It is not the drive - it is the service after that counts!

The final update 11/4 - Western Digital second line tech support told me that the problem with the second drive was my use of Western Digital's Data Lifegard - it messes up MBR for good. I was told to use Western Digital's Diag to write zeroes to the drive. It worked!!! The drive boots and works fine. It is a little quieter and a little faster than a 160GB SATA Seagate 7200.7 that I used before, but if I knew what I was getting into, I would not have bought WD drive to begin with.



Another update - 11/01 - received the replacement drive and it passes SMART test. The motherboard, ASUS A8N-E will not boot from this drive though. Boots fine from SATA Seagate drive. Western Digital works fine as a second drive. Will try WD customer service.


One week update - 10/20 - requested to speak with a manager on 10/19 and also requested any 16MB cache drive as a replacement. Was promised a callback - still heard nothing. My other request was for a letter stating that 5 weeks is a reasonable wait time and that availability is still unknown and that new drives are not sent from sales stock as a replacement. Was told - "We can not do that"

I wanted a fast booting drive for new PC I was building at home. This drive just came out and the 16 MB cache together with SATA II support attracted my attention. No local stores had it and I ordered the drive through mail order. The PC would not get past the BIOS screen indicating SMART failure in the drive. Installed it in my other PC, downloaded test tools from Western Digital and they confirmed what my BIOS already told me - SMART failure, fill out RMA.
This is where the adventure begins. The Web based process refused to issue RMA for my drive and told me to call. That was on Saturday, 9/10. On Monday, 9/12 I called and was issued an advanced replacement RMA. Web site indicated that the replacement drive would be shipped in a few days. A week later the message changed to say that drive was unavailable. As I received no communications from WD, I called and was told that the drive is out of stock and a similar larger drive that would qualify as an upgrade is out of stock as well. As luck would have it, I received an e-mail from WD store inviting me to purchase the same drive on-line from WD.

I called customer service and was explained that the drives were in stock to purchase as new but not available for replacement. When I expressed my amazement at such treatment of customers, they told me that sales and service are two separate branches of the same company.

I have made several calls since to no avail. Today is 10/13 and still no replacement drive.

It seems that the failure rate for the new model far exceeded the amount of spares allocated. I would be very reluctant to purchase new Western Digital products until they correct present imbalance. In my case, I will stay away as I simply can not tolerate seeing new drives on sale but not being able to get a replacement. Just imagine if your local store would try to pull something like this on you.