.... I like Top Posting ... ( apologies to those offended )
I wish to add some more information/thoughts to my initial post:
1) I purchased WD800JB at the local big box retailer (C.C.) in a
sealed plastic "retail" box that takes the "jaws of life" to get open.
Warranty terms are sealed inside box, so can't read until purchase
and rip open the box. On the warranty terms included in box there
is NO mention they replace defective unit with used drive. Warranty
sheet does say that "more" terms can be found on their website.
On their website, yes now they reveal that RMA's may be replaced
with used units. At the very least that is misleading. It is hard to be
a fully informed consumer when the manufacturer does not make
warranty terms easily available at the point of purchase.
Its just not feasible to have the entire warranty detail on the
outside of the box so it can be scrutenised before purchase.
No one does that.
side note: I have purchased/used approx. 16 WD drives in past 12
years. Over past year or so, their failure rate has become too high.
I believe that WD quality control/manufacturing process needs to
re-evaluated. That is why the bean counters changed the warranty
from three down to one (1) year. (p.s. avoid HD's fron Thailand).
Mindless conspiracy theory when the entire industry
except for Samsung has moved to 1 year warrantys
for the mass market commodity drives and WD is
happy to sell you a warranty extension to 3 years
if you want one, and the drives that come with
a 3 year warranty are made in Thailand too.
I WOULD gladly pay $25-$75 more for reliable HD
Then buy a Samsung currently.
( failure rate less than 1/100000 in five years).
Its never going to be feasible to quantify the failure
rate over 5 years until the drive is obsolete and is
no longer what anyone much would want to buy.
As an engineer, a failure rate of ~2/100 the
first year for a hard drive is unacceptable;
A real engineer would have been able to grasp that
that is technically a pathetically inadequate sample.
those early failures should be weeded
out on the manufacturing line.
Easy to say. IBM and Fujitsu would certainly
have preferred to do that but it just wasnt
feasible to do that on the manufacturing line.
Using the customer as the final QC
check is just plain "BAD BUSINESS".
You aint established that the drives that fail early
could even be detected by a better QC check.
Obviously any manufacturer would prefer to catch
them at manufacturing time rather than have to pay
the MUCH higher price to RMA them in the first year.
Hard Drives are "mission critical" in any PC
No more than any of the essential components are.
If your need really is mission critical, there are obvious ways
to ensure that no single failure is more than a nuisance.
and should be designed/engineered/manufactured/
tested to last 100000 hours under normal usage.
Not even possible. There will always be some failures
when the end user is installing something like a hard drive.
They need to have a lower failure rate
than any everything else in the box.
Sure, its certainly more hassle to deal with a hard drive
failure than the failure of any other essential component.
And there are obvious ways to ensure that hard drive
failure is no more than a nuisance, with a significantly
higher price. You just arent prepared to pay that price
and are demanding that be done for just $25-$75
Soorree, fresh out of magic wands to wave to achieve that.
Even with reliable backups available, getting restored and
up-n-running again is time consuming, costly and a big pain in @$$.
And it should be obvious even to you how to avoid that.
Maybe, they are setting us up so
everyone will need a RAID level-5.
Another utterly mindless conspiracy theory.
You're always welcome to run RAID5 if you want to avoid
most of the risk of any hassle with hard drive failure and
always welcome to run duplicated systems to completely
avoid any risk of significant hassle with any hard drive or
essential component failure. And to have one of them offsite
to avoid any hassle when the house burns down too.
2) I believe that if I took the defective HD back to the
retailer within 30-45 days ( I was right at that limit), I could
have negotiated a NEW replacement drive from them.
Then you'd better buy your drives from operations that
do that. And pay a significantly higher price for the drives.
You cant have it both ways.
But WD's "advance replacement" was more attractive as I
would then have both drives available and be able to salvage/recover
some data from the accessible partitions on the defective drive.
If you're stupid enough to not be adequately
backed up, thats your problem, not WD's.
And the expensive end of retailers will allow
you to do it like that on drive failure anyway.
Completely routine to get them to agree to that approach
at drive purchase time. You'll pay for that tho.
3) As earlier responders have sympathized, I think
WD should send NEW drives to replace the 1-5%
( or whatever qty ) that fail within 1-2 months.
Sure, that would certainly be a better policy, but its
all rather academic if you have decided that they are
deliberately skimping on QC at manufacture time.
If you are stupid enough to believe that and cant find
any manufacturer that does it any differently, the only
thing that makes any sense is to just throw the drive
in the bin when it fails and buy a new one yourself.
And pay the price for that mindless approach.
WD can recyle the re-furbished drives to older failures
or even better to sell "fully disclosed" re-furbished drives,
honestly via an outlet store or through a discount retailer.
It would make more sense to just bin all returns.
The cost of your approach would be higher than the
cost to the manufacturer to make a brand new drive.
Because the cost is mostly in first world country monkey's
wages instead of third world country monkey's wages
with more time required at first world country wages too.
Even though it may be standard policy,
a)it is not good customer relations,
Correct.
b) it is not fully disclosed
Wrong. Its fully disclosed on their web site.
and c) if enough people complain to them and/or
other authorities, change can be accomplished
In your dreams.
( .... the old hippy demonstrator comes out again... )
Didnt do a damned thing to legalise soft drugs.
The few countrys that have done that
didnt do that in response to complaints.
4) to remove any doubt about the my failure: WD has
received the RMA and has determined it is in-fact defective.
I sent documention: a) screen-shot of DELL Dim. 8200
P.O.S.T. HD failure warning and b) ActiveS.M.A.R.T.
report of 3 failure modes. (btw: TEMP was not an issue.)
But you dont know that something else like the power supply wasnt.
5) This failure was viscious:
Like treacle eh ?
My more recent back-ups from the defective drive to other
storage drives ( 1 bck-up drive in each in two local CPU's
and a removable HD stored offsite) were corrupted as well.
Then you clearly didnt test those backups properly before the
drive died. Gross incompetance and nothing to do with WD.
