1TB microSD cards or 1TB USB sticks when they become cheaper to buy.

 

[PCXT]

I remember about 5-8 years ago I bought very cheap 2TB WD Green drives (yes, these cursed Greens which failed mechanically but new) for backups and rarely accessed slow (but large) storage, they are generally OK if the proper firmware fix has been applied early (Timer3? Idle3? - something like this).
The thing is that these drives performed a full head parking procedure literally every second after use and could even turn the spindle off after few minutes "because why not". So after a few months they just couldn't release their heads so easily and it could take even more than a second for them to become usable again.
I have a 500GB Blue in my notebook, but it's from about 2012, so I'll look for some replacement.

In the meantime, look isn't it possible to carefully unlock electronics the way that it's possible to move it back and forth around connection with motor. This applies mostly to older drives, but I revived some of them by cleaning contacts. A typical symptom of contacts problems was audible, it just spinned down without any "additional effects" like specific banging or scratching, in random intervals even when not actively used.

 

[Pickle]

Im ready to be done with mechanical drives.
i had bad experiences with the WD power saving drive i.e. Green. The power saving 'techniques' like parking and spin downs I think lead to early death.
Ive using the NAS (WD red)'s. One of those did have issues but at least its under warranty.
I all my critical files on cloud backup, but i worry about my video collection which is not.

 

[TrashyMG]

But yeah, most things even SSDs either fail at installation or after 50 years.

Or cause a blue screen of death in Windows on ~15 minute interval like a friend's SSD... ends up it was a known problem, the SSD needed a firmware update. It took several days to diagnose the problem to the drive.

 

[levi]

Im ready to be done with mechanical drives.
i had bad experiences with the WD power saving drive i.e. Green. The power saving 'techniques' like parking and spin downs I think lead to early death.
Ive using the NAS (WD red)'s. One of those did have issues but at least its under warranty.
I all my critical files on cloud backup, but i worry about my video collection which is not.

Wow, I guess I was really lucky with my purchase of Toshiba hard discs then. I mainly bought them because it's a decent enough brand and super cheap, but so far (touch wood) I've not had a problem with them, apart from them being a bit noisy due to them running at 7kRPM and hitting some harmonic in the cheap old Compaq/HP case I'm currently using, but at least if it's getting bad I can squeeze the sides of the case momentarily and it goes away. I should probably look into using some buggy bumpers on it, but there's not a lot of space inside the hard disc cage.