I am writing this because I felt the need to bring attention to the customer service I received from Western Digital.  I am not affiliated with WD, aside from being an end user.  I simply feel that customer service such as I receeved deserves to be shared.

I had a 160GB WD Black laptop disk that began the click of death some months ago.  It sat in my garage until I happened to glance at the date of MFG and realized it may be under warranty.  I went to WD's site and, lo-and-behold, I had six months left on the warranty.  

I sent the drive back to WD for replacement, cost me $5.15 Priority Mail.  That was nine days ago.  

Today UPS dropped off a brand new 500GB WD Black.

I can only assume that the 160GB models are no longer kept in inventory, and that they sent me the smallest WD Black they currently manufacture.  No fuss, no emails.  Just a brand new drive nine days door-to-door after I sent the original.  

I realize that for a company such as WD, this is no big deal, and I can only imagine the markup on these drives over their actual mfg cost.  However I firmly believe that "only 10% of happy customers post positive feedback" when I myself am reading product reviews, so I figured I would chime in, even if it is a huge company sending a meager product to a small time buyer.  

I have a mix of WD and Seagate drives in my systems, and have used both for decades, and I have nothing bad to say about Seagate at all, however FWIW, WD will get my business in the future whenever possible.  Customer service goes a long way with me.

I have about twelve external drives, I don't even waste my time looking at anything but WD for my purchases.

They've been good with me on returns.  I put all of my drives with errors into a box, and about once per year, send them all back, and get nice new ones in return.

Notice that I didn't say "dead", I said "with errors".  I'll ditch a drive long before it's dead.  More than one or two bad sectors, it's in the box.  ANY seek errors or multi-zone errors, it goes in the box.

Good customer service... I had something similar happen to an old Bigfoot 4.3 GB drive I had. Yeah, it was a long long time ago. Customer service confirmed the serial # of the drive was under warranty and sent me a new one. It might have been WD at the time... who knows now.


Glutealcleft, what program are you running to determine the faults on a drive?

The drive stores that (and more) itself.  You just need a utility to read that data.  I use smartctl, it comes with every Linux distro.  The last time I looked at Windows SMART utilities, there weren't as many options as I would have suspected.

Most mobo's BIOS looks at SMART data, but doesn't actually tell you anything until the drive is so bad that it's all but dead anyway.