1/5

posted Mar-28-2006

Several years ago, the hard drive manufacturers all got together and decided to cut their warranties from 3 years to 1 year.

There were some minor exceptions. One of these was the Western Digital Special Edition drive.

I immediately began purchasing these drives for the systems at work; specifically for their ADVERTISED 3 year warranty.

Recently, one of these drives failed just inside the 3 year mark and I attempted to get an RMA for the malfunctioning drive.

Imagine my surprise when a Western Digital support representative told me that despite the correct part number, an advertised 3 year warranty and my ability to document the date and location of my purchase (Newegg); they would not honor the warranty.

Apparently, the drive I had purchased was tagged in their system as destined for the Asian hemisphere; ‘Out of Region’. They will not honor the warranty.

There is supposedly a process for handling such problems. I diligently emailed them scans of the hard drive label and the original receipt. That was almost three weeks ago and the ‘forum post’ is still listed as ‘escalated’.

I believe that Western Digital has some compelling products in their Raptor and RE2 lines. Unfortunately, I will no longer be purchasing or recommending them to others as Western Digital’s word is apparently not worth the letterhead it is printed on.

I encourage anyone else who has had similar problems with Western Digital to file complaints with the Better Business Bureau and continue to post your experiences online. Maybe if enough complaints are registered, some enterprising lawyer could start a class action lawsuit that would get them to change their nefarious business practices.

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5/5

posted Nov-01-2004

I ordered a replacement HP JetDirect 610n card for one of our network printers. HP recently upgraded this card to a new model that included features I did not need at over $300. I found the older card at Upgrade Nation for a good price and ordered it on 10/26 (evening) with 2nd day air shipping. The part was picked up on 10/27 by DHL and went into their usual black hole of shipping until 10/31 when it popped up in Fresno, CA. It arrived in Oakland on 11/1 and is currently functioning properly in an HP printer. Other than DHL's less than stellar shipping, the order was a complete success. Upgrade Nation did a good job of receiving, packing and shipping the JetDirect card. I would order from them again.

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5/5

posted Apr-16-2003

I ordered a laptop hard drive caddy for my Dell C400 laptop with the intention of having an alternative operating system to boot from without any possible impact on my business based Windows 2000 installation. The caddy arrived on time and packaged appropriately. Unfortunately, despite the correct part number on the box, this caddy did not resemble the website's picture or my current Dell supplied caddy. I called XtraDisk and left a voicemail stating my situation. I promptly received a call from Tom Hamlin at XtraDisk. He carefully listened to the description of my caddy and that of the caddy that was sent to me. He contacted his distributor and had them open a box to verify that the replacement part he intended to send me matched my description. The replacement part arrived within a short period of time. It was the correct part. I returned the incorrect part to Tom at XtraDisk. In addition to promptly returning my phone calls, checking to see that the replacement part was correct before it was shipped and emailing me status updates, Tom was generally pleasant to deal with. I would recommend this vendor based upon my purchasing experience and how they handled the return process.

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5/5

posted Mar-21-2003

I purchased two slim CD-ROM drives with IDE adapter boards. The adapters allow you to connect them to a standard PC IDE cable. Big008 was one of very few vendors to carry these items. The parts arrived on time and packaged correctly. I was notified by email when the order was "completed" and again when it was shipped. The second email included a FedEx tracking number.

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5/5

posted Mar-21-2003

I ordered a cool USB Flash drive/MP3 player. My order was processed quickly, packaged correctly and arrived on time. Their website was easy to navigate. I appreciated the level of detail and the ability to view full sized images of the product.

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2/5

posted Jan-30-2003

I recently ordered almost $400 woth of accessories for our company's Dell C400 laptop. The order was placed on 1/21, the order was processed on 1/24, an email acknowledgement was sent on 1/29. Upon checking their site on 1/30, still no tracking number.

A recent visit to Dell's site regarding a warranty issue on a DLT tape drive revealed that they had taken down any useful information regarding the warranty claim process. Several calls to different Dell #'s just got me transferred around. One hour later, I finally get to a "Tape Backup Support Specialist" who was resonably helpful until he couldn't cross reference this tape drive model to my Dell Poweredge server. He also kept insisting that the "Fault" light could be kept on by the NT driver which is not loaded before the operating system loads. If the server has power, the light stays on; even at a DOS prompt booted from a floppy disk. Apparently, the sales person at Dell who sold me the tape drive upgrade didn't input the info into the database that cross references my service tag for this server. That's the end of support until I can dig up the original receipt and go through phone hell all over again.

Dell has definitely gone down hill. The support contract is up for our two servers in July.

"Dude, I'm buildin' my own server!"

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