[ale] Western Digital Rocks!

[Doug Hall]

Just wanted to post a positive experience with Western Digital
Customer Service. I had a WD1002FBYS 1TB Enterprise SATA drive that I
had bought in January of 2010 to have an IO problem, according to a
SMART report that my NAS system warned me about. The drive has a five
year warranty, so I knew I was covered. I got Enterprise drives just
for this type of thing. I knew they would run a lot, so I decided not
to lowball the two drives which occupy my RAID1 NAS.

Anyway, Western Digital couldn't be easier to deal with. I used both
their web site, and called customer support during the swap. Both are
good. I could actually understand the support rep. :-) They sent me a
new drive, which is actually better, with a 64MB cache, vs. the 32MB
cache on my original drive. It came two day air. Easy breazy. I just
secure-wiped the old drive, and sent it back to them in the packaging
they sent me. They even made it easy to buy a discounted UPS packing
label, so all I had to do was drop it off at a local Office Depot.

I was surprised to get the error to begin with, because it was the
first time that I can remember having any trouble with a Western
Digital Drive (and I've bought my share of them over the years). It
didn't crash, by the way, it was still functioning - just reporting a
SMART error. Anyway, it's good to know they have good support. If they
keep this up, I will never buy a different brand of drive.

Doug Hall