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so i recentley decided to take all my data from my 1TB harddrive and reorgonise it moving them to several other hardddrives because my old TB WD is old and i am afraid it may one day crash (and i always distrusted western digital because a lot of them crashed in the past.

so i bought 3 western digital Green harddrives because they are stable, low rpm low power and are great for storage.

They cost me a fortune since harddrive prices shot up after the biggest harddrive factory somewhere in philipines was burned down and then the area was flooded. not only the factory but many of the harddrive factories parts sypplyers are now down. So i dont know how the situation is in the states or UK or the rest of the world, but when i bought them a week ago they were $100 pet terabyte. Now they cost up to $130.

NOW TO THE POINT!
So one of my harddrives which i dedicated to music, videos and movies started acting very strangley. It was in one of my old external USB enclosures. When i first tried to get it to work out of the box, It had a weird thing where i couldnt format it in NTFS and it just stayed in the RAW format.
I did some things clicked some stuff and i somehow managed to get it up and running.

But today the harddrive started acting slow sometimes and eventually it just didnt respond. I started suspecting the HDD enclosure could actually be causing problems. I had a case like this before where an HDD died after i hooked it up to an external case but the thing is i dont know.
Back to the present time, i got really paranoid and immediatley pulled the harddrive from the USB case, opened up my PC and hooked it up to the sata cables instead. After i started up the PC, Win 7 did a chkdsk which went trough recovering of a lot of "orpan files" I am not sure what this means but i am guessing the indexing or the file system was somehow screwed up. After that, everything seemed to be fine, i sampled some of the music and videos i had on it and nothing seemes to be damaged. But the only way i will find that out is if i watch/listen to everything it has. (btw is there a way to find out if anything is damaged that wont take forever?)

so i suspect the HDD enclosure. i have doubts that HDD enlosures could even damage HDDs because if they could do it,so could motherboards (well i do suspect that a broken chipset fried my videocard in my laptop) My question is can anyone actually confirm that usb HDD cases are a real threat to harddrives? like if it happened to anyone before?

i refuse to believe that the harddrive is broken because i just bought it a week ago and its been years since a harddrive i bought broke, i assume that they perfected the technology.

if it helps, this enclosure i have is for 3.8' HDDs has SATA and IDE, runs off an external powersourse and can be hooked up trough USB or eSATA
It also looks cool,

I noticed hdd doubled in price, I was wondering what was going on. I was going to put some on my wishlist but at twice as expensive as I remembered, I opted not to

I thought they were trying to screw me for x-mas

They are not screwing you there really is a shortage of harddrives. I also thought they were screwing me, but every place that sold them told me the same thing, then i read about it in the news.

The only real way to find out if anything is damaged is to attempt to fill it up. If there's not much on it at the moment then do that.

If not, copy what you can from it and then do the above. It usually is the quickest way.

The worst thing to happen to any HDD is the RDB (rigid disk block) getting damaged during a power outage. The RDB holds the partitioning information so whatever you're doing to it make sure your power stays on.

Thanks. I learned something new today. So the one which was acting funny before, so far didnt have problems after i hooked it up to onboard sata. And its been copying stuff to it all day. this HDD is 1.5TB and its already halfway full.

There was never a poweroutage around here so i am not worried about loosing power. so i think i should be fine for now.

So are my suspicions correct assumming that the old HDD enclosure might have caused it to glitch out before?

If thats the case, maybe i should make myself a blacklist of harddrive enclosures that i need to avoid bying. (not that i am gonna get one any time soon but you never know, maybe ill find out that my other 2 are glitched as well).

I have 5 external HDD's all connected by a very long USB cable. They're kept in a ventilated box near the houses air vent to keep them cool. Over heating inside the enclosures can be fatal to the HDD's themselves. The only problem I've ever faced with the 5 I have is the power supplies themselves aren't very good but the cases do have fans in them.

Good luck saving your data. And next time keep them in a cold place like I have.

EDIT: And the second worst thing to happen to a hard drive is if the heads crash. Once that happens there's 99.9% chance you definitely cannot recover anything.

Youre right about the heat. fourtunatley WD green HDDs dont get very hot at all. I worked with some computers that had old IDE drives, they got so hot youd actually burn yourself if you toch them. I didnt seem to loose any of my data so far.

i wish i had a case like yours but all i have is a bunch of external usb cases. since i dont want any of the heat problems, i keep only 1/2 harddrives inside the computer to give it room to breathe.

Latley i started having a lot better luck with PCs (not laptops) as far as the parts these days are a lot better quality than they were 5 years ago. So i started to forget how to deal with PC problems. Then windows 7 came out and everything in it is so much easier and it just works (likw a mac lol). and since now things seem to be different with new types of part, new OS, new CPUs and chipsents and stuff, because it all worked so well for me, i never bothered to learn the new little details of this new stuff.

i cant believe i finished a computer course in tech school and now i am starting to get lazy and slip.