I have been running 2Tb WD Red disks in my NAS since I bought it. Today, while in warranty one of the disks in my RAID 10 array failed.

I have emailed WD and opened a support ticket with them to clarify a couple of points.

My main question is, will they replace this disk without it being returned to them? I cant risk the remnants of data on the disk being outside my control, all my disks get erased and physically destroyed. Commercially sensitive information and R&D data as opposed to anything illegal in nature.

Anyone ever had to go down this line with WD and have any success with it?

 

Don't know the answer t your immediate question, but in the future you could run raid5 or 6, as there's no worries about sending a disk off then.

In my experience, I've had to pay extra to have the option of keeping failed disks.

 

i must be thick what are you on about lol

 

Hi there

Please have look on this

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/...ce-a-defective

I think WD Red offers Premium support and then I would think,this will apply to you,you will receive replacement HDD and then you will need send yours defective/failed HDD as per above link

Just not sure how this apply over here in UK as RMA should be part of ours e-tailers,but I would ask at least where you bought this HDD

Thanks,Jura

 

Id dare say you would need to send the drive back otherwise buy a new one.

 

Received the following reply to my support ticket this morning; Looks like the outcome may be favourable.

"Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Serviceand Support. My name is Jürgen.

If the data are of really sensitive nature, we have anexceptional process: our Sensitive Data Procedure, which has to be requested.With this procedure, the customer keeps the drive itself and only sends theunscrewed top cover of the drive and, with external drives, also the enclosure.

To request the sSensitive Data Procedure with WesternDigital, you need to send us the scan (.jpg, .gif oder. pdf <5MB) of aletter, which has to contain the following:

[+]Header of company or organisation
[+]Valid serial number of the device. I also could not check the warranty yet, asonly the P/N is provided, not the S/N. This is how to find it:
http://wdsupport.wdc.com/help/help_getserial.asp?lang=en
[+] Reason forthe Sensible Data Procedure (kind of data involved)
[+]Handwritten Signature, location and date

If you have any further questions, please reply to thisemail and we will be happy to assist you further.

Sincerely,

Jürgen

Western Digital Service and Support"

 

Very interesting. Have you had to send proof of failure?

 

That seems pretty good to me.

Re the failure itself, the WD Reds are pretty decent. I'm running about 20 disks in my company in various guises.

In the 4 years I've been running them, only one failure - and that was a DOA *touches wood*.

 

My QNAP NAS has flagged warnings for disk 2 in my RAID 6 array. SMART monitoring reports a high "current_pending_sector" count, which I think are sectors which can not be reallocated.


Have a screen shot of this and the email alerts from my NAS where this array entered a degraded state. WD haven't asked for them, but they are available, should they require them.