Things not to do with a £130 hard drive....

....Snap the tiny L shaped piece of plastic (about 10 x 4mm in size) off your 3 month old Western Digital Raptor hard drive, so that the data cable no longer clips onto the drive properly, preventing me from using the drive unless I use duck tape to bodge the cable in whilst resting the drive on a flat table.

*sobs*

The message that comes from my stupidity - take care with S-ATA cables. IMHO the interface is very fragile, I would say perhaps too fragile. My clumsiness is one thing, but it was hardly a great force that broke the tiny bit of plastic off. The cables themselves wiggle free rather easily, and could easily become dislodged over time (I have heard of on bloke who returned a PC to a system builder, it turns out that transporting the machine in the car had bumped the S-ATA cable off the drives connection so his hard drive wasn't connected).

The ultimate irony is that Western Digital announced a new 'SecureConnect' cable not so long ago, claimed to boost the strength of the S-ATA connection by 5 times (so that obviously indicates they felt it was a weakness), This sort of cable clips on to the drive chassis rather than relying on a relative flimsy piece of plastic to hold the power and data cables in place.

Look around and you'll see 'SecureConnect' being touted in the specs of WD's S-ATA hard drives, yet buying the cable to make use of this, which is about the only way I can conceive that will let me use my drive properly now its broken, seems impossible. Western Digital no longer even have the pdf detailing SecureConnects interface on their websites

Anyway, a bit of a moan, its either find somewhere that sells these rare as rocking-horse-turds cables, or save another £50 until I can buy a replacement drive (thankfully they're cheaper now). Be careful with your S-ATA cables at the drive end! Don't knock them!

 

I did the exact same thing too m8 , but i got mine working again by sticking the little L in a sata cable & sliding the the conductors in to the cable . I also use a sata power connector to give it added robustness & carefully taping the 2 together & i have had zero problems with it since

It's a pretty shoddy design by WD (even by there own admission) & i think they should be replace these drives for both of us after coming out & saying 'sorry the sata connection designs are pretty crappy & weak so were redesigning them'

 

Might have to resort to using your ghetto skillz method to get the cable secure enough that I can have it in my case

I'm gonna ring up WD and have a whinge, they know its an issue as can be seen by them releasing the secure connect cable. I hope I can convince them to let me RMA the drive though...not hopeful mind, but its worth a go. I'll let you know how I get on mate

 

yep , please do , cheers bud

 

one itty bitty teeny tiny drop of super glue will hold it from slipping, but you can still break the bond with your hands.

 

manufacturers generally use hot glue to solve this problem.

 

Why is the cable coming out a problem? Unless it is on your boot drive, that would probably aggravate you, but on a storage drive (like mine) I just get a "Unplugged Hardware" box and I shove the cable back in.

Still sucks that your broke, how exactly did you do it?

 

is SATA hot pluggable or are you just lucky?

 

SATA is indeed HotSwappable!

 

A 36GB drive isn't much use as a storage drive these days so yes it is my boot drive

Hot glue is a solution I considered, I just regard it as being rather ghetto style in all honesty - I'd rather see what Western Digital themselves say with regards to repairing the drive before I resort to that.

As for how I broke it, I was overclocking and needed to clear the CMOS, anyway an IDE cable was folded down over the CMOS and under the S-ATA data cable, a quick tug on it to try and shift it and I notice the S-ATA cable is really wobbly on the drive. Broken as the IDE cable was quite tight underneath the S-ATA cable and as I pulled it up it pulled under it and snapped off the 'L'.

Anyway, I rang WD this afternoon, explained the scenario and the bloke said that they didn't have a problem with me RMAing it for this issue (he said it was quite common). Anyway, halfway through taking my details he said his system had just gone down, so he noted my details with pen and paper and said he would get back to me asap (though I was calling 15 minutes before their call centre closes, so he said it might be tomorrow). I still don't have an RMA number but the guy didn't sound like he was fobbing me off...if he doesn't get back to me I'll ring them early tomorrow morning and try again.

 

Good news, hope it works out

 

SATA cables sux IMHO.
Be careful with the power cables as well...
Another thing not to do is have the power cable not in properly, and power up, only to see smoke, smell burning and have half the contacts on the power adaptor burn out.

 

thats why im holding off switching to sata. Going to wait a few months for them to iron out the problems first.

 

Success!

The German sounding bloke I spoke to before didn't ring me back or email me, so I rang again this morning before school.

This time I spoke to a Spanish sounding woman, who was more reluctant to let me RMA it, but once I said the other person I spoke to yesterday said I could, she was fine with it once she'd asked him whether he said so.

I also asked why, if the S-ATA connection is strong enough that if I break it its all my own fault, Western Digital strongly market a product to increase the strengh of the cable by five times - surely that indicates that the company feels there is a weakness? All she said was 'hmm yes, thats a good question we must answer' so she said she would process the RMA for me and let me return the drive.

One problem - the email with the details for the RMA is in German so I'm gonna have to try and get some to translate for me. But now I have an RMA number, it shouldn't really be a problem

 

Babelfish!

 

good for words^ not whole sections of text as it's carp with gramma etc

nice to know that WD realise there mistake and are willing to do something about it.

 

I reckon Babelfish might get confused about the intricacies of different sorts of Polystyrene packaging materials and other such things an RMA usually for HDDs covers (they are very very strict about things like that).

But anyway, I've found an English version of the packing instructions on WDs website, so all is good

 

glad you're getting it sorted mate!

 

shouldn't this belong in the "disaster mods" section? i know it wasn't an intentional mod, but malfoleos HDD destruction thread made it.

 

Holy thread revival batman!

It wasn't a mod or an attempted mod, it was an accident, so how does that mean it should be in Disaster mods?

Also what was the point of your post, it wasn't relevant to the thread.

Also either myself or Will would have moved it back when this thread was active, we're quite capable of carrying out our moderating duties without prompts.

Closing as this thread was done and dusted a long time ago.