PLEASE SEE MY NEXT POST, WD NOT REALLY AT FAULT!
Last April I discovered that I had lost quite a bit of data off my laptops 120g hard drive I had bought in November ’06. I had the drive replaced, and the process went fairly smoothly. I was quite mad that they were going to make me pay shipping, and they were going to charge my debit card (which had no money on it) before I could do an ARMA (Advance Return Material Authorization, they send a replacement drive as you send yours.) Now the only option was to be without a computer for a week or two, and then try to recover what data I could off the internet. I was fortunate enough to have a way to back up my remaining data, I don’t know what someone would have to do if they didn’t have a file server. Even so, I got a refurbished drive back in a week and started recovering data.
Yesterday, however, I was forced to restore a corrupt pci.sys from a backup installation, and today I had one of my utilities decide not to work. I was even more surprised when Speedfan, a great utility that told me that my last drive died, couldn’t read the SMART info. I do also want to say that I switched out the motherboard shortly after sending back my drive, so that is not the problem. I am now about to send the drive back again, without an ARMA, to get it replaced. I originally bought from Western Digital because I heard they are reliable, but I think I might just switch brands.
