Social Links
Twitter Feed
Top
External Links
Site Search
This Site Is Hosted And Powered By Squarespace.com
Powered by Squarespace
Subscribe To This Site
Admin Only
« SPB Mobile Shell 5.0 For Android | Main | Great, More Snow »
Saturday
Feb132010

Western Digital Travails

DateSaturday, February 13, 2010 at 7:15PM

I just finished up filling out the information at the Western Digital support website to RMA an internal hard drive back to them.  This will make the second time in twelve months that I've had to do this for this particular model of hard drive (WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA).  The first one that I purchased almost one year ago died about four months after getting it and managed to take A LOT of stuff with it into the great electronic beyond. 

After getting the replacement drive back in July I held off transferring anything important to the drive but after two months of no issues I went ahead and starting using it for its intended purpose, media storage.  Fast forward to October and guess what happened?  That's right, it started going hinky on me.  AGAIN!  This time I invested in some recovery software and was able to salvage close to seventy percent of what was on the drive before it gave up the ghost.

At least this time the symptoms are slightly different.  This time the drive randomly "vanishes" from the system and occasionally puts out a high pitched whine.  What makes the whole experience the more frustrating is that the SMART system shows the drive as healthy (when it shows up at all) and I've run numerous tests that detect no bad sectors.

Western Digital has dropped the ball twice on this one.  What makes the whole situation all the more insulting is their attempts to "up-sell" me to a different model hard drive for the same price for that model new, or in a couple of cases more expensive than just buying it from a retailer.  Where's the incentive in that?!?  Why would I choose to "upgrade" my "experience" by paying full price for a "replacement" drive that does nothing more than cancel the five year warranty on my current crapped out drive and put more money in their pockets?  The really sad part is that I can imagine some people buying into this scheme!

No, instead I get to pay for shipping AGAIN on yet another defective drive.  I paid $109 for the drive last year and have now spent another $20 on top of that shipping defective drives back to Western Digital.  Insane!!!

What I'll probably do in this case is ship the drive out this week, wait two or more weeks for the replacement drive, and then either sell the drive on Craigslist or find someone I don't really care for and give them a "present" of a brand new hard drive.  There is NO WAY I'd trust another Western Digital hard drive.  EVER!

AuthorMike P. | Comment2 Comments |
tagged , , , , in

PrintView Printer Friendly Version

EmailEmail Article to Friend

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.

Notify me of follow-up comments via email.