- Dec 25, 2008
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What has been other people's experience with the WD Black drives ? Mine has been horrible on the reliability front, and while the RMA process is smooth and fast, the replacements have been anything from DOA straight out of the box to rapidly dead or defective on another front.
I have quite a few WD Greens that have never needed an RMA and are working happily years later. I recently bought 8 WD 3TB Reds that I setup in a NAS box and they are just fine so far.
I've owned 5 WD 1TB Black drives. Only one has not needed to be RMAed. The other four have all failed in different ways from becoming invisible to any system they are plugged into, to clicking and clacking noises and causing file corruption to anything put on them.
Three out of four of those RMAs returned a defective drive. One of the RMAs was DOA out of the box, another failed within a month and the third will work for a short while but the drive ends up running so hot that it overheats and BSODs the computer it's plugged into. The thing literally is so hot I have to remove it with a dish towel. The overheating one is the most recent dead replacement drive I had. The first two I had to RMA again.. guess what.. both replacements are now dead. One died in a week and the other failed within months. I just have them stuffed away because I can't be bothered to RMA them again (which I have to pay shipping on to send the defectives back) and now I have this overheating replacement failure which again I cannot be bothered to RMA.
I tried speaking to WD to try to replace these 1TB Blacks with 2TB Greens, about the same price at retail. Didn't even get a response to my ticket, just closed it 5 days later.
These are what retail blacks look like
This is what you get in return for an RMA, with a small 'recertified' notation on the label
TLDR: Western Digital Black hard drives are garbage and the returns are garbage amplified.
I have quite a few WD Greens that have never needed an RMA and are working happily years later. I recently bought 8 WD 3TB Reds that I setup in a NAS box and they are just fine so far.
I've owned 5 WD 1TB Black drives. Only one has not needed to be RMAed. The other four have all failed in different ways from becoming invisible to any system they are plugged into, to clicking and clacking noises and causing file corruption to anything put on them.
Three out of four of those RMAs returned a defective drive. One of the RMAs was DOA out of the box, another failed within a month and the third will work for a short while but the drive ends up running so hot that it overheats and BSODs the computer it's plugged into. The thing literally is so hot I have to remove it with a dish towel. The overheating one is the most recent dead replacement drive I had. The first two I had to RMA again.. guess what.. both replacements are now dead. One died in a week and the other failed within months. I just have them stuffed away because I can't be bothered to RMA them again (which I have to pay shipping on to send the defectives back) and now I have this overheating replacement failure which again I cannot be bothered to RMA.
I tried speaking to WD to try to replace these 1TB Blacks with 2TB Greens, about the same price at retail. Didn't even get a response to my ticket, just closed it 5 days later.
These are what retail blacks look like
This is what you get in return for an RMA, with a small 'recertified' notation on the label
TLDR: Western Digital Black hard drives are garbage and the returns are garbage amplified.