Why WD sucks

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SirKenin

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Well, this week has been an interesting week. I've seen one or two corrupted drives each day, minimum 7 computers to repair a day. Every single one of the toasted drives were Caviar SEs. Every damn one.

I had a lady specifically request a WD SE in an external case. I made the big mistake of providing one as a favor. It lasted 48 hours before it completely died. It's currently in the back seat of my car. A Caviar SE 16 drive. Deader than dead.

I successfully repaired all but one of them. The one today was completely fubar unfortunately.

Complete, total garbage. I had a guy come in tonight who was brought in on contract for the federal government. His very first two tasks... RMA two full cases of WD harddrives. Even he says they're complete crap. He was eager to share the strengths and weaknesses of drives from the last ten years. Awesome convo.

Even he says that WD dropped their warranty to one year for a reason. They've been having qc problems for the past 10 years, and in order to keep the RMA rate under 40% they reduced the warranty. No kidding? As long as the last one day past warranty, WD is off the hook. The only reason they sell is because they retail $2 cheaper than the competition (which is a full hour's wages for half the people here) and wholesale not quite $10 cheaper.

They

Are

CRAP.

Easy way to tell who knows they're stuff and who doesn't.. Listen to who flaunts WD Caviar SEs. Chances are really good they're a hobbyist at best.

If you put those POSes in RAID 0, you're an idiot.

I had a wicked time finding a portable enclosure that would even work with a WD. Many of the more common ones won't even work with the SEs, even limiting the drive to SATA 1.

JUNK!!!!!!!!!! Damn, I knew there was a reason I stopped retailing those scrap piles.
 
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wow, yeah i read somewhere (good idea) when you get a drive use it 24/7 compleatly ware it down make it spin a lot for a week, if it goes bad it is bad if it lasta it will last for years
 
SirKenin said:
Well, this week has been an interesting week. I've seen one or two corrupted drives each day, minimum 7 computers to repair a day. Every single one of the toasted drives were Caviar SEs. Every damn one.

I had a lady specifically request a WD SE in an external case. I made the big mistake of providing one as a favor. It lasted 48 hours before it completely died. It's currently in the back seat of my car. A Caviar SE 16 drive. Deader than dead.

I successfully repaired all but one of them. The one today was completely fubar unfortunately.

Complete, total garbage. I had a guy come in tonight who was brought in on contract for the federal government. His very first two tasks... RMA two full cases of WD harddrives. Even he says they're complete crap. He was eager to share the strengths and weaknesses of drives from the last ten years. Awesome convo.

Even he says that WD dropped their warranty to one year for a reason. They've been having qc problems for the past 10 years, and in order to keep the RMA rate under 40% they reduced the warranty. No kidding? As long as the last one day past warranty, WD is off the hook. The only reason they sell is because they retail $2 cheaper than the competition (which is a full hour's wages for half the people here) and wholesale not quite $10 cheaper.

They

Are

CRAP.

Easy way to tell who knows they're stuff and who doesn't.. Listen to who flaunts WD Caviar SEs. Chances are really good they're a hobbyist at best.

If you put those POSes in RAID 0, you're an idiot.

I had a wicked time finding a portable enclosure that would even work with a WD. Many of the more common ones won't even work with the SEs, even limiting the drive to SATA 1.

JUNK!!!!!!!!!! Damn, I knew there was a reason I stopped retailing those scrap piles.
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As I will be building a new comp soon and was thinking about the Caviar drives,what is a good brand and model of HDD that has good quality and reliability in your experience that I should buy instead?

Greg
 
i have my wd active for 24/7. i'll tell you guys if it dies within 3 years. i'm weary about getting the 1tb green drive now

edit:
make that 1 year. so far it's been 3 months of constant writing/reading with no probs
 
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Well I must be blessed as I've had mine for 6 months and no problems whatsoever ... :D

Forgot to add that I have older WD products that haven't even belched ... :)
 
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Cavier REs are fine, I've never had a problem with Seagate either. Samsung makes some good drives as well. That's not so say all drives from a particular manufacturer are all automatically good (or bad for that matter) though.

Some people have used Cavier SEs for years without trouble too. It really depends on how much load you put on your drives.
 
perhaps canadians get c grade wd

there was a theory on sony laptops. a grade would go to japan and usa. c grades go to developing countries like china, india, etc. this information was hearsay though
 
Yes, Caviar REs are fine, although they don't get along well with certain hotswap backplanes and controllers. WD Raptors are fantastic. Not so much for the speed, but for their durability.

Maxtor makes a lot of good drives, now that they've done away with the Quantum tech. They had three really bad lines from that acquisition, but that was almost ten years ago now. Once they redesigned the structure to take the heat generated from the faster drives they were good to go.

Seagate makes some fine drives too.
 
If you get a W/D drive for a upper end computer get a Raptor or a RE. I really use aot of SE drives in lower end models that I build for people that just go on the Internet, check there email, like IM, print photos and so on and have had good luck with them. But higher end setups I use W/D Raptors-W/D RE and Seagates.
 
Western Digital, in my opinion, has a gotten better. A few years ago I purchased one of their drives and it had many problems. A couple of months ago I bought a WD Passport and it's one of the best drives I've bought.
 
Don't feel sorry for you, I support 5500 macbooks and 1500ish desktops or so and well we have 100s of Hard drives fail each week. that is right, 100s. Most of them are WD as well. However, according to some inside information its not totally the HD's fault is what I am being told from engineers at apple. It has to do with some sort of voltage regulation with some chip that was manufactured not quite to spec, or blah blah blah.
 
:) I don't feel sorry for me either. I get paid for it. I feel sorry for the client though. They call in a panic because they've got so much important data on it that they really don't want to lose and it usually takes 1 1/2 hours to get it back again. That one yesterday I couldn't rescue a thing. All the others I've fixed, though, and made some very happy, loyal clients.

Still... WD Caviar SEs suck.
 
my 160gb Caviar hasnt failed me in over 4 years, even through multiple formats and partitions.
maybe im lucky?
 
Easy way to tell who knows they're stuff and who doesn't.. Listen to who flaunts WD Caviar SEs. Chances are really good they're a hobbyist at best.
Click to expand...

A 'hobbyist', huh...:rolleyes:

I don't flaunt them, but drives of every make/model fail every day. Repairing as many systems as you do...well, you should know that.

Bad luck/coincidence.
 
imsati said:
A 'hobbyist', huh...:rolleyes:

I don't flaunt them, but drives of every make/model fail every day. Repairing as many systems as you do...well, you should know that.

Bad luck/coincidence.
Click to expand...

Yup, at my last job we were a certified HP self maintainer, with me being the main APS HP certified IT person. Meaning I facilitated all warranty repairs and claims for about 8,000 or so HP products including servers, desktops and notebooks. Not a single day ever went by with out me having to replace some failed part in some if not all of their products. Their servers needed less maintenence, yes I will come out and say that. They barely failed, but they failed. I had to replace a few motherobads, a few RAID controllers, and several hard drives over the few years I have worked there. We also had a couple of xserves there, and now I work with pretty much a 100% Mac network and I help managed 20 xserves, with a directory (OD, LDAP) and a full on enterprise solution.

I can safely say that even though I am also seeing massive HD failures, I have to repair the Mac machines at a far less rate than any PC counterpart. I also have never in my 4 years working with Xserves ever had to replace a single part, besides one failed HD. Where as with every other server brand I have worked with in the last 4 years I have replaced RAM, motherboards, RAID controllers, NICs, and hard drives.

Everyone experiences life differently and my experiences may differ from yours, but I think my results speak for them self when talking about quality control of a product.
 
I have a 74.5 gigabyte, Western Digital Model WD800, Parallel ATA hard drive I have been using since August 2003. It is obviously an older model and I am reluctant to give it up as it has no bad sectors and is still working great.

If I do buy another Western Digital hard drive it definitely will be one of the Caviar RE, or Raptor models.
 
SirKenin said:
Well, this week has been an interesting week. I've seen one or two corrupted drives each day, minimum 7 computers to repair a day. Every single one of the toasted drives were Caviar SEs. Every damn one.

I had a lady specifically request a WD SE in an external case. I made the big mistake of providing one as a favor. It lasted 48 hours before it completely died. It's currently in the back seat of my car. A Caviar SE 16 drive. Deader than dead.

I successfully repaired all but one of them. The one today was completely fubar unfortunately.

Complete, total garbage. I had a guy come in tonight who was brought in on contract for the federal government. His very first two tasks... RMA two full cases of WD harddrives. Even he says they're complete crap. He was eager to share the strengths and weaknesses of drives from the last ten years. Awesome convo.

Even he says that WD dropped their warranty to one year for a reason. They've been having qc problems for the past 10 years, and in order to keep the RMA rate under 40% they reduced the warranty. No kidding? As long as the last one day past warranty, WD is off the hook. The only reason they sell is because they retail $2 cheaper than the competition (which is a full hour's wages for half the people here) and wholesale not quite $10 cheaper.

They

Are

CRAP.

Easy way to tell who knows they're stuff and who doesn't.. Listen to who flaunts WD Caviar SEs. Chances are really good they're a hobbyist at best.

If you put those POSes in RAID 0, you're an idiot.

I had a wicked time finding a portable enclosure that would even work with a WD. Many of the more common ones won't even work with the SEs, even limiting the drive to SATA 1.

JUNK!!!!!!!!!! Damn, I knew there was a reason I stopped retailing those scrap piles.
Click to expand...

Did you really have to start a rant thread? (Useless)

You're IT, most ppl here know that, you IT guys hate everything... And it being you, I see that you might be trying to start something, don't deny it.

I've ran WD in every PC I've had, even the PC(years ago) I had with a 6Gb drive. I've never had a problem... I did almost lose my job b/c a Maxtor drive couldn't wait 12 hours to be backed up. RAID 0 has it's advantages and if anyone runs them like that, good for them, they took the time to set them up, and if that's the way they want it then so be it.

I feel like this post was shot at PC eye, mep916, and me, just to see if you could get a reaction. It's a sad and sorry life to be entertained by having the amount of time to think about making a thread to piss ppl off... That's why it's yours...

An enclosure problem is not WD's fault, which came first between the enclosure or the drive?

If you haven't noticed, CF is full of hobbyists, no doubt I am one... You must remember that hobbyists run the PC market. But, I want to know what kind of education, type of certifications, etc, that you have... I have never seen you reveal anything... I have none but, by the time I graduate, I could have A+, Network+, Security+, MCPD, Both CC*A certs, and all the CC*P certs... Just a thought from thinking about certifications-- I don't guess I have to have one to label ppl as any alternative name for idiot I choose. I could make a whole list for you...
 
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