Hey guys,
Got a bit of feedback after just sending off a hard disk drive for warranty. What a process :(.
Had a 5tb WD black fail in my Raid 5 array (bad sector and reallocated sector counts exceeded in smart and array marks the drive as bad). The drive was only purchased June 2016 for nearly $400AUD so that was pretty disappointing already, but I understand stuff happens. And to top that off, despite only being just over 12 months old, it’s no longer available anywhere in Australia to buy another replacement drive :(. Anyway I digress,
It just cost me $43.35AUD to send the drive to the Vietnam RMA centre! Had to spend 10 minutes filling out a ridiculous customs declaration form that replaces half of the shipping/.RMA labels I printed off from your website! When are you going to get an Australian shipping address for RMA?! I’ve had to send back Seagate drives for RMA, ships to a Sydney depot, costs $10 and I’ve had drives back in 5 working days! This one to Vietnam is going to take at least 6 days just to arrive, let alone for me to get the replacement. I’ve had to replace the entire array seeing as I couldn’t get another 5tb and the RMA takes so long.
All in all a very expensive and time consuming process just to return one obviously faulty drive all because I live in Australia. There’s a number of forum posts complaining about the same thing too, surely WD sell enough drives here to warrant a return address that is local. Seagate has had one for 10+ years.
