I have a home NAS to store videos, music, photos, and random personal files. I wrote about the issues I had adding a second 6 TB hard drive previously. The transfer speed seemed awfully slow, and any mistakes take forever to fix. Well, not the second drive I purchased has failed. I set up the NAS as RAID 0 so it writes data across both drives. This speeds up performance, but there is no redundany. I do have all the data backed up using HyperBackup, but it uses a proprietary file format so I am not 100% confident I can restore the data if I just wipe out the NAS.
To be sure, I purchased a 8 TB external storage hub from Costco. It cost me $150 but I was able to copy over all my data. It took about four days to copy 7 TB of movies to the backup drive, plus two more days for smaller volumes for music and photos. After all the data was backed up, twice, I tried to create a new data pool with the existing drives, but received warnings that there were too many bad blocks on the second drive.
At this point, I realized that the second drive was still under Western Digital’s 3-year warranty. I pulled up the Amazon invoice, screenshotted the error messages, and filed a warranty claim online. A reply came quick, but they wanted me to put the drive in an external enclosure, download test software, run tests, and send in results. I do not have such an enclosure, so I purchased one from Amazon. As I am waiting for it to arrive, I received an email from WD saying that I have not responded with test results, and they will close my ticket after 24 hours. I will be very pissed if I am still waiting for the enclosure, I had to buy to test their failed drive.
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If WD rejects my warranty claim and I must buy another drive, I am going with Seagate. I wonder if their warranty claim process is as burdensome on the customer as Western Digital.
Life with chronic diseases 