A Conflagration of Randomness

I’d say it is about time I get back to the receipt of my inquiry to Western Digital about my hard drive.

First, as far as I know, this new drive I was sent has been working okay (I stress okay since it definitely isn’t perfect or even near).  I haven’t lost any major files as of yet, though I have been careful not to put anything of value on it.

While I was away in Germany, I awaited the return of the hard drive (as well as my college acceptance letter which turned into a rejection  letter.  I’ll post about that in another post)  and upon my return from Germany, I hadn’t yet received the hard drive, but it came within a few days. I unpacked it installed it as before and have left it thus.

Now I will explain the process you should take in case you need to return your hard drive:

1.  Go to the site I posted on my last entry.  Here it is.
2. You need to prepare your hard drive.  If not they may return the drive without consideration.  To do so follow this:
   • Find a box large enough to put the hard drive in and make sure it is corrugated.
   • Wrap the hard drive in the electrostatic bag you got it in or find another.
   • Register an RMA at that site.
   • Either you can pay for tyhe postage or you can use WD’s postal service which allows you to print a label form their site.  It is slightly cheaper.
   • Put the RMA number on the outside of the box if you don’t purchase one of their labels.
   • Send through the post and hope they send you a new one.

The one thing that annoys me most about the WDs is that they turn off to0 safe electricity and make a really loud noise when turning back on which not only delays their activity, but also disrupts watching movies or listening to music.

Yep, tomorrow I am going to Germany for an exchange trip. Since I am in the top orchestra at my school, we go to Germany every two years and since it is my senior year, this is my last time knowing the German students. We are going to Detmold which is in Westphalia. It is going to be fun and I might post some things here while I am there.

In September, my 5 year old hard drive started making those clicking sounds that often tell of their soon to be death. And sure enough within the month, my computer had died and I was in need of reinstalling windows. So I had 2 hard drives and was planning on exchanging them, putting the OS on my 80 GB hard drive and leaving the 160 GB one completely free, but alas, as I was pulling the 80 GB out, it hit the platform on my computer and was thus broken.

So the next day I bid my father to go out and we’d buy an external drive, a Buffalo Brand 500 GB for $109, but since I knew of Western Digital (my hard drives at home were all WD) the man there was able to tempt to buy the WD 500 GB MyBook for $129 because he said he didn’t trust the Buffalos. Little did I know, the Western Digital 500 GB is considered one of the worst External Hard Drives. I had it for a few days and it started randomly deleting files, which would turn up a week later in the same folder, but others would disappear. I found one solution to the problem was to plug the adapter directly in the wall since it takes so much power. However, though that lasted for a few weeks, stuff once again started to disappear. And not more than two months after I had gotten it, most of my files were corrupted. So I started googling some answers.

I first started with data recovery tools since I needed to get the data back that had been lost on my drive (a load of music and other programs). After coming across GetDataBack for FAT (which I got for free *cough*), I backed up my whole drive to my G: Drive. It turns out the supposed 128 GB of used space was mostly just corrupt files. Then I turned my search to other tools to see just how bad the 500 GB MyBook is. I eventually came across this site which tells how you can break apart the case of a MyBook and recover the hard drive in there that can then be easily plugged into a SATA capable computer.

However, if you only have had the drive for a few months, you can easily return it to Western Digital who will send you a replacement one. I recently did this and am awaiting the return of the new drive. The process is called getting an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) and you can start the process here.

My point is don’t buy a Western Digital 500 GB MyBook even if your local computer store salesman tells you too because it most likely will break. Many users complain about it also never starting up again though I never had that problem.