Hi forum, I ave always been a user of Western Digital drive where possible in the past (particularly when using external drives) and forked out a considerable sum for a 1TB 3.5 internal recently. The drive developed bad sectors and became completely unusable within a couple of months and WD have offered a replacement. So far so good.
BUT… please tell me that despite the fact that the hardware has malfunctioned despite exemplary use and that I have lost 800GB of data that I do not have to pay for the return of the faulty product?? Surely not…?!
Hi yes that is the way it works you have to pay to send it they will pay to send it back. You only other choice is to contact WD and see if they will give you a prepaid RMA label
Yep. I got two WD 3TB Reds for my Synology NAS and one lasted about a week. No troubles at all with the RMA, and the new drive got here (under the Advance Replacement) today, well within WD’s stated 5-7 business days. But no return label was included, instead it has to be printed from the same page in the portal that the RMA was filed, and the shipping to WD is on me. It would go down better, I suppose, if the thing had lasted a year or two instead of only a week. Oh, well.
It is a bit of a letdown I agree. At least in my case I chose this because I could have returned all 4 3TB REDs to Amazon at no cost to me; instead I have decided to collect data (and do better backups!) over the 3 year warranty period by dealing with WD direct.
Already I can see that of the 4 drives - they came in the same box and packaging - it was the oldest SN by more than 100k drives and the other 3 have continued fine under much higher load - the same tasks on 3 instead of 4 drives, with benchmarking and other heavy tasks on top, plus migrating back to a 4 drive RAID0 when I installed the replacement.
I’m wondering if WD corrected a manufacturing problem around the 1.7m drive mark. Time will tell!
