I Boycott Western Digital

[db]

I have had bad 'luck' with WD also... Unfortunately, I don't believe in
'luck' and it ain't only me. I have a friend who owns a local ISP and also
builds PCs. I could go down there any day of the week and see a stack of WD
drives that had failed waiting to be RMAd. He finally quit using WD and the
stack of failed drives disappeared permanently.

If someone here wants to call Western Digital a 'premium manufacturer', I
guess that is their prerogative, but you sure could've fooled me. I stopped
using WD drives a long time ago. Since then, I have used Maxtor, Deathstar
(when they were still owned by IBM),
Hitachi, Fuji and Seagate.

I have had the best results with Seagate. WD does have a good RMA program. I
guess they need to with as many of their drives I have seen fail.

I have had one Maxtor fail. Maxtor's RMA service was fairly prompt. I also
had to have the only IBM hard drive I ever purchased RMAd and it took them 6
or 7 weeks to replace my drive. I bought it when IBM stilled owned their
hard drive division and RMAd it after Hitachi bought them out. I couldn't do
a normal RMA where you give them a credit card and they send you a new drive
and you send them the failed one in the same box. I had to send them the
failed drive first. They literally had to ship the replacement drive from
Thailand (on an extremely slow boat obviously.)

Just my experience and JMHO...

 

[VanShania]

I have also had a Western Digital drive fail on me but I noticed a problem
right away. Thinking it had to be something I had done as far as jumpers, I
failed to take advantage of the " not satisfied return in 14 days" clause,
and of course the drive failed. The thing was I had 2 dvd roms fail on me
and all 3 had the same thing in common, the vendor I bought them at(Computer
Boulevard). When my new drive came back, the guy let it clunk on the
counter. Point is, you got these clowns who handle parts the way a football
is handled during Grey Cup week. Might want to try dealing with a vendor
that has more mature staff. I have heard a similar storys about maxtor, msi,
asus as well. But I have a brother-in-law who has used maxtor for years in a
hot room, so hot the temp for his cpu flashes red sometimes. And he has
never had a problem. I myself want to purchase a couple of WD 250 gig 16mb
buffer sataII for a raid 0 setup, so I hope your wrong.

 

[Toshi1873]

I generally buy a brand new drive from a local source (where I can get
same-day or next-day delivery for cheap), then ship the dead drive back
under RMA. When the new drive comes back, I starting using it as a
backup drive.

I've RMA'd maybe a dozen drives over the last 5 years. Had a few IBM
Deskstars fail, a few Maxtors that have failed, and I'm sure a WD or two
have failed. Not many Seagates in my systems. Most RMA service has
been pretty non-eventful, ship the drive off, get a new/refurb back in a
week or two.

The biggest cause of death for us has been due to inadequate cooling.
Some drives are simply better at dealing with high operating temps then
others. (Maxtor drives seemed to be rather sensitive, the IBMs seemed
to do better for longer. WDs sorta fell in the middle.) If you can
keep the drive running at 35C, it could well last a decade.