Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For quite a long time I've been WD fan. I put WD drives in any computer I put my hands on. I've sinned, but I know better now... 5 months ago I've bought 8 of those drives to exchange 7 1TB drives in my Linux server. The 1TB drives were (and are - I use them still) OK, I just run out of space. Since then I did not have a single week without some kind of failure. 3 drives are failing mechanically (almost 40% failure rate!), I have random intermittent read errors. I rolled up my sleeves and run some tests; this is what I've found: The read errors coincide with only ONE relevant (Power On Hours is not relevant, for example) changing SMART attribute - Multi-Zone Error Rate. The description of it is a bit misleading and nobody really seems to know, what it is; here: [...] it says something about writing errors, but the writes to the disk were always OK - after a retry or retries the correct data was read. The problems appeared only while reading. And only when this parameter was changing (i.e. - growing). The real big, bad issue is that the drive does not inform me about problems it had reading data! So far it looks like when the disk hits a problematic sector (so the MZER grows), instead of reporting that, it returns some arbitrary data and pretends everything is rosy - no read error, nothing - just corrupted data! So you might copy a file and find it later corrupted. Or your system will miraculously crash. I would suggest returning this drive on the very first sight of MZER>0; even better - just avoid it altogether. As a result, yet another disk has been RMAd to WD; hopefully they will accept it under warranty, as they did before; I really wouldn't like to give them only one star... Yet they managed. If the drive is RMAed, the replacement has a warranty of... ~100 days. If the original, 3y-warranty drive breaks in first 6 months, the effective warranty will be shorter than 1 year! Oh, well, that's easy, sell crap with '3y warranty', when it breaks, shorten it to 10 months. Well done, WD. Update 2013-05-11: Yet another drive had is MZER gone up, checksums found another file damaged. I think by now all of my 8 drives have been replaced, and the ONLY improvement is- the error happens less frequently. But when it happens, the result is as devastating as ever. If you value your data - DO NOT BUY. Update 2013-10-17: I'm looking for the replacement for my 8 3TB disks. Got to the reviews of Seagate 4TB NAS drives, and was astonished they actually react to the buyers' complaints! Nice! The WD apparently does not believe in reaching out to their customers, it's you who should call them; I did so a week ago. I asked them to buy the drives off me - 2 more drives failed in a week and I have enough. They were surprised I do not want this walking disaster of theirs for a drive any more. All they did since then is to create a support case, that stays on their website, abandoned. Very nice gesture, indeed, even if utterly useless. It seems not only the QA does not work there, PR is also a bit of a problem. I think I will surprise them once more and share my WD adventures with C't. They might be interested in how good WD customer support and product quality are, even if WD is not. Update 2013-11-08: Well, 4 disks failed on me in the last month - two of them had <200 power-on hours (i.e. they were replacements for previously broken drives). Come on, all you brave testers with 3TB of discardable data, unlimited tinker time and money to waste - buy these. Update 2014-04-04: The latest development with these drives happened last year; I've been slightly slow on reporting ;). After some fight WD agreed to buy all the 8 drives off of me for 75% purchase price. I coughed-up a few EUR for a 4TB NAS drives of another manufacturer, and returned the Greens. Since then I forgot I have drives. I do not have to check their well-being constantly. I could delete all the recovery data. What a bliss...