Lemons

This weekend it came time to pick a few lemons.

It all started when my WD Mybook World Edition II, which I painfully shelled out $260 for, started flashing it's LED in a way that just tells you something did not go well inside. Two days and a few emails to tech support later, I found out the problem was one of the internal disks had failed. Tech support told me to send them the defective hard disk for a replacement, and that started a week long chain of events that finally ended yesterday.

In the end, my hard headedness paid off, since the internal drive diagnostics seem to have gone wrong, and I was about to send them the disk that was in perfect working condition, while keeping the defective one. Good thing I decided to spend a few days running my own diagnostics on the unit.

I also learned quite a bit about how this WD network drive works behind the scenes. It's basically a very small, buggy and limited PC, that only knows how to move hard drives. Which brings me to a very important point... if you have one of these WD network drives, never format both internal disks. You'll kill the operating system and brick your drive. I was fortunate enough to stumble on to that fact by accident, and just barely avoid bricking it =S

So, once again, I seem to have gotten a lemon from Western Digital. Four months in, one of the disks dies. Next week, it's RMA and disk mailing time.

On a side note, I also found a relatively new (about a year old) Maxtor drive which is also defective, and under warranty. I'm surprised at the amount of stuff I have stashed away that I can claim warranty on. It's gonna be like christmas in october =D