Technology Forum

hello everyoneas i sit here at my desk writing this i am reminded of the phrase that has been haunting me for my entire IT career"Did you have a backup?"What happens though when the backup is the problem in the first place?my story is belowi work for a national IT firm and have data constantly moving between my laptop and my server and my office pc, so one day while shopping at the "now extinct" compusa i stumbled on a good deal for a WD500 (mybook) bu i also knew i could get a better deal elsewhere, and me not really trusting external drives anyway, i went to wally world.I bought the drive the next night and after formatting the "free" stuff off the drive i plugged it into my xp laptop and proceeded to dump 100gb of data into it, talk about SLOW speeds, ever wait 6+ minutes for thumbnails to show up for photos, with this drive i did.It became apparent that if i was going too get my moneys worth i would have to attach this to a SATA on my win2k3 server box, so after about a week i plugged it into the server, and the problems really started then, sometimes the drive would cause the entire server to freeze and the only relief was to unplug the USB cable bringing the server back to life, finally i had enough and got the drive out of the clamshell and plugged it directly into the motherboard using sata and power from the win2k3 server.I thought my problems were over, wrong!about a week later i noticed the drive was no longer appearing in disk management, fearing the worst i put it back in its clamshell and plugged it in my usb port on my lapop pc, i immediately got the error from windows saying "device malfunctioned, click here to yada yada" I started to get a bad feeling, so i ran a program called getdataback on the drive, the full scan took 12 hours+ and all i got was error 127 on all sectors.heres where Im at after calling WD support?? and speaking with "Brauschan" who i am almost certain is direct fromIndia (it seems that after paying 100+ for the drive, and putting my precious data on the drive, that they can offer data recovery service partners, but those cost as well, so they sell you a drive wait till it fails, AND WITH WD IT WILL FAIL, then sell you off to a "partner" nice scheme they got there)the drive is recognized as a sata in biosthe drive spins up when power is appliedthe drive triggers the "dingy" noise when connected via usbgetdataback sees the drive as 488 gb, but a scan is not producing any resultsmy only hope is in linux or a boot disk or something, it would appear that he drive HAS NOT failed as of yet, but my options are dwindling, it amazes me how a company like that could stay in business, this drivei s only 3 MONTHS old people, i doubt i have a warranty because the clamshell looks like a sardine can after trying to get the drive outI am sincerely hoping someone has come across this before and might have any suggestionsTIP: DO NOT BUY WESTERN DIGITAL, THEY ARE NOT TRUSTWORTHYany thoughts, and thanks for listening to my rantJayunknown IT company