BEWARE when making an RMA

[washer111]

So I have a couple of the ill-famed Western Digital Green 2TB (WD20EARX) hard disks in my stable, and one of them recently died, after just 1.5yrs of round-the-clock operation, but mostly in an idle state. The drives firmware appears to have been compromised.

Anyway, I filled out the information to have my product registered on the WD website. This drive appears on their site as a "WD Elements Desktop 2TB," instead of the 3.5" INTERNAL hard disk that it is.

WD accepted the drive, no problems, and arranged a NEW drive, with FedEx shipping. Happy so far, but Googling the model number informed me this was still a USB external hard disk. Hmmmm.

It finally arrived today, and imagine my surprise when I find a USB WD My Book Essentials in the package.
SERIOUSLY?

You would THINK that a major firm like WD could actually manage to correctly identify products and give the right ones back, with the correct Model and Serial numbers provided. (Which were on the hard disk's own identification sticker).
Nope. Apparently thats just too hard.

At the very least, I can disassemble this contraption, remove the drive that is rightfully mine, and flog the enclosure on FleaPay, as I have no use for one of these, in all honesty.

 

[jkbff]

if its the big usb drives, you can crack the case open and take the 3.5 drive out and pop it in the machine... <-- Sorry I didn't read the last line

Thats how I have my servers filled with drives.. I buy clearance external drives, rip the cases apart and take the drive out. Oddly, externals are always cheaper, even if it contains the same internal drive you'd buy online.

 

[washer111]

As another person, on a small "gated community" computer forum said to me, its entirely possible that sort of thing happened to me.

What surprised me is they don't distinguish between the enclosure product, and the drive contained within. (Seriously? How hard is that for them?)

I never received a reply to my complaint email, although it doesn't bother me as I don't intend to purchase their product again. I mean, 1.5yrs of use out of a drive, then a firmware failure?
Not surprising, coming from a company manufacturing drives with infectious hard-parking technology, to save all but 0.5w of power, which, in my case, has already happened on the remaining drive about 540,000 times now (design limit of 300,000).

Seagate or Hitachi will be next. Not dealing with clunky "Green" drives ever again.

 

[whirlcool]

I've used Western Digital hard disks for over the past 30 years. I only had one fail on me. And it was a green drive from when they first came out about 5 years ago. But I think the hoops you have to jump through to return a HDD to WD is almost overwhelming. First you have to complete that lengthy form. Then read through all the warnings WD gives you about packing and the loopholes they have to get out of replacing your drive for you.

I got my drive exchanged, but it was more than I was ready to deal with.

 

[mich]

It wasn't a error.

They just sent you what they had on hand, to mail out for all replacements (in that category). 

 

I've sent countless dozens of Desktop Drives to WD, and I've received external HD's back every single time. 

 

It's just how they handle replacements. You could probably request, a exact replacement, but... I've never bothered. 

 

[washer111]

I'd call it an error: They should send back to you, what you sent them (within reason, of course, if they switched to a new model that is otherwise identical). Its a waste of time and resources (and their money) sending me something that I may never use.

Older WD drives, and even the ones without the infectious "Intellipower" technology were/are pretty reasonable. But I think they pushed the bar too far with these Green drives. A lot of horror stories. They're only designed for 300K worth of those "head parking events," and yet their software design will have them doing this upwards of 70 times each day, from what I can see.
The remaining drive now has somewhere around 540K worth of these. I'm hoping it craps out before the warranty goes, so I can get it replaced.*

Needless to say, I will take a "plain-jane" drive from Hitachi next time. They're more reliable and don't feature silly power-saving features that only serve to wear out the drive, needlessly.

* The "real" reports of failure are only about 2-5%. There seem to be a lot of anecdotes that completely contradict this, however. People with 10, 20 drives and anywhere from 25-50% of those drives are falling over.