The second duff WD Blue disc - now bought a Firecuda

I may have been unlucky but I've just had my second duff WD Blue disc in my ageing desktop.

The desktop is an Acer X3300 and is about seven years old.

The first WD Blue gave me a S.M.A.R.T. failure alarm one day so I wanted a quick replacement disk and bought the same make and model just a bit bigger (1GB vs 650MB).

That installed OK and I used Windows 7 backup and restore to migrate.

Fast forward to about two and a half years and the second WD Blue started being very laggy.

It could sometimes take tens of seconds to seek and the general PC performance was dreadful.

I wondered if it was a driver issue or something broken by one of the Windows 10 updates.

I tried a "refresh" which helped with a laptop but that didn't do much on the desktop.

I decided to bite the bullet and buy another disc.

This time I thought, the Firecuda seems to offer performance improvements and would cost perhaps £20 more. A quick Amazon order and here was a new disc.

Then, how to migrate.

Windows 10 backup and restore wouldn't work (an early indication that all was not well) so I tried the Seagate tool. That didn't like the hard disc USB caddy and had some unfathomable sector size problem, so I replaced the DVD drive with the new Firecuda and set the copy to work. There were complaints about unreadable source sectors but they could be set to be ignored (on the basis that the old system worked) and the copy completed.

Perhaps not ideal but massively less work that another re-installation (although I knew how to do that as I had done the refresh a few weeks ago).

I did a chkdsk /r on the new disc to see if anything duff had been copied and when I looked at the machine next morning all seemed well.

This far (a few days in) I'm very impressed with the Firecuda. It was 1GB 7200 RPM 3.5 inch format and has transformed the machine from frustrating to a pleasure to use.

As a simple upgrade on an aging machine that didn't justify a large SSD it seems good.

Sadly the WD warranty on my disc is two years.

I suppose it was OK for the £40 I paid for it and I've not lost data but I won't rush to buy another WD Blue.