I’m having a serious problem with 2 6tb blue drives,they are less than a year old and recently started to develop problems,i tried to return them on the local store i bought them from only to find out that shop was closed.I thought its ok as i had the warranty from Western Digital, and at this point is when i found out after trying to register my drives that those are supposed to be OEM products.i really don’t feel responsible for this as there is no way to tell if a drive is oem or not when you buying it,why should the OEM products look exactly like the retail drives?i tried already to update the warranty with a case with the proof of purchase only to get a message back that this is an OEM product please return it where you bought it from, how am i supposed to return it there while i mentioned that store is now closed.you had the drives registered in your database as OEM but im sure that those drive were new with 0 hours of use when i bought them as RETAIL so serials should be update and be considered as retail product, never used in any OEM device.
That’s just not going to happen. You dealt with an unreputable dealer. They got the drives at a significantly lower price. That lower price is because the dealer takes responsibility for the warranty, not the manufacturer.
So yeah, YOU are not responsible, WD is not responsible, the dealer is, and they shut their doors leaving you with the problem.
so any Western Digital drive that we buy from a local store is a gambling if everything is all right and product is supported by manufacturer or OEM not supported etc.and all this because both of them are look like 100% the same without giving you a chance to determine them between retail and oem.
At least in the US, OEM drives are NEVER put in retail packaging. It is possible, though, that non-retail-packaged drives are NOT OEM. The 8x 8TB RED drives I bought from Amazon a few years ago were packaged in bulk packaging but are retail and warranted by WD.
And this is exactly why I only buy WD drives from WD’s Store. I learned the hard way too.
That reaction from WD is illegal under EU law. The first point of contact on the warranty is with the retailer but the fallback is to the manufacturer.
If you’re in Europe, bring it to the attention of your local trading standards department or citizens advice bureau
