We received in a drive today that was a WD20EARS.

The symptoms were that the drive was running very slowly, and the client was unable to copy any data at all.

The drive was worked on by another person for a couple of weeks, but they were only able to recover one file. It was placed in the freezer by them as well (do not place hard drives in the freezer as condensation may form on the platters which will damage your data).

This is a common issue we see with WD drives that have failed and WD passport drives (not to say that all WD drives have this issue, just a lot of those that fail)

As we diagnosed the issue quickly, the drive was temporarily repaired by us without opening and all data was copied off the drive.