i would just like to say this is the second western digital that i have had die on me... my hitachis and my maxtors work fine but i had a 60gig western digital die and a 200 gig western digital.... the problem is there rma service is horrible... they expect me to pay for the shipping on the hard drive while they hold MY money so they can ship me another thatll probably die in 2 months... i am fed up with western digital... :|

Purchased WD Raptor 36GB drive and worked in RAID 0 for approx. 8 months. Started clicking and machine rebooted. RMA'd drive and WD received drive on 031704 they logged drive as received on 032304. I got no email on replacement drive for some time and called. They said they have no WD Raptor 36GB drives in stock and I am on a wait list? On 041404 I get email that my replacement drive has shipped (just shy of a 30 day turn around). Then I check status of tracking and find WD shipped the replacement drive "UPS GROUND"? I will not recieve the drive until 041904, 30 plus days after WD received the drive for replacement. Keep in mind the WD Raptor is an Enterprise "Business" class drive with a 5 year warranty. What business could deal with 30 day warranty replacement not to mention the drives should work for 5 years not 8 months. I am evaluating further WD purchases and suggest any RMA use the credit card and they ship drive to you then you send drive to them or you might just be treated the way I was. UnHappy with WD !

Bought a WD1200JBRTL from Fry's in San Diego. Mailed in my rebate a couple days later. Recieved letter from WD saying my purchase was not in the time frame. I have reciepts to prove that it was. I was ripped off by 50 bucks Thanks WD you just lost a customer.

This review was modified by its author, midas38, on 4/9/04 12:08 AM.

I used to loathe WD. I had a total of 8 drives from them all fail (sizes ranging from 6.4 to 10GB, if this is any indication of how long ago it was) realatively soon after purchase. I didn't know that much about RMA or any of the like, but Best Buy was a willing swap-host.  
 
For the longest time, I swore by Maxtor. Then the WD Special Editions with the 8MB cache came out. I had a few extra bucks and nabbed a 120GB for the hell of it. Guess what... now all that I have in my system is WD. I may be crazy, but they've all been rock solid (the two 120's (RAID-0) are over 2 years of near-constant use, the 160 just turned 2 years old last month, and the 2 SATA Raptors (RAID-0) are just... wow. O.O).  
 
As long as you don't get tricked into getting their 'Valuedrive' (5400 RPM with 2mb o' cache, probably made in the same factory and by the same workers as JTS was (not familiar with JTS? They were in business for less than a year. The company was from India, and has a 100% failure rate. Most drives never even lived to be more than six months old))) then you should be fine. The Special Editions are carrying a 3 year warranty, and the Raptors (built from their SCSI line of HDs) come with a 5 year.  
 
At work, I deal with mostly Hitachi and Seagates. I RMA more of those than any other drive. Yes, mechanical parts *DO* fail, it's inevitable. Those drives, though, only come with a 1 year warranty, so... in order to get an RMA, they're all dying before reaching their first birthday. That's just not right.  
 

Exellent Company to do business with.  
No hassle when returning a defective product under warranty  
Very prompt on replacing defective hardware which was the first defective product I encountered in purchasing from western digital in the last 15 years

WD customer support is awesome. I bought a retail 200gb drive from Dell, but had no controller card. WD support was very prompt and curteous and sent the controller card via UPS second day air no questions asked!  
 
because of this service, i think WD has won me over for future purchases