What Is Wrong With Western Digital

[h90]

Try to buy these outside of Thailand I think is a better bet. USA for me, never had a problem yet. I simply keep mine propped up to get airflow underneath. I always buy non portable plug in units too, much cheaper (and more reliable?).

I too buy most of my equipment in the U.S., however any W-D HDDs I purchase have always been "Made in Thailand". Cheaper in the U.S. though.

There is a W-D service center in Pantip Plaza, stop by for 5 minutes and you may be amazed at the flow of customers and the stack of replacement drives for warranty replacement. They have the warranty replacement process down to a well-oiled machine, taking ~ 3 minutes per customer.

Always when I had to replace a drive I had to wait 2-3 weeks. Usually I exchange at JIB here a bit outside, but the same happened when I exchanged at hardware house in Pantip....

[lomatopo]

^ Assuming warranty replacement (not recovery or repair) one can go directly to the W-D service center and get a replacement drive. I did this two weeks ago, it took less than five minutes to get a replacement drive, there were many, many customers coming and going and this shop is wall-to-wall with replacement drives. Amazing actually.

[robblok]

^ Assuming warranty replacement (not recovery or repair) one can go directly to the W-D service center and get a replacement drive. I did this two weeks ago, it took less than five minutes to get a replacement drive, there were many, many customers coming and going and this shop is wall-to-wall with replacement drives. Amazing actually.

Yes i had the same experience.. changing a drive is so easy.

[h90]

^ Assuming warranty replacement (not recovery or repair) one can go directly to the W-D service center and get a replacement drive. I did this two weeks ago, it took less than five minutes to get a replacement drive, there were many, many customers coming and going and this shop is wall-to-wall with replacement drives. Amazing actually.

Will try on the next drive....A couple of exchange drives had written "refurbished" on it. Other didn't. But all 2-3 weeks.

[indothai]

WD has their own service center at Pantip, swapping hard drive is pretty much immediate, that is unless they don't have your model in stock. This is probably where retailers (ie: JIB, Banana IT, etc) send in their drives for replacement. It is possible that the drives get sent to the factory by the retailers, but I doubt it. Synnex is a distributer/retailer.

I don't run an IT store here, so my guesses are based on U.S. experiences at the consumer level.

[Plastic Brontosaurus]

Just my two cents on this: I tend to have a large number of external drives (>10 at any one time) for various backup etc. purposes.

Back in the early 2000's I always had Seagate as they were very reliable then. However about five years ago I lost three Seagates (of three different models) within a month. Those were recent buys. That put me off Seagate.

Hitachi is IBM, they always used to have the glass platters, not sure if this is still the case. In the 2000-2005 timeframe I operated a data centre and we lost 20% of the new IBM drives in a year so stopped using them. However the technology may have changed since then, not sure.

Right now I have around 10 of the 2TB 2.5" Western Digital external USB 3.0-powered drives (not available in Thailand or at least never seen them in Chiang Mai; got these online and in Australia). Had these for just under a year and they are performing well - not lost any of them. Before that I had around 20 of the 1TB WD 2.5" external drives and lost one in the space of two years.

Conclusion: for me personally at least, WD is quite reliable. I would not risk Seagate. And Hitachi/IBM well as long as WD performs for me, will not go back there either.

By the way there's not many manufacturers left these days; many of the different brands of external drives actually hide either a Hitachi, Seagate or WD drive inside the differently branded case.

Good luck in the quest for the most reliable drive :-D

[jbrain]

Jbrain.. I think you are right, they just tried to push the bit density too much, it is not two or more spinning disks - it is still only one.

The technology has come to an end, moving parts are just not the way forward anymore.

Even the current technology is still based on single layer chips but very soon we will see the 3D multi-layer technology enter the commercial marketplace.. actually it is quite exciting, I'm sure we all remember the likes of the spectrum 48K and commodore 64k.. how thing have changed, and I have no doubts that in 20 years time we will be making the same comparisons.

Harddisk Sentinel reports my WD 2Tb disks as having 4 disks inside and the 1.5 Tb as having 3 disks inside.

[Plastic Brontosaurus]

Harddisk Sentinel reports my WD 2Tb disks as having 4 disks inside and the 1.5 Tb as having 3 disks inside.

On 2.5" disks the current mainstream density is 500 gigs per platter which explains the above. If they stuffed 6 platters into the case they could make a 3TB disk (in the 1980's and probably before some disks had 8 or 10 platters in them, they were seriously chunky and stored whopping amounts of data like 20 megs and similar). There are some higher-density platters out there now I believe, they probably can make a 1.5TB 2.5 disk with 2 platters now (perhaps Seagate, not sure).

If you want to move away from spinning disks there's the SSD's and there's even a 2TB one now for the laptop (or will be soon), Foremay proudly announced this. It will probably cost the same as a small car...

http://www.foremay.net/

However SSDs are not immune from failure, they can brick themselves for no apparent reason as happened to two SSDs of a mate of mine.

WD announced yesterday that they had found a way to double spinning disks capacity using nanotech... So even though the SSDs are on the rise, spindles will probably be with us for some time to come

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237258/Western_Digital_claims_HDD_capacity_doubled_with_nanotech_breakthrough