There are many different brands of hard drives out there (although the number seems to be shrinking as they buy each other up) and it's always a bit of a toss up which brand to buy. The latest two brands I've been buying over the past couple of years have been seagate and western digital. I've had better luck with western digital in terms of reliability, however I think I've bought most of them more recently so that could be why. However as I RMA'ed my first western digital drive (a 160gig IDE) that died I found a good reason to buy western digital over seagate, and that is the RMA process.

I had to RMA 3 or 4 seagate drives recently and the process has not been all that good. First the website to handle RMA's only works in IE 5 or 6 which is fine when your running windows but makes it impossible to use if your not on a MS platform. I did get them to manually create an RMA for me without much trouble by emailing their support, but still not very convenient. The next problem is getting the proper packaging for them RMA together so they'll accept it. Foam packaging and whatnot which isn't all that big of a problem but it's not anything I have around the house, and thus because I'm super lazy I still haven't done the RMA.

The western digital RMA on the other hand worked perfectly in firefox and was also really easy to fill out and submit. They also offer advance replacement in which I can give them my credit card number, they will ship me a new drive, and I can then ship them this drive back (and as long as I do the credit card charge gets reversed). Which also means I can use the packaging they send the new drive in to send the dead drive back in.

So in the realm of cheap IDE drives I think I'm going to stick with Western Digital since it seems like all IDE drives fail at one point or another but at least the Western Digital RMA process is really good.

posted at: 17:35 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry