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Comment by mastercheif | Hacker News Reader

> Don’t buy anything but physical hdd from WD.

Don't buy anything from WD.

I RMA'd a failed SSD to to them under their "advanced replacement program".

They put a hold for the value of a new SSD on your card and ship it to you before you ship them the dead drive.

When they received the dead drive, the claimed that they would be unable to service it under warranty because the sticker had been removed.

I quoted the FCC's Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act to them and outlined how it is illegal to void a warranty based solely on the removal of a sticker.

They stopped answering my emails/tickets. Charge went through on my CC for replacement drive + $25 advanced RMA fee + shipping.

I sent Apple Card CS team a transcript of my interactions with WD, they filled a chargeback for everything.

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Similar story with an $800 Asus monitor. The power supply blew inside warranty, I shipped it back in the original packaging, and they flaked on the warranty because the panel was cracked. Almost certainly on their side. They strong-armed the matter, but my proof pictures were a bit fuzzy so I didn't feel like I had a small claims case or anything. They won. Ugh.

Similar story with a $300 Fitbit. The battery died inside warranty (shorted capacitor) and they flaked. I bought off Amazon, but I guess you have to watch closely which store because only some of them come with a "manufacturer's warranty." Really? They can mention a manufacturer's warranty in advertising and then just drop it in fine print somewhere? Ugh.

Warranties are trash in the US.

Amex buyer protection is great for these situations.

The solution to this that I’ve seen many businesses taking now is to refuse Amex.

I've seen that since being a kid. In my experience, businesses that refuse Amex are either great enough to be comfortable rejecting customers and mostly good faith, or mediocre to bad and not worth patronizing.

Happens a lot with Amazon. They’ve been making it harder to find 1st party shipped and sold for sometime now. received a nice set of knives for wedding that instantly rusted, I then discovered all the things on my list were sold from sketchy third party, I then proceeded to free return many many pounds of kitchenware, cast iron, etc because ain’t nobody got time for counterfeit nonsense. This was a handful of years ago and it’s only gotten worse.

There’s a lot more shady things going on with mismatched skus and reviews. What you see is often not what you get. Amazon is gutter level now.

The companies figured out that if they all suck, you’ll have no choice but to accept the suck. This is what happens when we have no real consumer protections and why stuff like USB-C iPhones and replaceable batteries and banning some bad ingredients in food come from the EU.

Thank you for pointing out the specific Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act vs sticker and such. Appreciate it.

At this point SSDs are so cheap, I'm inclined to just buy a 7.5TB Enterprise SSD from Kioxia for $800 and call it a day.

I understand that's pretty expensive for a hard drive and probably not in most people's budget, but having an enterprise drive seems like it would avoid most quality issues.

Also, 7.5TB of SSD space is a good amount to last me a while.

I use enterprise SSDs now for the same reason - serverpartdeals has been reliable so far and has old stock 8TB under $500.

Yeah, but can you use it in a regular desktop (not to mention laptop) since it doesn't use M.2?

You’re still going to want backups though, and at that point, drive failures shouldn’t be catastrophic because you can just restore onto a fresh drive.

I am considering something like that, and noticed some enterprise / data center SSD makers do not publish firmware updates. Checking as I type this: Kioxia seems to only have consumer SSD firmware/tools/binaries. Micron has a list of firmware downloads for their drives. Samsung seems to have only consumer SSD firmware/tools, except for SM/PM863. Solidigm has a comprehensive status and download page for their drive firmware, including all(?) previously-Intel drives. Western Digital seems to only have consumer drive firmware available without a support ticket.

I am discounting whether email support could provide firmware, as I believe firmware updates should be as easy to access as possible (and have read forum posts describing the issues encountered when trying and usually failing to request via support channels). - If I missed something, please post it, would be good to know.

Uh yea, probably should be sent to the state attorney for that bullshit.

>Don't buy anything from WD.

I don't doubt your bad experience. But do you really think that there do not exist other customers of other vendors with similar, or even worse, stories? The tacit assumption is that if even one such story exists, then one should avoid the vendor, but I question if that's ever really possible past a certain scale. (Which is an indictment of scale itself! But that's another discussion)

It reminds me of an HN post during the Covid lockdowns telling people not to go to the hospital because they got MRSA at a hospital and were still dealing with it years later. It's not that they were lying, it's that they were giving bad advice based on their experience. It's a risk/reward calculation. If one bad experience is enough to delegitimize every service or product, then there would be NO services or products available to us.

I agree with what you’re saying but this talk of WD customer support going silent after a customer points them to a law they seem to be breaking -- and then proceeding to actually violate said law -- is not something I would write off as simply a bad consumer experience.

Their CMR 5400 WD Reds are the best drives nowadays quiet and fast.

If you don't need any kind of support maybe.

What are other good options ?

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