A Note/Caution on Drive Warranty Service

I’ve been thrilled with my DX4000 so far with it serving as a client backup appliance for 17 workstations in a small business environment.

Unfortunately a few weeks ago I got a notice that one of the drives had failed and needed replacement. The same day I registered the Sentinel on WD’s support site and created an RMA with “Bad/Defective Drive” as the return reason. I sent the drive out semi-rush so that the unit would not have to run in degraded RAID5 for very long.

About 3-4 business days after WD had received the drive I still did not have an update on the RMA, not even acknowledging receipt of the drive. I created an online support case requesting a status updated but did not hear back after 2 business days.

Today I called their RMA support line to inquire about the status. I was told that since I registered the DX4000’s serial number and created a bad drive RMA under that, they were expecting to receive the entire unit!

Thankfully the support representative was very courteous and knowledgeable (maybe this situation happens a lot?) and filed a new RMA with the drive model and serial numbers. I did note to her that nowhere was it specified in the process that each drive in a Sentinel was considered an individual RMA-able item and that it might be helpful to add this somewhere in the steps.

In Short: If you need to RMA an individual drive from your Sentinel, you must register the drive serial number for the RMA, not the DX4000 itself!

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Yup

this will be handy for people with RAID drives such as this one

the enclosure and the drives serial number are different so we need to make sure we provide the serial for the item we are replacing and not the entire unit

Here’s a further caution: Warranty support is currently out of 2TB RE-4 drives!

Oh, and they won’t call or e-mail or return your e-mails to let you know this fact. You need to call them, only to be told to call back Monday to see if just maybe they have some back in stock.

Three weeks running on degraded RAID-5, good thing there’s no crucial data beyond workstation backups stored on our Sentinel.

I was happy with how simple and reliable the DX4000 is but this warranty experience has really soured my opinion.