My stupidity hosed my hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter fencerxx
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fencerxx

I would like to know if I should blame myself or Western Digital. I lost a
lot of good stuff and would like to know it this is my own doing

I've had a 60 gig Western Digital hard drive for a few years. WD600,
5400RPM. It ran cool so I liked it. Most of the time it was used for storage
and was not always installed in a computer. Total time in computer, maybe
one year.

Yesterday it died after a few minor warnings in the morning. Freeezes and
such.

I want to know if I killed it through carelessness.

I taped each side of it with clear tape so the black paint finish wouldn't
get scratched. The sides where the mounting screws go.

Now I read the fine print on my HD and it says "DO NOT COVER ANY DRIVE
HOLES"

The tape did exactly this, covered these drive holes.

Is this what killed my hard drive? Me covering over these (breathing) holes
on the side of HD? There are four of them

I often opened my case and felt this drive and it never got hot.



Thanks much for any advice.

Fens
 
I taped each side of it with clear tape so the black paint finish
wouldn't get scratched. The sides where the mounting screws go.

Now I read the fine print on my HD and it says "DO NOT COVER ANY DRIVE
HOLES"
Click to expand...

I don't have one of these drives and I can't see where you put the tape so I
can't be sure. But for all of the ATA drives I've looked at, the holes on
the sides are for mounting screws. You can verify this yourself, just look
inside the hole and see if it's threaded or not.

Obviously if it is threaded, it's intended to hold a screw, and could / would
be covered with a screw in place.

It probably was a waste of time to tape up the sides of the drive. If the
tape is an insulator, the drives might be warmer than if they contacted metal
directly. But some systems have plastic rails anyways, and would make no
difference. Also we're talking a 5400 rpm drive here. Just my opinion, but
if it's cooked itself, I'd be more worried about the cooling and layout of
the case in general than just some tape on the drive rails. But we don't
know if the drive really did fail from heat or something else. You might get
it formatted and working in another system and never see a problem again. Or
it could be dead no matter what you do short of sending it off to a data
recovery service.
 
http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

Western Digital labels or breather filter holes obscured by customer applied
stickers

___________________

They were not screw holes. There are four rectangular holes (openings
actually). Roughly 2 millimeter by 1 millimeter. Are they called breather
filter holes?

Fens
 
I taped each side of it with clear tape so the black paint finish wouldn't
get scratched. The sides where the mounting screws go.

Now I read the fine print on my HD and it says "DO NOT COVER ANY DRIVE
HOLES"

The tape did exactly this, covered these drive holes.
Click to expand...

Breathing holes are normally on the top of the drive rather than the side.
How big were these holes you covered?
I often opened my case and felt this drive and it never got hot.
Click to expand...

The breathing holes aren't for cooling - they are to allow the air inside to
remain at a reasonably constant pressure when the drive get wam/cold.
 
Hard drives are sealed, they can not have any dusk or particles get in side.
I believe there is one or two micro (filtered) holes to keep the air
pressure normal.
Could just be you had that one in a hundred drive go bad.
 
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