Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased the 8TB elements drive in an attempt to consolidate a bunch of data I had on a series of smaller, older drives. Once I had all the data copied over, I intended to buy another and raid it so I had a copy of everything; always have a backup and all that. I guess I did take a small risk not immediately buying two of these drives so I never had any period without a backup, but I just didn't have the money at that point to double down. Here's the full timeline breakdown. Bought drive, it sat for a month before I got around to using it, transferred about 3TB of data to it, let it more-or-less sit for a couple of months (unplugged on my desk) with the occasional removal of a piece of software or movie/music (not used hard, I'd estimate less than 3 hours of use after the initial transfer), plugged it in about 3 days ago and moved some pictures to it, plugged it in today and it returns uninitialized without recognizing any of the drive space. It's been less than 5 months since I bought this drive. Attempts to interact with it return with "the request failed due to a fatal device hardware error." I've tried several different cables to see if that was the issue; it was not. Well s***. I've done some data recovery before, it's part of what prompted me to get this drive and start the process of consolidating and backing everything up. But before I go hog-wild stripping the case of, running diagnostics, and trying to recover everything myself I figured I'd at least give WD customer support a call to see if they can do it. I'm not really looking for an extra project right now and, for me at least, this will be a project (maybe someone more knowledgeable would have no issues). Anyway, called customer support. They were friendly. When I asked about data recovery, they kindly informed me that it would cost $400-700, had to be through one of their contracted data recovery companies, and came with no guarentees. When I asked what I could do to the drive, they kindly told me that almost anything I did would void the warranty and they wouldn't be able to replace the drive. They also, very nicely, told me that any drive I got in return for this one would actually be a refurbished drive and may or may not have cosmetic wear, may or may not have factory packaging, and had no guarantees of having less than any certain amount of drive hours on it. That's right the "warranty" replaces your drove with another, already once defective drive! "Sorry the drive we sent you broke, we'll happily send you a different drove that also broke!" To summarize: my drive broke after five months of light use and proper treatment and then their customer service told me they'd be happy to send me a second hand drive in exchange for the POS one they sent me in the first place, with no assistance at all with recovering any data. I'll ultimately end up keeping the drive, stripping it out of its case, and seeing if plugging in directly to the drive gets around the "hardware error" (though I doubt it will). Amy replacement is as good as worthless as I have no faith in it lasting more than a few months; I'll just have to take the loss. You can do what you like with your money, but I'll no longer be giving any of mine to Western Digital. Crooks. UPDATE: I took the drive apart and it interfaced directly with the HDD with a $16 SATA adapter I have; had no problem accessing the drive. The failure was entirely the fault of the Western Digital enclosure.