I bought a Cavair Black 1TB HDD from a local retailer and after a few weeks, the sound from the drive increased and apart from that, I found that a couple of errors were reported by smartctl utility. I had a dual boot system with Ubuntu 10.04 and Win Vista. I first ran an offline check and a thorough check from the smartctl utility and it showed many read failures and at one point of time, it got struck and the test failed.
As I wasn’t sure if WD support will be able to understand all the details of the checks that I ran on the machine, I went through the website and downloaded the utility provided by western digital to check disk health. The standard and thorough tests failed on it too. I created an RMA and attached the snapshots with it. It was created on 10 March 2011 and I still haven’t received the replacement drive. Why? - I’ve been asking the same question from support and first they told me that it has been dispatched and I need to call the courier service provider. I called the courier provider and they told me that the drive’s been sent back to the warehouse due to some issues between Western Digital and the courier service provider. The latest update from western digital support has been that the replacement HDD has been lost during the transit and it’s due to the reason that the service center is being shifted from Delhi to Banglore *but* I was told not to fear as the same has happened to a lot many clients who will be shipped a new HDD soon. I’m still waiting for mine. :(
First, I would like to share that you really have to be so lucky in order to get in touch with a representative on the toll free number as most of the time the line is either busy or a strange call bar seems to happen - have tried it from 4 different landline numbers.
Secondly, not sure if Western Digital has outsourced their ticketing support as even after being so disappointed with the kind of service that rendered, I maintained civil tone for a very long period but the people handling tickets section just don’t seem to care, at all. They don’t even bother to respond to the ticket and I’ve requested so various support reps on toll free number to escalate this issue as it’s not at all easy to connect to them on the toll free.
If someone responsible enough from western digital customer services section is reading this, please do something about this. I don’t wish to criticize the support/services team publicly but as nobody is listening, I needed means to amplify my response and therefore, I’m writing on my blog: http://nitinsharma.info/vendor-issues/issues-while-dealing-with-western-digital-support/
tweeted about the same at twitter, facebook and couple of other forums. I really hope that someone responsible will hear this call and do something about the problem that me and a lot of other clients are facing.
Nitin
