So Western Digital Caviar Black is worth paying more for than other hard drive choices eh? I just got a laugh when I found out that the 640 GB Western Digital Caviar Black that was being used in my son's pc was already a replacement drive for one that didn't work out of the box that I bought in 2010. So now Western Digital will have us on our 3rd hard drive from them when I RMA his current hard drive. I am lucky that the warranty was still going. 5 year warranty = thank goodness. In regards to the drive that is being RMA'ed I knew for a few days something was wrong with something in the PC but I assumed it would be the Seagate hard drive but nope. The so called top dog of hard drives, Western Digital, is the one that is sounding loud and irritating and is I guess having reading problems.
Soooooo ... anyone ever go through more drives than this while the thing was still under warranty? I am guessing yes that someone has a greater horror story than mine.
Never had to RMA a drive or SSD. Only issues I had were with my Seagate 1.5TB drives. Things were piles of shit and died right after the warranty was up. Never had a WD or other brand HDD/SSD fail.
At the time I bought the WD Black it was pre-flood pricing. I got it at a really good deal. I am like you now where no way in heck I will pay extra for WD. Now I am at the point where hey until Seagate fails me why buy WD?
I had eight WD greens go on me within a month of each other, but that was probably because I was using them in a server. I had a WD velociraptor die almost immediately and then the replacement die pretty soon after, my current one is still going though.
I had a bunch of OCZ SSDs die on me, didn't bother RMAing them though as they're junk.
Had to RMA a Maxtor hard drive many moons ago. Had built my first system (back in 1995) and had used a Maxtor drive. One day I jogged the table the PC was on and heard a grinding sound. Rebooted only to find that the drive wouldn't boot. Had to send the drive to Ireland as the warrenty from PC World in Brentford had passed. Got a replacement sent, only to find that it was defective. Never used Maxtor after that. Have since found out that Maxtor was bought by Seagate a number of years back.
I tried to RMA a defective Crucial SSD but they said they'd give me £20 ex VAT on the Crucial store for it which was a joke because after searching the internet I found out that the whole line of SSDs in this model were defective and Crucial knew about it before I even bought the drive. I guess I can't complain much because it was only a 60GB SATA 2 drive which I got for around £35 but they still should have pulled the line before I bought it instead of attempting to sell off the defective stock.
I have had one drive fail. I guess I have just been lucky so far. I don't think WD Blacks are worth getting unless you are doing constant read/writes but still then looking over in the NAS area for harddrives is probably a better idea anyway. - 2008ish, 320GB WD Drive. Still works but has been on a shelf for a year. -2009 500Gb laptop Drive. Still kicking with the original Windows Vista (facepalm) install. -Date unknown, 160gb Laptop Drive. Still working. -2011 1TB Hitachi Drive. -2012 500GB Seagate Drive. Still kicking in my laptop. -2013 Samsung 840 Evo, 120Gb. Still working like when I got it. -2014 1TB Seagate SSHD, DEAD. Working on a RMA. -2015 OCZ Arc 100, 240Gb. Working on par with the 840 Evo 50ish read difference.
I only buy HDDs which have good warranties and aren't too slow on the RMA side. Reliability is not worth looking for IMHO considering a drive can die at any time anyway. I would recommend backing up to a NAS or external HDD.
I'm not sure if they're still making them or if they went out of business, but a few years ago all their SSDs were trash. They had frequent failures and all sorts of firmware issues. I bought four of them I think before I knew about this and all of them have failed.
I think afterwards they partnered with or bought out Everest and maybe that fixed the issues they were having but I'll never buy another one from them if they're still around.