Eh, Oh lord! Western Digital's incredible......

[jinsonxu]

This is my post in the archieved messages in this forum 4 months ago:

Date Posted: Oct/10/2000 8:36 AM

Good to know i'm not the only one. I'm on my 4th WD harddisk at the moment. Also the Caviar series. The last 2 failed exactly 6 months after i got them. Good thing WD is big on replacement though.

I've learnt my lesson after the first failure. Now i keep all my important stuff in my old IBM 2.1 gig HD.



Well, the harddisk crapped out on me today. 1st indication was slow loading of windows till it wouldn't load at all. Booted from CD and ran scandisk and it found loads of bad sectors. Nothing strange, since it's the 4th time i'm experiencing it. As was expected, a format turned up even more bad sectors and the whold HD is scrap now.

Typing this using my old trusty IBM 2.1gig HD. This little workhorse has been running for 4 years while in the space of 3 years, 4
8.4 gig WD Caviar HDs failed on me. Nothing else i can say....:disgust:

 

[andylawcc]

i hear you...

 

[Bartman]

My room mate put a sys together for his mom.. It had a 2gig WD drive.. well 3 RMA's later we're now up to 8gig.. every time the drive would die he'd rma it and WD would send a larger one to replace it. 2 then 6 now 8..

What a junk company!

Bart

 

[jinsonxu]

Bartman, you've gotten me interested....lol

How did he replace em? Call up WD directly?

 

[PliotronX]

After 8 months my WD Expert pooped out. I thought the Expert line was manufactured by IBM or something similar..

This 6.4Gig WD is still truckin along, about 3 years old though hah

 

[Kaieye]

Ha! I just RMA my Western Digital 6.4 gig drive back to WD. Be afraid -

Be VERY afraid!

 

[Adul]

I love my 10 GB IBM drive, I hope this 30 GB WD doest go out on me .


/me thinks I should move important data to IBM drive now...

 

[Adul]

I also just RMA'd a 6 GB WD has well. I had the dreded click of death sound.

 

[bolomite]

Damn, now I'm worried about my WD 20.5 drive. Nine months so far, without a problem.

 

[Mday]

<< in the space of 3 years, 4
8.4 gig WD Caviar HDs failed on me >>



i've never had a 8.4 GB WD caviar.

but my other WD drives are fine. i have a 1.2, 3.2, 6.4, 13 GB and 2 18 GB HDDs. let's say the 1.2 GB is more than 4 years old........

 

[BassDominator]

Just RMA'd two Western Digital Caviar 8.4GB drives that were only a year old. I thought they were a good company. Hope this isn't a trend.

 

[MustISO]

I've owned drives from all manufacturers since 1992, I still have a 270MB Conner drive that still works. I have WD drives in all my systems and IBM and Quantum and Maxtor. Of all the drives I've owned 1 has gone bad and it was 6 years old. At work I deal with over 40 servers and I've had 2 drives go bad in 3 years. One was a quantum and one an IBM. That's more than 200 drives I've seen pass through here. Just my experience.


MustISO

 

[Motero]

My WD 1.2 is still trucking along great! I've had mine for about 4 years now.

 

[bernse]

I have a 2.1GB Quantum Bigfoot 5.25 that is still chugging from 1995. Never a problem. A few years back I put together a Celeron 333A system for my folks, with a WD Hard Drive. It cratered less than a year later. My folks aren't even exactly on their computer much either. After hearing all these other complaints, I will never buy a WD drive again. Pure and utter crap.:|

 

[>>>Newbie<<<]

I have RMA a 2.5g WD once long time ago. The replacement is still going and going. I also have a 27g and recently bought another 30g WD drives.

 

[emjem]

I had a WD 20.5 for 30 days when all data was suddenly scrambled. But drive tested good in every respect so WD wouldn't rma it. I was 99.9% sure it was not a virus.

Well, I wasn't going to put any data on THAT drive again, so I took it back to retailer and complained that the box said it was an Expert but the drive was actually Caviar. They called WD and they said Expert and Caviar were the same drive. Thay was BS because the Expert vs Caviar results showed the Expert to be faster.

Anyway, I stood my ground and the retailer told WD the drive was going back to them. Done deal, and I'm done with WD!

 

[BigLance]

I've lost a few Western Digital's but not even close to the number of Maxtor's... ouch ! I love my IBM, hope it lives up to its reputaion.

 

[sharkeeper]

I had two 400BBRTL drives produce error codes in WD's test program. They generated RMA codes as well! These drives were BRAND NEW right out of the box! The drives worked ok in Windows but seemed to slow down at times, hence the need to test. Weird.

Cheers!

 

[dalfollo]

i think it strange to stay with a company because they have great service when their product go bad....why not stay with a company because their products don't go bad and you DON'T need Cust. Service...

 

[Kishkumen]

I have a 2 year old 4.3GB WD that I put in one of those removable drive bays. I haul that thing everywhere I go, work, school, bouncing around in my backpack. Pretty sturdy little drive...

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Well when I get home I'll make sure to back up all my tv episodes on my 45GB WD drive.
somebody hold me, I'm scared for my data

 

[SUOrangeman]

You guys are scaring me. I have an Expert 20.5GB that's been strong since December 1998. I run 4 OSes on it and it hasn't given me any trouble (Soyo 6BA+IV with HPT366). Yes, this is the drive used in my partitioning dissertation.

I also picked up the $45 45GB WD450AA special from CompUSA a few months ago (rebates arrived last week!). No problems to date. I have it in a mobile rack and am now shuttling the drive betwixt home and work.

-SUO

 

[Murben]

I personally have had one Caviar 8.4 gig drive fail on me after about 15 months of use and one Expert 18 gig drive fail after 14 months of use. Both drives just started loosing / corrupting data (and subsequently produced error codes using the WD diagnostics). WD RMA'd the drives without issue but I will not buy WD again. I am building a new system and will replace the 18 gig with a 30 gig Diamond Max Plus.

Most of the hard drives I have replaced at work have been Western Digital 2 and 6 gig drives in Dell systems. Dell has been shipping Maxtor replacements for the most part.

 

[techfuzz]

At work we get Dells too and I've replaced my fair share over the last year. Since I'm tech support I get the lucky job of diagnosing the dead drives and such. Dell seems to have replaced all their WD drives over the past year with Maxtor and IBM drives. We've had a couple WD drives die and the new ones are all Maxtors or if very large they're IBM DeskStars.

At home I've had a variety of drives die over the years, Conner, Seagate, IBM, Quantum... I've come to the conclusion that no matter who makes the drives, there's the possibility it's going to die. Back everything up to CD or Tape and you'll be thankful when your HD dies and you backed your important information up.

 

[Finality]

I've been running my WD experts for over 15 months now. No problems here.

Except of course when I let them run loose in a hard metal box in an International flight.

&quot;Yeah they just stopped working &quot;