My (positive) experience with WD

[tucansam]

Apologies in advance to the mods and readers as this is not a post that will generate useful technical answers, however I hope this post finds some acceptance in this forum and some find it informative.

 

I am writing this because I felt the need to bring attention to the customer service I received from Western Digital.  I am not affiliated with WD, aside from being an end user.  I simply feel that customer service such as I received deserves to be shared.

 

I had a 160GB WD Black laptop disk that began the click of death some months ago.  It sat in my garage until I happened to glance at the date of MFG and realized it may be under warranty.  I went to WD's site and, lo-and-behold, I had six months left on the warranty. 

 

I sent the drive back to WD for replacement, cost me $5.15 Priority Mail.  That was nine days ago. 

 

Today UPS dropped off a brand new 500GB WD Black.

 

I can only assume that the 160GB models are no longer kept in inventory, and that they sent me the smallest WD Black they currently manufacture.  No fuss, no emails.  Just a brand new drive nine days door-to-door after I sent the original. 

 

I realize that for a company such as WD, this is no big deal, and I can only imagine the markup on these drives over their actual mfg cost.  However I firmly believe that "only 10% of happy customers post positive feedback" when I myself am reading product reviews, so I figured I would chime in, even if it is a huge company sending a meager product to a small time buyer. 

 

I have a mix of WD and Seagate drives in my systems, and have used both for decades, and I have nothing bad to say about Seagate at all, however FWIW, WD will get my business in the future whenever possible.  Customer service goes a long way with me.

 

[garycase]

They do indeed have excellent warranty service ... the last 3 drives I've had replaced have all been larger than the failed drive.    In fact, I'd probably be disappointed these days if it wasn't 

 

[Frank1940]

I have probably sent a half dozen drives back to various manufacturers over the years that were within their warranty period.  They have always been replaced very quickly without any hassle.

 

I believe that unless you are sending a a lot of drives (and, perhaps, all right at the end of their warranty period) and thus get 'flagged', they don't even look at the drive except to read the serial number to verify that is is still in warranty.  From a PR standpoint, it really doesn't made much sense to piss off a customer who thinks a drive is bad, took the trouble to remove it from his system and pay to ship it back by telling him you are are not going to replace it because your tests on his returned drive failed to find a problem.  And I would suspect that +99.9% of the returned drives are defective in any case.  Plus, it is actually cheaper to replace all the returned drives that are still in the warranty without any hassle and if the manufacturer decides to evaluate them to ship them to a third world country to to do that analysis. 

[neilt0]

I returned a Seagate drive and I'm pretty sure they didn't look at it, as they didn't even ask for a fail code on the online form, but the refurb they sent me died after 2 days, meaning I had to pay to ship the dead one back again.

 

Good news: none of my WDs have failed under warranty...

[gwl]

 

They do indeed have excellent warranty service ... the last 3 drives I've had replaced have all been larger than the failed drive.    In fact, I'd probably be disappointed these days if it wasn't 

Actually, their 5yr warranty was one of the reasons I went with a few of their Black hdds.

 

 

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