A dozen years ago I was a young IT manager at a Raleigh software company. I had just ordered new Gateway 2000 PCs for our developers but something was terribly wrong. After just six months of service, the Western Digital hard drives in the new PCs all failed, taking a lot of work with them and adding a lot of work for me to rebuild the systems. I swore I would never buy another Western Digital hard drive.
Time moves on and the anger subsides. WD did the right thing by replacing all the defective drives. Quality improved. I dared purchase more WD stuff.
Then trouble struck again. My Western Digital MyBook, a 500GB external USB drive I purchased in May, became a brick a week ago. The drive won’t spin up. Apparently the USB controller inside is faulty. After poking around the Internets, I’m relieved to discover that this appears to be a common problem and the drive itself is probably okay. All I need to do is pop it onto a SATA card in my desktop machine and I can copy everything off. Still, it shakes my already shaky trust in Western Digital.
On the other hand, I purchased this drive for about $150, which is easily half the cost of the drives in the Gateway machines years ago (and the drive is orders of magnitude larger). Amazing to get so much for so little. Somehow Western Digital is making a profit, but it can’t be much.
My experiences with Western Digital have been the exact opposite: total satisfaction. When the first 1 gig IDE drives came out I used all my saved Young Geek overtime money to purchase one. This was a long time ago, I was quite a bit younger, and I think the drive cost $700.00? It was expensive but I reveled in the fact that “I would never run out of disk space”. Yeah. Right.
I’ve purchased more WD drives over the years but admittedly not for some time. I’d hate to WD to get a reputation reserved for drives like the IBM Deathstar! Remember those? 33%+ failure rate… I have always wonders just how much wind that took out of Ocualn’s sails.