Pathetic After sales support & fraud behaviour by WD in India

W

Recently I purchased a My Book 8TB Model from Tata Cliq based on good feedback from @Extreme Gamer who also got the same model but from Amazon. When I got the drive it seemed to be working fine but during my test run of copy pasting a few dozen GBs of data I found out a very serious flaw. The drive was reaching 60C temperature even during the current approaching winter season in Delhi-NCR that too during night time when outside temps are in the range of 15-16C. I tested again on different times of the day & got same result. In fact I found out once the drive is heated up to 63C it won't even go down below 59-60C if you just leave it connected to system doing nothing.

I checked with @Extreme Gamer & found out that he got WDC WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 model hdd inside his My Book drive while I got WD80EDAZ-11TA3A0. The most significant difference between these 2 models is that WD80EZAZ-11TDBA0 is Helium filled model while mine WD80EDAZ-11TA3A0 was an air filled model(Helium filled hdd models are newest tech & runs cooler on an avg than air filled models). Also this particular air filled model WD80EDAZ-11TA3A0 that I got runs hot even for an usual air filled hdd. You can find reports of this particular hdd model running very hot compared to usual on reddit too from users in US/EU which have much colder climate than India.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/g61kvi

They run way hotter than my other drives. I have 2 8 tb edaz drives and also 2 8tb ezaz Drives.
and 6 3 tb wd reds.
These run atleast 10 degrees hotter than any of my other hard drives. I was dumb enough to make one of them my parity drive on unraid. my wd red 3 tb run at 35 degrees. the ezaz drives are at 39. These hover around 50 to 52 at the best location of my fractal define r5 diretc at the fans both of them with within 2 inch.... the other ones dont have direct airflow. as much they are still lower temperature.
even my r5 3600 never reaches 54 degrees under full load and mostly idles at 30. These are the hottest components in my server..... they do their job they read just as well as the other ones. BUT THEYRE HOTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.
Before shucking them they ran at 70 degrees in the case. While i did my preclear. i should have taken them back. But i thought it was because of the hard drive case.....
I regret that now.
They idle at 45
they also made some of my other drives hotter as well.

I bought a another 3 all of them edaz drive they all run hot in the case didnt bother shucking them. Theyre terrible 3 of them in my fractal case bring up all the temps to 10C hotter on all my other hard drives im not taking any risks. I sugest to anyone who is using more than 2 at a time to just return them...
Normal unraid temps with 3tb were 32 to 35c. After these 3 that i have already spin up every other drive become 45 degree on mostly idle if theyre in use. They go over 50 all the time at like 23C ambient.... i dont recomend these.
Keep in mind that I use to run 10 3 tb wd reds. and the temps never went above 38c.

Thanks for the pics and update on more EDAZ being as hot. Mine is hitting 64c in the enclosure and I don't want to bother shucking it at this point.
The fact that you used 4 drives and they were all the same shows they do run hot. People say they'll run fine when you take them out but I don't want to run the fan on my Synology at max just to keep these shitty drives from overheating.
The JAAHLE code on the bottom indicates its air and not helium, another datahoarder user figured that out, if the DCM code starts with J, its air, if its H, its helium.

I just got 2 of these as Well from Best Buy, It seems no one still has any real info on them. Also mine run warm, i have one idling at 51c with ZERO data on it. I plugged it in out of the box and just let it sit to see what it would do.
EDIT: I let it sit there for another hour and it got up to around 54 while doing absolutely NOTHING.
If these are in fact data center drives the heat makes sense, most data centers are being HEAVILY cooled and these drives would be fine in those conditions, The data center i b worked for had huge amount of cooling being pumped into every server room to the point you almost needed a jacket to walk in. We dont have these condition in our homes.

I had this HDD and decided to return it. It just feels bit too crazy to see that 60C on temps. Just can't lay my trust on it especially if shucked and not in "cold server environment". I guess those drives just aren't suitable for personal use in general.

Now the icing on cake is that WD gives you recertified drive as replacement so basically if you are unlucky to get a very hot running model inside your My Book 8TB model then you will immediately want to get it replaced & then you will get a recertified drive so basically WD is tricking you into buying a brand new defective product & then replace it with a recertified product. I somehow managed to get it returned on Tata Cliq(that is another long story to tell but at least in the end they helped me much more than WD) but I am not going to leave this matter without highlighting it on all the places I can to warn potential buyers of WD's so called "good after sales support" which I also used to believe before this incident. In fact seagate I found out is much better because they at least not try to play a game of thrones with their customers in the sense that all their external drive models are quite consistent so either you get usual slower running SMR model(for capacities up to 8TB) or faster hotter running(but not this much hot) CMR model(for capacities 10TB & above). In short do not believe in so called WD good after sales support & definitely do not buy any WD My Book 8TB or above model from any place without a solid 10 days no questions asked replacement(aka amazon only).

@ofabhishek @Desmond David @Vyom @SaiyanGoku @omega44-xt @Nerevarine

P.S. Temporarily making it a sticky until this post get enough attention as I think it deserves it. From now on I will never buy any WD external drive where I do not know which hdd model I will get inside.

Well, I miss dk_wd now.

W

@Raaabo @Anorion Maybe we can raise this issue with WD as it is clearly significant, a major brand selling inherently defective products in India which runs risk of catching fire is something which should not happen.

This is surprising as all of my WD RMAs were brand new drives. Quite unfortunate, really.

W

Nerevarine said:
This is surprising as all of my WD RMAs were brand new drives. Quite unfortunate, really.

As far as I know WD changed their policy to give new drives & started giving re-certified drives same as seagate a few years back.

that's really unfortunate-i was under the impression that WD is one of the few reliable hdd brands in the country,hence bought many of their drives over the last few years.

i dont know why but most reputable brands always try to give the shaft to their customers in 3rd world countries like india-it seems they dont care what we think of them or whether we buy their products or not.

Are re-certified drives refurbished? In that case I think they won't be winning the Digit Icons of Trust award XD

Wasn't looking to buy higher capacity drives anytime soon, now would just avoid them all together.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk

Damn, I had no idea WD was offering you a recertified drive as a replacement. Seriously man, what the...

Now I'm worried what will happen if my drives fail. Mine don't exactly run at the lowest of temps - 40-50C on average, because they're seeding terabytes of data at any given time.

So what's the consensus to buy new HDDs now ?
WD, Seagate and Toshiba are all the same. I guess we are back to square one?

W

Desmond David said:
Are re-certified drives refurbished? In that case I think they won't be winning the Digit Icons of Trust award XD

Re-certified is basically a more polite way of saying refurbished.

W

quicky008 said:
that's really unfortunate-i was under the impression that WD is one of the few reliable hdd brands in the country,hence bought many of their drives over the last few years.

i dont know why but most major brands always try to give the shaft to their customers in 3rd world countries like india-it seems they dont care what we think of them or whether we buy their products or not.

That seems to be the case going by the various horror rma stories for almost all brands on /r/IndianGaming.

W

Extreme Gamer said:
Damn, I had no idea WD was offering you a recertified drive as a replacement. Seriously man, what the...

Now I'm worried what will happen if my drives fail. Mine don't exactly run at the lowest of temps - 40-50C on average, because they're seeding terabytes of data at any given time.

Yes that was what really ticked me off. Buying a new drive just to find out it is practically unusable & then being offered a re-certified drive. WD was caught recently when it had to admit it was selling smr drives even under WD Red series which people always thought as 100% CMR drives being nas exclusive drive & all.

*blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/

I think for seeding purpose SMR drives are better, just fill them up in 1-2 go & then use them as seeding drives & they run quite cool too(my 4TB smr drives are always uploading on torrent & still temps don't cross 50C even in summer season in a non-AC room with a ceiling fan & a desert cooler). In fact I have learned from this incident that it is better to use a large capacity ssd(even dram-less one will do just fine & they can be bought for as low as 3400 for 480gb) as temporary drive for downloading torrents & once downloads are finished move them to smr drives in big batch(say 100-200gb in 1 go) & then continue seeding from there.

W

Nerevarine said:
So what's the consensus to buy new HDDs now ?
WD, Seagate and Toshiba are all the same. I guess we are back to square one?

See my above post. Stick to smr drives of 4TB(seagate or wd, I never had any issues with seagate 4TB barracuda smr drives) size just don't use them for downloading torrents as they rely heavily on random 4k write speeds which is smr drives biggest weakness. Use a cheap dram-less ssd as temp location for downloading all the torrents & move them to smr drive for seeding once the download is finished.

C

WD gives brand new drives as replacement for the higher end hdd ( red pro , black and gold)
Other internal drives you get recertified.

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

Gulp!
I am glad my 2 TB WD HDD bought years ago (which I use mostly as a cold storage for backup) is working perfectly. And after hearing about this incident I think I should take care of better (then just leaving it a corner with other objects piling over it!).
Thanks whitestar for making aware that WD only provides refurbished drives. That's quite sad. I use to recommend everyone WD eyes closed. What a shame.

Now's the time for some other brand to shine through!

W

Vyom said:
Gulp!
I am glad my 2 TB WD HDD bought years ago (which I use mostly as a cold storage for backup) is working perfectly. And after hearing about this incident I think I should take care of better (then just leaving it a corner with other objects piling over it!).
Thanks whitestar for making aware that WD only provides refurbished drives. That's quite sad. I use to recommend everyone WD eyes closed. What a shame.

Now's the time for some other brand to shine through!

2TB portable hdd earlier models were/are probably the best made models by both WD & Seagate. I have been using 2TB portable from WD & seagate(1 each) for 5 years now being used almost 24*7 with torrent seeding & still working fine with temps not crossing 45-46C even in summer season with a well cooled room with a desert cooler & no AC. I have found that seagate 4TB latest models also run fine(compared to WD 4TB models, I can confirm WD Elements 4TB runs hotter than average) even if hotter than 2TB models which is expected. Just avoid buying WD external drives & especially never buy WD external drives of 8TB & above capacity unless they are going to be used in server cold room environment.

C

Vyom said:
Gulp!
I am glad my 2 TB WD HDD bought years ago (which I use mostly as a cold storage for backup) is working perfectly. And after hearing about this incident I think I should take care of better (then just leaving it a corner with other objects piling over it!).
Thanks whitestar for making aware that WD only provides refurbished drives. That's quite sad. I use to recommend everyone WD eyes closed. What a shame.

Now's the time for some other brand to shine through!

Wd does not give refurbs for all rma.
@whitestar_999 it is misleading. I have recently rmaed wd red pro 6tb and wd black ( 4tb and 6tb) i got brand new seal pack drives. Not recycled. *uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20201108/c83540f10ef8613b74ae2a38b715bceb.jpg

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

W

chetansha said:
Wd does not give refurbs for all rma.
@whitestar_999 it is misleading. I have recently rmaed wd red pro 6tb and wd black ( 4tb and 6tb) i got brand new seal pack drives. Not recycled. *uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20201108/c83540f10ef8613b74ae2a38b715bceb.jpg

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

You yourself answered, WD Red Pro & Black comes with 5 years warranty which is the highest one can get & are top end models & if one gives refurbished/re-certified drives even for these then that company has no good future. I am talking about "normal drives" which most people buy.

P.S. Also you cannot simply check whether a drive is refurbished/re-certified or not as power on hours count is reset to zero for such drives. Just because they come in sealed pack & all doesn't mean they are "factory fresh manufactured". Try to get this in writing or over voice call from WD support & then you can update here, I am curious about knowing WD support reply regarding this.

C

whitestar_999 said:
You yourself answered, WD Red Pro & Black comes with 5 years warranty which is the highest one can get & are top end models & if one gives refurbished/re-certified drives even for these then that company has no good future. I am talking about "normal drives" which most people buy.

P.S. Also you cannot simply check whether a drive is refurbished/re-certified or not as power on hours count is reset to zero for such drives. Just because they come in sealed pack & all doesn't mean they are "factory fresh manufactured". Try to get this in writing or over voice call from WD support & then you can update here, I am curious about knowing WD support reply regarding this.

I have been using wd for last 20 years or so. And drives if recertified then it will be clearly written on top. Wd is professional co, it will not give a refurb and claim it new.

"Thanks whitestar for making aware that WD only provides refurbished drives" - this is factually wrong.

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

W

chetansha said:
"Thanks whitestar for making aware that WD only provides refurbished drives" - this is factually wrong.

First of all I never said that(see my post), second the fact is not entirely wrong. "WD only provides re-certified drives for their non-5 years warranty models as default replacement policy".

P.S. I don't understand why are you defending WD so much, I am not some newbie who bought a hdd & then complaining why I did not get 4TB space in a 4TB hdd or why hdd is not working at 120MB/s all the time for all file transfers incl thousands of small few mb files. I have presented all the technical details. WD is selling a model in India which can easily reach 60C in winter season & then they are offering a re-certified drive as replacement, case closed.

C

whitestar_999 said:
First of all I never said that(see my post), second the fact is not entirely wrong. "WD only provides re-certified drives for their non-5 years warranty models as default replacement policy".

P.S. I don't understand why are you defending WD so much, I am not some newbie who bought a hdd & then complaining why I did not get 4TB space in a 4TB hdd or why hdd is not working at 120MB/s all the time for all file transfers incl thousands of small few mb files. I have presented all the technical details. WD is selling a model in India which can easily reach 60C in winter season & then they are offering a re-certified drive as replacement, case closed.

I never said you said. Your post was such that other members are mislead to understand that wd provides ONLY refurbished if it goes for rma.
Why do you feel i am defending wd when i am correcting misconceptions ?

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

Re read his earlier posts carefully, he said wd provides refurb drives only for entry level models, not top tier drives belonging to red/black families etc.

I too was under the impression that wd was a reliable brand, hence bought quite a few of their drives over the last few years. But after this recent development, i will have to think twice about buying wd, as i usually buy blue/green series drives which are regarded as entry level products.

Now that wd drives are risky to buy, are there any other reliable manufacturers remaining? I think seagate and toshiba are just as bad, as far as their rma policy is concerned.

W

chetansha said:
I never said you said. Your post was such that other members are mislead to understand that wd provides ONLY refurbished if it goes for rma.
Why do you feel i am defending wd when i am correcting misconceptions ?

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

No one here is being mislead, majority ppl here(& elsewhere) buy regular WD models with 3 years(or less) warranty for which WD does provide re-certified drives as replacement. In fact I asked you to contact WD support & get it in writing/call that WD provides new replacement for their top end models just as a confirmation for future reference for others.

C

whitestar_999 said:
No one here is being mislead, majority ppl here(& elsewhere) buy regular WD models with 3 years(or less) warranty for which WD does provide re-certified drives as replacement. In fact I asked you to contact WD support & get it in writing/call that WD provides new replacement for their top end models just as a confirmation for future reference for others.

Well. Its pointless when you don't see the point i am making.

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

W

chetansha said:
Well. Its pointless when you don't see the point i am making.

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

Agreed, you seem to like WD too much as a brand & that's alright. Btw in case you didn't notice, the thread title is "Pathetic after sales support & fraud behaviour" aka WD selling models which should not be sold in India in the first place.

chetansha said:
"Thanks whitestar for making aware that WD only provides refurbished drives" - this is factually wrong.

Ok.

It's all about reputation. Till now they had a good reputation. Now they don't. Just dropped from "trusted" image, they had before. Simple as that.
I may have exaggerated a bit, by saying that it provides "only" refurbished. But I represent 'general mass', not geeks now.

C

Vyom said:
Ok.

It's all about reputation. Till now they had a good reputation. Now they don't. Just dropped from "trusted" image, they had before. Simple as that.
I may have exaggerated a bit, by saying that it provides "only" refurbished. But I represent 'general mass', not geeks now.

That was my point. Your exaggeration.
No where else have i disputed nor agreed what whitestar_999 has said.
I only Drew attention to the line " wd provides ONLY refurbished drives "
Go thru my posts again and again.

Sent from my SM-M315F using Tapatalk

^^ I agree you are true. Point taken. Maybe now we can go ahead with the discussion.

W

Another point to add here, WD support person who called back in the evening(after he failed to talk to me the previous day when he called me in morning & phone was not with me) & talked to me apprently could not "tolerate" listening to my technical explanation of helium & air filled drives & the way to differentiate between them based on a code on box & cut the call rudely & then never called back again after I told him my issue was resolved as Tata Cliq refunded my money. Contrast this with seagate customer care person who called me 3 times in a day just because I created a support ticket to get 2 months trial version of adobe creative cloud suite which came in seagate 4TB portable which I forgot to copy before doing a quick format.

Seagate has a negative reputation (drive failure rates) to repair. While their reputation may not be justifiable for their newer drives, it is still historical baggage that sticks.

W

Extreme Gamer said:
Seagate has a negative reputation (drive failure rates) to repair. While their reputation may not be justifiable for their newer drives, it is still historical baggage that sticks.

Myth to be honest, those who are actually concerned with historical baggage are a minority while majority just believes it as any other online gospel with no logical basis. WD initial green series models were also bad but they were lucky in the sense that seagate produced even worst models before & around that time effectively hiding WD mistakes. I believe just like everything else HDD overall quality have also gone down & nowadays it doesn't matter which brand you get as long as the drive is suitable for your usage.e.g.in my case this particular model would have worked fine inside a data centre with better than avg read write rates.

The thing is, perception is almost everything when it comes to business.

Even in enterprise if a WD sales rep comes to an acquisitions manager and refers to Seagate's baggage, and their techies parrot the same 'gospel', it hurts Seagate's bottom line.

So Seagate has to make it a priority to treat their customers well to overturn the negative opinion with time.

W

Extreme Gamer said:
The thing is, perception is almost everything when it comes to business.

Even in enterprise if a WD sales rep comes to an acquisitions manager and refers to Seagate's baggage, and their techies parrot the same 'gospel', it hurts Seagate's bottom line.

So Seagate has to make it a priority to treat their customers well to overturn the negative opinion with time.

Well enterprise customers are a different category altogether but as for retail customers WD doesn't seem to dominate market outside of a minority(that too mostly in US where its after sales support is much better than segate).

*cmrindia.com/seagate-leads-the-consumer-external-hdd-market-in-q2-2020-cmr/

whitestar_999 said:
Well enterprise customers are a different category altogether but as for retail customers WD doesn't seem to dominate market outside of a minority(that too mostly in US where its after sales support is much better than segate).

*cmrindia.com/seagate-leads-the-consumer-external-hdd-market-in-q2-2020-cmr/

Yes and you'll see most of the bad rap on seagate is limited to tech people based in the US or Europe.

W

Extreme Gamer said:
Yes and you'll see most of the bad rap on seagate is limited to tech people based in the US or Europe.

Now if only seagate improves the availability of their larger than 4TB capacity barracuda series, strangely surveillance series/skyhawk availability is much better & even its price is similar or even cheaper than barracuda series usually.

imho, If it comes with 3 year warranty, at least in first year companies should provide a new one.

W

vidhubhushan said:
imho, If it comes with 3 year warranty, at least in first year companies should provide a new one.

I will be happy even with WD not selling products completely unsuitable for a typical Indian climate conditions or at least put a warning on product box/description that says something like "suitable only for AC cooled environment".

whitestar_999 said:
I will be happy even with WD not selling products completely unsuitable for a typical Indian climate conditions or at least put a warning on product box/description that says something like "suitable only for AC cooled environment".

i agree. any company should understand climate and general working conditions in any country before selling any product that may get affected due to these and should not sell anything like that or mention it clearly like you said. my reply is only related to warranty part of any company.