Western Digital Disaster

Buon giorno. First, I wanted to say that I had a "rodeo visitor" the other day. I call it that because he only lasted eight seconds.

Time for some thunder today, since yours truly is very angry indeed. This has been going on for a while, and now I'm going to let it out.

A few months ago, I purchased a 500 mb "My Book Essential" by Western Digital. (Cowboys usually like westerns, right?) It's an external hard drive that runs through the USB. These are a great idea: Back up your regular hard drive, install a second operating system, store all of that music that you downloaded illegally, store all of that music that you purchased legally, save the scanned photos of your ancestors, hide pictures you don't want your kids to see in an encrypted partition next to the government secrets you're hiding, store whatever you have downloaded or created over the years. I say again that it's a great idea.

It's a great idea until it fails, that is. Then all of your precious work and everything you've collected is not available. The problem is, you were trusting a product to work. You wanted it to be there for a long time, and maybe give some indication that it was nearing the end of its life cycle.

That's what Western Digital did to me. One day, it simply did not come on. Sure, it was getting power. I could tell by the insistent flashing of the light. Following all of the suggestions on their site and also using my own vast experience, I still came up zero.

I lost data. Lots of it. But it could have been worse if I wasn't double-backing with my portable Toshiba hard drive! Yes, some was lost forever. Western Digital has "partners" that will help you recover data from one of these pieces of merda, but the price is very high. If I had lost everything, I may have considered it. Briefly.

"Gosh, Uncle Bob, any company can have a product go bad!"

Do you really think I don't know that? It's why I did my other backup. But the thing that I'm so furious about is their total lack of customer service. These stronzos were sent two e-mails, and they have a promise to get back to you in one business day. They never got back to me at all. (That's when I went out and bought Seagate's "Free Agent" external hard drive. Hope that works better than this one did.) Now dig this: They sent me a customer satisfaction survey! Ohhhhhh, yes, I let them have it in there. But you know those things are a joke, because there was no response.

A few days ago, I went through the process again and really let them have it. I demanded a refund, not an exchange, because I replaced the hard drive. Those cafones never answered, so I'm using my small electronic corner of justice here to expose them and tell people stay away from Western Digital products. They betray your trust, and they do not stand behind their products.

Hal the Hacker wants to use my old hard drive for target practice. Maybe I'll let him, he needs the practice more than Lela, Nicky and the others.