Western Digital Hard Drives: Bah! By Ambrose Burnside on Oct 14, 2007 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

I bought a WD hard-drive a few years ago for a computer I was re-building. The drive itself worked alright for most of the time I had it, but its' eventual problems and the debacle of dealing with the apparently normally-helpful Western Digital tech support means I can't recommend their line of hard-drives.

The drive itself is unremarkable- at the time, adequate storage, good price, fair access times, why not? Unfortunately, about 6 months after I bought it, I got a head crash- meaning the magnetic head directly touched the data platters, possibly scratching it. The drive wouldn't start up, and my warranty with Western Digital was still valid, so I called them up and they told me to send it to them.

Real problems begin here. They call me and tell me a flake of metal from the inside of the case got in-between the head and platter- something that's not supposed to happen, by the way, because the HDs are supposed to be swept meticulously for foreign bodies to stop just this sort of thing from happening. That said, though, in a wonderful application of doublethink, they admitted the 'foreign body' came from the drive itself, and yet because it was a foreign body, it wasn't covered under the warranty! I complained my way up the ladder, eventually talking to some faceless higher-up who reluctantly agreed to refund my purchase. Two weeks later, another drive arrives in the mail- but this one's a 20-gig. I called them again, went through the motions, and was finally rewarded, a month and a half after I first called them, with another hard drive, this time identical to the one I already have, even though they promised a refund.

It's a shame I had to go through with all of this, because the hard drive wasn't bad- it was the lack of quality control, the stubborn tech support, and the lack of following up on their promises that kills it for me.