[RESOLVED] Western Digital Drive problems

[ibennetch]

Anyone else have lots of problems with Western Digital drives dying? I've gone through 3 on my home machine over the past 3 or so years, the first two were under warrenty, no problems, WD did a nice job of getting the replacements to me. this third time, though, it's less than a month out of warrenty. I've had a Seagate running next to them at home, no problems with that yet, it's been there since before the first WD. At work we are always having to replace WD's, I can think of 3 or 4 in the past 3 months, but hardly ever have trouble with any other brand. Anyone else have this problem or I am just incompatible with WD ;-) ??? TIA

[jacqueline]

I have been having trouble with WD drives also.
Right now I am dealing with a 10.2 Caviar thats total crap.
Been after a RMA off their site and I am being told its an invalid serial number. This is the second hard drive this year I have had issues with. Can't run their utilities because the drive is toast and they want this error code that is being generated by running their utility program.
sigh....
what is just is.....

[ibennetch]

I have never actually gotten an RMA off the site. On one occasion I told the tech support person on the phone it was dead, he asked me why i thought that, i told him, within 2 minutes of him answering the call I had my RMA...but the other time....ugh! *shudder*

[BurntReynolds]

I hear ya. I've replaced 4 in the last three weeks. One I tried to replace with another brand new one and it was toast right out of the box. What gives?.

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[swamprat]

I've lost 3 WD drives this year also. All brand new installs. I do not use them anymore. Also had problems with Samsung.

[Sowulo]

I posted elsewhere a few days back...It seems that WD drives are having difficulty with VIA chipset MB's. Several that had all kinds of problems (errors reported and fixed with WDDIAG) that keep coming back. When the same drives are moved to a BX or 815 chipset MB they work fine.

[Ruslan]

I have rich enough statistic of exploitation WDs. We have about 140 Pentium/P2/P3 PCs in our company mostly with WDs installed.
I've lost 2 WD (out of 100) drives this year also. And 2 Seagate (out of 30),2 Samsung (out of 10). I cann't use them anymore due to mechanics failures. So,now I have lots of spare part...



[This message has been edited by Ruslan (edited October 05, 2000).]

[teckie]

Western Digital has had a recall on some models.... go to their site and find out if you could be one of the luck\unlucky ones.

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Sniff...Smell that..... That's what a roach smells like after he made his home your computer... and fried.

[MHz]

I am currently running 3 WD drives in this computer without a problem. Never had a WD drive die on me or other customers. I HAVE had Conners, Maxtors, Seagates and even an IBM die before, usually because they were used hard.

FYI, I replace my drives every 3 years regardless of needing to just to prevent data loss. This is very affordable now with drives being so cheap. If you are a very data concious person I recommend doing something similar.

[KEMETHOUSE]

I HEAR YOU, MY WD HARD DRIVE JUST QUIT WORKING- I AM TRYING TO FIND A SERVICE CENTER TO FIX IT SO I CAN GET MY DATA BACK.

[3fingersalute]

We have been selling WD drives for years, and they always had the best track record of all for us. The last year or two however is a different story. We have a book we keep all RMA's in, and we had to start a separate one just for Western Digital.

We have RMA'd I bet at least 100 over the last year. It is so bad that at times, we had to wait to RMA them because WD wouldn't advance replace them to us because we had too many in the works already! We do so many RMA's for WD that WD gave us there UPS Acct. # so we don't have to pay for shipping anymore. Now that's sad!

Jacqueline....anytime WD support wants a diag error number and you don't have one, just tell them the drive won't even spin up, so the BIOS and WD_Diag don't even see the drive. That shuts them up real quick and gets the RMA.

Ibennetch....you know WD warranties the drive 3 Years from the date of SALE. Another words, we have slid a few here and there by making and showing them a receipt for when we sold it...now how you get that receipt showing it is less than 3 years since you purchased it I'll leave totally to your imagination!!!

KEMETHOUSE.....Western Digital has a data recovery company called Ontrack....very expensive however!


(Sorry all for the length!!!)


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WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY?......Not that it matters, because Micrsoft will crash on the way there!!!

[AlienDyne]

I've seen problems on Quantum, Seagate and Western Digital Hard Drives at work.
If you asked me, though, which is the most reliable, I'd say Western Digital..

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"Matter is passive. In spite of its power, it can't be controlled without the human mind." Sokrates

My Hardware Info, Hardware Media and Computer History page

[NPaladin]

I love WD personally....Maxtor/Quantum just seem to die (good thing Maxtor is really good about giving RMAs) and I've had a lot of trouble with IBMs too (mainly MBR sector problems). Western Digital and Seagate tend to be the absolute most reliable. THing is, WD drives are QUIET...even the 7200 RPM ones. Run pretty cool too. Seagate 7200 drives, on the other hand are really noisy, and run REALLY hot (they're specced to run at a max of 140 degrees....by the end of a WIn98 bootup, they've already hit 135 degrees) Western Digital has GOT to be the best out there in my book.


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Bryan Pizzuti
CompTIA A+
[email protected]

[TrackMan]

tell me about it. back in 98 i bought a 3.4 gig wd drive, one day it just stopped working on me, i was real stupid then and didn't know about rma's (i was like 13 then) so i replaced it w/ a 4.2 gig unit, that one's been working sinse then, but latly it's been randomly clicking for no apparent reason when i'm not doing anything, and say im playing an mp3 the song will pause for a second and you can hear the drive click. then last year I bought a 8.4 gig one for my new computer, and early this summer it started grinding when the bios tried to initiate the drive, after a while it wold fail to initiate, and resetting the computer would make it work, then it just failed. never had any problems with the thing once it had booted up, however. I finally got around to rma'ing that one last week, and now they're sending me a brand spanking new 10.2 7200 rpm unit. I still have the 3.4 gig drive here too, and it's probably under waranty, if i could only find it...

and that's the story of my 3 drives in 2 and a half years

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I was going to be a procrastinator, I just never got around to it.

[pga]

Originally posted by Ruslan:
I've lost 2 WD (out of 100) drives this year also. And 2 Seagate (out of 30),2 Samsung (out of 10).

I agree with these statistics. Throw in Quantum at 3 out of 10, Fujitsu at 2 out of 10, Maxtor at 5 out of 20, Micropolis at 5 out of 10, and JTS 99.999 out of 100.

WD may seem to fail more often, but maybe it's because there are more WD's out there. Look at overall ratio's, not the number of bad drives.

In 1992 the total number of GM model vehicles involved in accidents was 100 times that of Yugo model vehicles.

[This message has been edited by pga (edited October 29, 2000).]