Shout Out to Western Digital

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javacontour

javacontour

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I had a Virtual Machine was running slow, and after ruling out software, I took at look at the logs on the host and sure enough, I had a drive failing. A four year old, 2TB WD Black Model WD2003FZEX-00Z4SA0.

It took a few days to get an RMA number since I submitted my details on a Friday afternoon. But Wednesday AM the following week, I had an RMA number and the details available for download.

Since I had some other 2TB drives, I was able to get most of my data off this drive. I was using it to hold downloads, ISO files and the VM disk images. So I wasn't backing it up as the files were either available elsewhere or impractical to backup. I'd export the machine every so often, so I could just import the most recent export.

I could have provided a credit card number and cross-shipped the disk, but since I had other drives lying around, I just went the slow route.

On Friday, i got the replacement WD sent me the 4TB disk in the family. Twice the capacity, same speeds and cache.

Really a hassle free experience.

I ended up moving my data from an existing 3TB drive to the 4TB WD black, and then moved the data from the 2TB drive to the now free 3TB disk.

The only thing I lost was the one VM where the bad sectors were on the disk. Everything else was retrievable from the old disk.

It was an older version of Linux, so I just took the opportunity to build a new VM with a newer release of Oracle Enterprise Linux. (Don't laugh, I use it for work..)

All in all, while a bit annoying, drives fail. I replace enough of them at work to know to have backups of anything I can't readily replace.
 
I used to install Solaris x86 and optimise its filesystem for the Oracle. It was a fun gig.
I hope you didn't get one of those refurbs
 
Couple of years ago I bought a WD backup drive which failed within the first year. Going through them for replacement was a breeze.
 
I've always had good luck with their drives and their service and it was a welcome change after Seagate brand went downhill on me.
 
Yep, I haven't bought a Seagate since the drive included with an old Dell Inspiron 530S died and wasn't under warranty.

That was Windows Vista vintage HW, so that tells you how long ago it was.

I've been buying WD or IBM/Hitachi since then for the most part. The 3TB drive I have is a Toshiba, and my 512GB SSD is a Samsung, EVO 850, IIRC.

Originally Posted by StevieC
I've always had good luck with their drives and their service and it was a welcome change after Seagate brand went downhill on me.
 
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I've had many hard drives from many brands over the years....WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Toshiba and IBM. Started out buying drives from WD, then moved to Maxtor for a while as they were the fastest for a long time with their Diamondmax line of drives. When Maxtor dissapeared I went to Seagate for a while and loved their older Baracuda drives.

I had reliable service from all the drives I've bought and some were used daily for 6+ years. Only drive I've ever had fail on me was a Samsung 80GB that was a couple years old. I RMAd it without hassle.

I haven't bought a hard drive in the last few years. I've moved on to SSDs and haven't looked back. Right now I've got a 512GB Toshiba PCIe NVMe SSD in my laptop.
 
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Yeah, my last two laptops have been SSD.

My boot drive is an SSD, but my file storage is spinning.

I suspect some of the spinning storage will eventually be replaced by SSD. Maybe the next desktop I get. But I tend to keep desktops for 8 years give or take, so I have another ~5 or so years unless it just conks out. I'm rocking an i7 4770 with 24gb of RAM and could upgrade to 32gb, so that should be future proofed for a bit longer.

The new work laptops has an 8th gen i5 and had to tweek an older Win7 VM to fool it into thinking it had an older proc as Win7 was complaining that updates were not supported on such hardware. So I tell Virtualbox to report the previous laptops processor and we are all good.

I hope I've not jinxed myself, but the number of failures for the number of machines I've had/have really seems small.

But I still backup anything I cannot replace.

Originally Posted by GMFan
I've had many hard drives from many brands over the years....WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Toshiba and IBM. Started out buying drives from WD, then moved to Maxtor for a while as they were the fastest for a long time with their Diamondmax line of drives. When Maxtor dissapeared I went to Seagate for a while and loved their older Baracuda drives.

I had reliable service from all the drives I've bought and some were used daily for 6+ years. Only drive I've ever had fail on me was a Samsung 80GB that was a couple years old. I RMAd it without hassle.

I haven't bought a hard drive in the last few years. I've moved on to SSDs and haven't looked back. Right now I've got a 512GB Toshiba PCIe NVMe SSD in my laptop.
 
It's probably worth it to them to be able to tear it down and do a little "root cause analysis" on a drive that failed in "the REAL world"

If i were in R&D there.... that's what I would do.
 
Originally Posted by Linctex
It's probably worth it to them to be able to tear it down and do a little "root cause analysis" on a drive that failed in "the REAL world"

If i were in R&D there.... that's what I would do.


Possibly. Also, they can marry up circuit boards that are good with the physical hardware that is good and make refurbished drives.

I had bad sectors on mine. Nothing wrong with the circuit board...

They figure out why they fail and have good parts to build refurbished drives.
 
Originally Posted by StevieC
I've always had good luck with their drives and their service and it was a welcome change after Seagate brand went downhill on me.


This. WD's reliability and RMA experience is far better than Seagate's. If I am buying a spinning disk, it is WD.
 
Originally Posted by javacontour
I had a Virtual Machine was running slow, and after ruling out software, I took at look at the logs on the host and sure enough, I had a drive failing. A four year old, 2TB WD Black Model WD2003FZEX-00Z4SA0.


What's the wsrranty period on WD hard drives?
 
Five years. I bought it just over 4 years ago, August of 2014.

The replacement will only have the remainder of the warranty on the original drive, so about 10 months if I read the information correctly.

Like batteries warranties, the clock doesn't restart.

Originally Posted by ZeeOSix
Originally Posted by javacontour
I had a Virtual Machine was running slow, and after ruling out software, I took at look at the logs on the host and sure enough, I had a drive failing. A four year old, 2TB WD Black Model WD2003FZEX-00Z4SA0.


What's the wsrranty period on WD hard drives?
 
Originally Posted by StevieC
Between 1-5 years depending on the drive model. Here is a chart outlining it. I typically only buy black series drives. Best of the best as far as I'm concerned for mechanical drives.

https://support.wdc.com/warranty/warrantypolicy.aspx


Thanks for the link. Dang, WD sure makes a ton of different models.
 
The most reliable drives I'm still using is the Seagate 7200.7, 120GB, from 2003. It is still running in my machine storing photos and downloads, 1st generation using fluid dynamic bearing and it is conservatively build. Low density so the data retention is probably very good.

Maxtor was alright but they feels rough in the noise department, I had their thin single head drives.

WD is nice too and that's what I used in the last 5 years on 3.5", Toshiba on 2.5" unless SSD.

My OCZ Vertex 2 50GB finallly died, it was my workhorse for the last 5 years (RAID together as a 100GB drive). Now I'm running a refurb Toshiba enterprise 200GB. It claims 3 drive write per day and was supposed to be pretty durable. We'll see.
 
Back when I worked more with hardware, before the advent of SSDs, Western Digital was by far the best HD manufacturer to deal with.

It is good to know that their service is still very good. Are they as good with their SSDs, their more recent acquisition?

Sandisk had awful customer service.
 
For consumer drives WD / SanDisk are pretty good, their Black SSD is very fast. These days unless you buy the no name brands they should all be decent. May not always be the fastest but they should live a decent life. As usual read reviews on newegg and see what the customers say.
 
I have a pair of 1TB Black drives in my DNS-321 that will be 9 years old in January.

Every time I think about them, I get worried that they're going to fail on me, so I try not to think about them too often.
 
I have had good success, meaning no failures, with WD Gold and Black and other HGST drives. The Gold and Black drives come with 5-year warranties. The problem now seems to be shipping. Nobody seems to ship drives properly packaged with the item floating in peanuts. Instead, you get your item falling more or less loosely around in a box with a couple of air pillows on top.
 
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