Seven calendar days (five business days) have passed since my last update. The status on the outstanding WRN disk remains:
Warranty Replacement Number: 2607876 continues in status***** Received / Processing with no change for 60 business days (83 calendar days).
Apparently RMA handling is a victim of the insanity of the AI bubble.
Vegan, you are a kind and generous person. I can tell that by your responses.
I do not think we can blame AI (sometimes called AI Washing) for a lack of attention to quality or customer service at WD. Here is an example of a lack of quality control and great customer service that I had a couple of days ago. I bought a product from Amazon. Amazon shipped a different product. I filled out the return request and the system said I had to call them. I called them and they told me they were sorry, refunded my purchase price, and included an additional $20 for the hassle of the situation. Amazon is dealing with AI factors just as much as WD, but they do not let it be the reason to impact their service to customers. WD’s ultimate problems are failure to manage the quality of products and failure to manage the warranty replacement of those products with reasonable service targets. AI has not done anything to WD except create the circumstances for its market capitalization to become ten times larger.
The tulip craze in the Netherlands centuries ago had people adopt irrational enthusiasm towards exotoc varieties. Today corporations are spending every dime chasing AI like the tulip craze.
Vegan, stay tuned from comments about the Tulip Mania you noted. But this thread is not meant to discuss any market distortions of any period. It is to document for all who want to see how long it takes WD to deal with the 33% failure rate I experienced and also the laissez-faire customer service I am experiencing on the Red Pro 16TB drives. These are not primarily affected by market conditions. They are choices that WD management makes to serve society’s (the customer’s, my) needs. I paid money for those products and services and even though WD has my money, I only have received a fraction of the products and services I purchased months ago.
The tulips example is probably not as analogous to AI as one might think. Historian Anne Goldgar, in work summarized by The Real Story Behind the 17th-Century ‘Tulip Mania’ Financial Crash, identified about 350 people involved in the trade, while noting that this number is low because she did not examine every town. That is a count of people she could identify, not a count of bulbs sold.
The same source says Anne Goldgar found six examples of companies set up to sell tulips, and only 37 people who paid more than 300 guilders for a tulip bulb. Again, these are participant and high-price-purchase figures, not total market volume.
The University of Chicago Press page for Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age also emphasizes that Anne Goldgar used extensive archival research to challenge the popular legend, arguing that the bubble and crash were much less dramatic than commonly told.
The AI bubble is finding corporations paying outlandish rates for SSDs and GPUs etc. ALl of the characteristics are exhibited by spending double to 5x more.
Vegan, you are right. That is happening in the industry. However, I don’t think we can blame AI for WD’s lack of attention to quality or achieving a high level of customer service. If WD wanted to, they could take one of the 998 Red Pro 16TB disks in their inventory and ship it to me to replace the disk that would not initialize in my NAS. I have not even been able to use that disk after I paid for it. AI has nothing to do with WD’s choice. That is a management decision and reflects on the culture at WD at this moment in time.
AFAIK hard disks are up in price as Seagate, WD and Toshiba only have so much capacity. So when the AI bubble needed vast amounts of storage prices leaped to triple what disks used to sell for. SSD are way up too. RAM is also way up. This is all due to a disruption of the equilibrium before AI.
The point is that WD has 998 of those disks sitting in their warehouse. They do not need to worry about what the price of memory, disk platters, heads, or anything else for those disks. The cost of manufacturing the disks has already been invested. I already paid the price for a new disk that works. WD has that money. Why should WD keep my money without supplying a working disk, particularly when they have some in hand? Reciting market conditions and making excuses about AI and component prices does not address the core issue. I purchased from WD because I thought WD would provide a high-quality product with amazing customer service. I experienced 33% failure rate (extremely low quality) and months of waiting for a warranty replacement (very poor service). The net effect will be that I paid the inflated price for a new disk when I get a refurbished disk with likely an overall reduced warranty life.
I see that RMA is problematic. It has been a long time I have had a disk die under warranty. My server disks have lasted for eons and they keep working and night fine. The Red line is designed for NAS use which suggests a specialized line of server class disk.
Seven more calendar days (five business days) have passed since my last update. The status on the outstanding WRN disk remains:
Warranty Replacement Number: 2607876 continues in status***** Received / Processing with no change for 65 business days (90 calendar days).
Seven more calendar days (five business days) have passed since my last update. The status on the outstanding WRN disk remains:
Warranty Replacement Number: 2607876 continues in status\*\*\*\*\* Received / Processing with no change for 70 business days (97 calendar days).
However, divine providence or someone at WD took pity on my experience and shipped me a replacement disk and I am grateful for this. Thank you, WD. Therefore, I will no longer log additional time to and status of 2607876 unless I find quality problems with the replacements.
Good to see you have finally got some help, but the service is definitely slow
I also finally got a replacement drive. They ended up replacing my Red Plus with a Red Pro, which is a perk.
I have yet to put it into my system yet, I’ll do that this weekend. Here’s hoping it’s a good drive
Confirmed that the new 12tb drive is good. Took over 3 months, but I’ve finally been able to expand my storage
I have some old WD disks and so far I have been lucky. I have a top load enclosure so I can swap disks quickly.
How is the situation now ? Need to rma 10TB gold
