Western Digital RMA experience

So I had a 1TB Blue western Digital drive go belly up after a year or so, it happens. It was the Western dig, software that told me the drive was dying and back up anything I wanted and soon. It died the next day.

Luckily each time I buy a WD drive I always register the drive on there site, it's painless. I visit the page , look at my drives still under warranty and this drive is in the list. So I apply for RMA and got my number instantly. I pack up the drive follow the instructions and ship it out USPS on 2/6/14

The drive was a WB 1TB Blue 7200, RPM 32meg cache I believe. What I got back was a new WD 1TB Black 7200 64meg cache sata3 6gb, WAHOO ! LOL

Not only did they send me a new Black drive manufacture date 1/25/14 but I got it back in 8 days from the day I shipped it

I have always used WD. As long as they keep doing good by me I will keep the loyalty in place. Very pleased and surprised when I saw the box on my desk when I got home. I never even checked the status it was back that quickly.

Glad to hear you had a good experience with WD, I had a good one also with my raptor.

I exclusively use Western Digital (Blacks) for my hard drive solutions; I love the 5 year warranty and their RMA process is easy and painless. That's pretty awesome that they upgraded you to the latest model in the Black flavor!!!

No HDD company is perfect, failures will happen, what really sets a company apart is how they handle those failures, and I really feel Western Digital does it right.

Yep, for HDD's I always use em myself, they back their things up and I've read of many times on a RMA if somethig fails, they'll send you an upgraded one.

Was just reading up on a forum a bit ago one guy had a 1 TB Black fail and they sent him back a 2 TB Black on RMA.

For HDD, I'm a dedicated WD Fanboi.



Been using my RE3s so long now think they might be even out of warranty range for 5 years, but they still kicking along fine.

Well, I hope it's as good as you say it is, just about to submit an RMA for my WD Black. This would be WD drive #10 out of 11 that has failed within a year for me, first one that's actually worth going through the trouble of RMAing.

freakdiablo said:

Well, I hope it's as good as you say it is, just about to submit an RMA for my WD Black. This would be WD drive #10 out of 11 that has failed within a year for me, first one that's actually worth going through the trouble of RMAing.

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Wow, Im really surprised, I have been using WD drives since about 2002 and this is my 2nd RMA total. I have a stack of IDE drives in my closet that are still working One of the WD Blacks in my current machine I bought from Egg in 2009 and it still chugging along like it did day 1.

I've been using WD products since 1987. I just RMA's the second ever WD drive that failed me. It was a 2.5" 3200BEVT. They replaced it (1 month out of warranty) at no cost with a WD7500BPVT, no questions asked (except the diagnostic type). It made the round trip in 9 business days.

Somewhere in my former-mother-in-law's attic, my original Caviar ATA IDE 80 MB (yes MB) still sits waiting for me to come back and claim it. It was working fine the day I upgraded and put that one upstairs.

@freakdiablo
I suspect you have a heat,vibration, or magnetic problem that affects such a high percentage of your units. I keep mine cooled via good airflow in my cabinet and I shock mount them with rubber gaskets between the drive walls and the bracket sheet metal. The only 2 that have failed me in nearly 30 years were laptop drives manufactured in 2011 and 2012 (one wasn't in a laptop, but a removable bay in my tower instead).

Vic Velcro said:

@freakdiablo
I suspect you have a heat,vibration, or magnetic problem that affects such a high percentage of your units. I keep mine cooled via good airflow in my cabinet and I shock mount them with rubber gaskets between the drive walls and the bracket sheet metal. The only 2 that have failed me in nearly 30 years were laptop drives manufactured in 2011 and 2012 (one wasn't in a laptop, but a removable bay in my tower instead).

Click to expand...

I doubt it. I treat them the same as all my other drives, and the others all have much better fail rates:

9 Seagate drives, including several of the dreaded 7200.11s: 2 Dead, known physical shock damage. (One was a 2.5" drive in an Archos PMP that I quickly picked up w/o realizing it was plugged in, the other was in an external enclosure a friend dropped)
7 Hitachi drives: 2 dead, both started showing SMART errors and kept dropping from RAID
4 Samsung drives, all working
Then the 11 WD drives: 10 dead, only two can be possibly be explained my misuse (WD Passports that spent most of their lives in a school backpack). The current one only showed up in the BIOS/Windows half the time, the other half of the time it showed up, but with loads of bad sectors. Temps never got above 30c.