The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/thesentrygamer on 2025-02-26 18:28:05.
Hey all! Just sharing my recent experience with the fallen king of hard disks: Western Digital. Due to frequent commutes between home and campus, I felt it necessary to bring my data with me on an external device. I went with WD for a 5TB USB3 device because I had very good experiences with them in the past. This drive never really ended up serving this purpose and within a month was hooked up to my main system as an additional drive instead, but within a year of purchase, the drive started to spit out CRC Check errors and I began to lose data integrity.
I immediately contacted Support to get an RMA set up, where the CS Rep I received became insistent that I not only was unaware of how hard drives worked, but that I for some reason had a mac, sending me picture diagrams on how to check on whether or not the device was plugged in and visible in Disk Utility. I never once mentioned Macintosh, nor did I make any sort of claim that the drive wasn't showing up, yet it took half an hour for this rep to finally concede that my drive was faulty and begin the process of RMA. upon which he wasted no time trying to extract more money from me to repair an $150 defective product by pushing me on an "Advanced RMA" where I pay extra to get a hold placed on my card and they send me a drive first before I send it back.
It took another 15 minutes to convince this rep that I did not want to pay them extra to honor my warranty agreement, and he eventually led me down to the Standard RMA process. From here, it took a normal turn for exactly 1 week as your typical box, ship, and wait RMA experience occurs, except I waited a month and a half for my replacement drive to be shipped in the first place! I called them regularly to ask where the hell it was, and I kept getting the same unhelpful response: "We've put a mark on your incident and will have it out the door ASAP"
tl;dr WD dropped the RMA ball so hard that I refuse to buy from them again
EDIT: Wow, after getting this drive back, I've noticed that the default formatting is in exfat with an allocation unit size of 1MB, on a drive marketed towards storing games. I only noticed this as I began moving my files back onto it and discovered that the drive was using a Terrabyte more in space than I had given in files. Are they actively trying to make their drives hold less in reality?
EDIT 2: exfat is not inherently a problem, as I understand the benefits for a general audience, but the default allocation for exfat drives this size is 128KB, they made a conscious choice to change that to 1MB