OT: Western Digital Firewire Drive Warning

jbrawn wrote on 7/25/2003, 11:48 PM

UPDATE: JUMP TO "Severely Delayed Follow-up" MESSAGE (number 18?)

(NOTE: See follow up message "Western Digital Responds")

I greatly appreciate the help and advice I've recieved from this group. It is wonderful to hear from people about what works for them, as well as what doesn't.

This message falls in the later category.

I bought a Western Digital 200 Gb external firewire drive. After 7 weeks it simply quit working. I looked up the WD warranty policy and found that the only remedy is full replacement -- you send them the entire firewire drive and they send a new one. Any data on the drive you send in will be lost, even if the drive mechanism is good and the data is intact.

My drive was 80% full, and the stuff on it included my brother's wedding video. I had put a couple of dozen hours into editing (3 source cameras, suround sound, etc.) and I didn't want to lose all the data. So on the advice of a service tech where I bought the drive, I took the external case apart and removed the drive mechanism. I installed the drive mechanism in a generic firewire case (which I knew worked) but no joy. The drive made a horrible grinding noise and I knew it was all gone.

I put the external case back together, got an RMA number from Western Digital, and sent it to their repair facility. Then I went out and bought a second one, so I wouldn't have to wait for the replacement drive to get back. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Three weeks later the first drive was returned without being repaired or replaced with a form letter indicating a reason code of "Tamper".

Here is where Western Digital goes out to lunch... While they do sell the very same drive mechanisms loose, and expect you to install it in your PC yourself, and they promise to replace the drives if they go bad -- they use a different policy for their firewire drives. If you pull the drive mechanism out of the plastic case on a firewire drive they void the warranty even though you haven't done anything to the drive mechanism you wouldn't have done if you had bought it loose. To me, installing and removing the drive mechanism from a PC is no different than removing and installing it from the firewire case. Same connectors, same pesky little screws, same jumpers, etc.

While I was still arguing with various levels of management at WD, my replacement hard drive failed! It was only 5 weeks old. This time the problem was not the disk mechanism. So I haven't lost any data yet on that one. I plan to buy a 3rd party drive case with a fan in it and move the disk mechanism to a new case and hope it hangs together until I can afford yet another disk of some sort as a backup device. The Western Digital external cases do not have fans, and they run very hot.

I am really upset with Western Digital's policy and the attitude of their service managers over this. It all boils down to this:

1) They'd rather save their service techs the time it takes to crack a firewire case open and check that the serial number on the drive mechanism matches the serial number on the outside of the firewire case. In order to save that 2 minutes of a technicians time, they expect all the customers to willingly give up any chance of saving any data that might still be readable on a drive mechanism inside a faulty external firewire case.

2) If you do crack open the external case on a firewire drive that still might have useful data on it, Western Digital will refuse to replace the mechanism inside, irrespective of the condition (not tampered) of the mechanism, your ability to prove where the fault is, or anything else.

Western Digital promised to fix my drive and didn't. They also promised to call me on at least two occasions and didn't.

After much discussion today, I've promised WD to tell my family, friends, and co-workers about my unacceptable experience with Western Digital and recommend to them than they not buy any Western Digital disk drive products. I intend to keep my promise.

So, my advice to my fellow Vegas users is this: If you decide to buy a firewire hard disk, save yourself a headache and don't buy anything from Western Digital.

Best Regards,
John Brawn.

Comments

mvpvideos2007 wrote on 7/26/2003, 12:14 AM

Thats bad to hear. I had purchased at least 8 WD hard drives and all have been great. There was one that crapped out on me, and they sent me a new one. But the drives overall have been great for me. Sorry to hear about your troubles.

BillyBoy wrote on 7/26/2003, 12:42 AM

I feel your pain John. Same thing happened to me with my Maxtor firewire drive. The original failed and so too two replacements. At least in my case each time it was the cheesy interface card, not the drive that failed.

Yoyodyne wrote on 7/26/2003, 2:42 AM

Sorry to hear your going through this, I've had a few drives fail and it is no fun. The only word of advice I could offer is to only get drives that have a three year warranty, most drives now only have a 1 year warranty...& it's for a reason.

Yoyodyne

farss wrote on 7/26/2003, 4:12 AM

Now suppose you bought a new WD drive and put it in the enclosure yourself and it failed. You'd probably be told the warranty was void because you fitted it into an enclosure with inadequate cooling :)

jbrawn wrote on 7/30/2003, 7:37 PM

Jim Case, Customer Service Manager of Western Digital called me today to tell me that WD would like to send me a working drive.

It seems that my post recommending people not buy Western Digital firewire drives came to his attention, and he decided to try to make me a happy customer.

I have thrown away the old disk per his instructions, and I'm now expecting a new one to be delivered to me some time soon.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

John.

rmack350 wrote on 7/30/2003, 8:00 PM

Good luck.

Squeeky wheels DO get the grease.

(Next time get a sevice tech at WD to advise you to take the drive out of the case. Make sure thay log it on the incident report.)

Rob Mack

p_l wrote on 7/30/2003, 8:52 PM

I, too, feel your pain.

So, assuming you really want an external firewire drive, would people recommend LaCie drives over WD and Maxtor?

wcoxe1 wrote on 7/30/2003, 9:15 PM

In an article I read a few months ago, in some PC magazine, they reported that ALL Hard Drive companies that sold consumer Hard Drives in this company had recently switched to 1 year warranties (allegedly because the customer demanded it). Any you find with 3 year warranties are old stock. At least according to that article.

MDVid wrote on 7/30/2003, 9:26 PM

I have used 2 WD firewire drives (200gb, one in ADS box, the other WD enclosure) for some time w/o problem. There is a reported bug on their Knowledge base with regards to these drives, and the fix is pretty simple. I had one drive 'fail'[delayed write failure], after which, applying the fix, the others have run 24X7 for several months now. See: http://tinyurl.com/ikz9 for details.

JTH

AZEdit wrote on 7/30/2003, 9:40 PM

I have used Accom, Fantom, QUE and Busslink drives with no problems, some as lond as 2 years... I have had several clients who have had WD external drives fail. I must say, I use WD internal drives for my video raids with no problems now for a couple years now....better cooling

Sorry for your loss of work- I know it can be very frustrating

riredale wrote on 7/30/2003, 10:41 PM

jbrawn:

Too bad you have to throw the old one away. It would be fun (at least to a nerd like me) to open it up and marvel at the sophistication. Maybe you could turn it into a "Lazy Susan" for your salt and pepper containers!

BillyBoy wrote on 7/31/2003, 12:22 AM

LOL!

Someone not only took a drive apart (lots of pictures) he, well, set it on fire, then hit it several times with a sledge hammer

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/mangadude/computers/drive/drive_main.htm

Grazie wrote on 7/31/2003, 4:30 AM

Arrrgh !! HAH!! - BB! Excellent!! - I'm assuming, big mistake on my part, as there is a "uk" reference in the weblink, that this is British Irony coming through.... "The Ministry of Funny Hard Discs"! - Oh the fire and then the . . .SLEDGEHAMMER

Thanks BB - G

RichB wrote on 7/31/2003, 10:55 AM

This is a perfect demostration of the number one rule in any form of data mangement.

BACKUP"S, BACKUP'S, BACKUP'S,

Trichome wrote on 7/31/2003, 11:35 AM

I have intermittant power failure to my WD 200GB external drive and it has caused lost projects. WD has not responded to my requests for tech help, or a new power supply.

dmcmeans wrote on 7/31/2003, 11:54 AM

A while back, our office went through 11 Western Digital hard drives in a 3 year period. Needless to say, that soured opinion of their product.

Since then, we've chosen Maxtor exclusively and have had good success.

But we've had the occassional Maxtor failure too, which they promptly replaced. And I know other people have had good success with WD.

I think quality runs in lots. WD may be bad right now, and later on it may be Maxtor that's having issues.

But regardless, that kind of customer treatment is inexcusable. More amunition for my low estimate of Western Digital and their products.

Sorry about your troubles, though.

David

Chanimal wrote on 7/31/2003, 12:46 PM

First, I don't believe enough attention was given to WD's excellent recovery. Most of us know that we can void warrantees by inadvertently tinkering--trying to salvage what is ours. WD was within their right, but, understanding the circumstances, they overruled "policy" in favor of good customer relations. This is excellent and they should be applauded. As a former VP at GE, Motorola and other vendors, they did a good job and it should not go unnoticed.

That said, I have also looked into the WD 120gig external w/Firewire/USB2. I opted instead for the ADS case (which supports up to 250gig) w/Firewire/USB2--watch out for several other brands that have an older chip and max out at 120gig. This case will also support a CD, DVD or most any other IDE device. At $99 at Circuit City, you can afford a larger HD for the same amount as the WD external. The external WD 120 GIG was $299. However, with $99 for the ADS case, and a WD 200 gig/w 8 mb cache at $128 (after rebate), I was able to almost double the space, save almost $70, plus have more flexibility. In addition, unlike the WD external case, the ADS has a small fan to facilitate cooling--a big plus. The only negative...certain models of the WD external have a REALLY cool case with two florescent lights--the WD is also more compact than the ADS (since the ADS can also support the larger 5 1/4 DVD housing).

Regarding ongoing HD usage, I have six HD. Two 200 gig, two 120 gig, an 80 gig and a 60 gig, all for one computer. The 200 and 120 gig's are internal (I decided not to use the new 200 gig for external, but used the 60 gig instead--but at least the ADS external case has the flexibility and is real quick to swap and add later). One of my keys is to have two fans blowing over the four internal HD's. This makes them MUCH cooler.

The 80 gig is mounted in a slide out tray. I use the Kingwin brand where the removable tray and enclosure are only $19.95 at Fry's--plus the unit has two fans for cooling! I use this drive for backup of the most critical files only--the final AVI. It may be a hassle to edit without all the source files, but a lot quicker than re-capturing them all off the original tape. I also turn the key on this drive and keep it off, except when I need to save. I can take this drive out and shelve it, plus I can buy additional trays for only $12 each (I have 2 extras) that I can now use to swap in other drives).

I installed an extra tray and enclosure in another machine and I can trade the hard drives (removable storage, not OS drives) at will. Very cheap, fast, works well.

This configuration is VERY effective and should help with backups--which I would recommend when you get your new WD external.

As a side note, I use the Soyo Dragon brand motherboards for all my editing PC's since they come with four separate IDE's. When I add a card (comes with the 200 gigs), I can pretty much run all HD's (except the backup) as master for optimal speed.

I hope this helps.

jbrawn wrote on 2/10/2005, 12:53 AM

I usually try to keep my promises, and often within only one generation. :) I promised a follow-up after I got my replacement drive, and here it is:

It's been over 18 months since my problem with Western Digital. They did ship a new drive. It arrived about 8 days after they told me they had shipped it (from southern California to northern California). All I was out was the shipping on the first failed drive and dozens of hours of work.

I never sent in the second drive that failed. I was able to get the data off of it as it limped along in an ADS external case. Then I trashed it.

My collection of external hard drives (firewire, USB2 and Kingwin slide mount) that I've used over the last two yeas totals 13 drives of 200 or more Gbytes each. Of these, 4 were Western Digital. All four of them have failed! The longest lived of the WD EIDE drives made it 14 months before making loud noises and becoming unstable. The other nine drives are a mixture of Maxtor, Hitachi and Seagate. None of them have failed! The oldest of these has been running just over 2 years and the average is probably 12-15 months.

I've recently been buying SATA drives for a new PC. I bought four 250 Gbyte Hitachi drives which I use in a RAID 5 configuration. I also bought 2 Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM, 4.5 msec access time, 72Gbytes each) which are configured as RAID 0 and make up my "C:\" drive for my primary Vegas machine.

I'll be honest and say that it took some soul searching to decide to buy the Western Digital drives. But in the end, the high praises they earned from other NewEgg.com users, and the fact that no other manufacturer has SATA drives with 10,000 RPM or 4.5 msec access time won me over.

The Raptors have been in continuous use for 2 months with no problems. (BTW: This 3.4Ghz pentium PC boots XP Pro in under six seconds. And, my renders are considerably faster than they were on my previous PC with EIDE drives.)

So, I'm now a hesitant but happy WD customer again for their line of high performance SATA Raptor drives. WD did keep their promise to send me a replacement drive after I finally talked with the Customer Service Manager. And I've made sure that none of my other WD EIDE drives caused me any lost sleep as each of them failed.

Best Regards,

John.