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johnridleyI put a 1.5T drive in my system about 2 weeks ago, to help in organizing media files, primarily audio files.
I immediately noticed that the drive seemed inordinately slow. Eventually I eliminated everything but the drive itself (by swapping cables, power supplies, SATA ports and even using a USB interface). I then spent about 5 days going back and forth with WD tech support. This took the form of me sending an initial email saying everything I'd tried, then waiting 3 days for an initial response, then 4 rounds of "try this"..."I already tried that, read the original email" and finally "yeah, it's the drive. RMA it."
This evening I decided to see if there was a mainboard BIOS update - turns out there have been two updates since my last flash of the BIOS. It also turns out that it's kind of a pain in the neck to flash FOXCONN mainboards if you don't have a floppy drive, but I eventually got it done.
This didn't help the hard drive issue, but it did solve another problem I'd been having, which is that the BIOS locks interrupts for about half a second whenever the fan speed changes (and it changes a lot) - this has been incredibly irritating for a year, and having it gone is nice.
I really don't enjoy screwing with hardware like this anymore. It's fun enough to drop in a hard drive or something, but when things don't go right I don't enjoy the hunt that much anymore.
WD does have an advance RMA so for a $150 hold on my Visa card (until the old drive gets back to them) I can get a new drive, copy the data to it and not have to lose the work I've done so far.
I immediately noticed that the drive seemed inordinately slow. Eventually I eliminated everything but the drive itself (by swapping cables, power supplies, SATA ports and even using a USB interface). I then spent about 5 days going back and forth with WD tech support. This took the form of me sending an initial email saying everything I'd tried, then waiting 3 days for an initial response, then 4 rounds of "try this"..."I already tried that, read the original email" and finally "yeah, it's the drive. RMA it."
This evening I decided to see if there was a mainboard BIOS update - turns out there have been two updates since my last flash of the BIOS. It also turns out that it's kind of a pain in the neck to flash FOXCONN mainboards if you don't have a floppy drive, but I eventually got it done.
This didn't help the hard drive issue, but it did solve another problem I'd been having, which is that the BIOS locks interrupts for about half a second whenever the fan speed changes (and it changes a lot) - this has been incredibly irritating for a year, and having it gone is nice.
I really don't enjoy screwing with hardware like this anymore. It's fun enough to drop in a hard drive or something, but when things don't go right I don't enjoy the hunt that much anymore.
WD does have an advance RMA so for a $150 hold on my Visa card (until the old drive gets back to them) I can get a new drive, copy the data to it and not have to lose the work I've done so far.
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Date: 2009-09-02 12:29 pm (UTC)Yeah, seagate has the advance option, but they charge a flat fee to do it which is more expensive than just shipping the old drive back. It's not really a concern for me now that I can just swap a different drive in and send the defective one back without downtime.
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Date: 2009-09-02 12:38 pm (UTC)If I got a replacement from Newegg, it'd be wrapped in bubble wrap. That's actually always been OK for me, I don't think I've ever had a drive be shock damaged, but I'd still rather have proper hard drive packaging if given the choice. Some reviewers at newegg have gotten drives where the bubble wrap + peanut packaging has failed badly (drive unwrapped itself and was lying bare on the bottom of the box).
I don't worry that much about warranty; I only have maybe a dozen drives in the whole place, and by the time a drive has gotten to even a 3 year warranty point, it's probably smaller than what I want anyway. I don't believe that warranty period is any predictor of actual lifetime, and if a drive fails, getting it replaced is a trivial part of my concern compared to the data.