Hard Disk Monitoring

I've become very good at RMAing HDD to Western Digital (primarly WD20EARS)...well I've got three in waiting for assessment for a return!

I find that if the HDD Fails the quick or extended test then WD will RMA your drive. This is backed up not just by my personal experience but the following communications
- On their website "If you encounter the same error code more than once after re-testing, we recommend for you to create an RMA" (http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/errorcodes.asp)
- After e-mailing them either the details or a screen shot of the DataLife guard error / HDS Overview Info their response was "Based on the error codes you provided, the drives appear to be faulty and should be replaced. "

FYI - this is different to what HDS advises as each of these drives had not yet reached 0% health at that time hence was marked as "At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the heath drops further". Given WDC's stance that anything that fails the quick or extended test more than once is eligible for WTY Replacement, it may be worth adding this criteria to the calculation of Heath and hence the RMA recommendation.

At present, HDS has a more stringent criteria for RMAing a drive the MFR!

Thanks for the information and your experiences !

Basically, HDS is more conservative when recommending RMA.
Exactly as you can see, if the health is higher than 0 %, it does not really recommend RMA because of the following reasons:

1) that point the error-level "threshold" set by the manufacturer is not yet reached. So in theory, the number of errors does not yet reach the limit and the manufacturer / service may ask fees as the drive is not really faulty.
Sending a such drive for RMA may result that the service simply performs a complete fill of the drive (maybe even with Hard Disk Sentinel -> Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface), stabilizes the drive and return it as perfect (and ask for a service fee).
Or (worse case) it is even possible that you may get back an other drive which is "repaired" - but its condition is not as good as yours before sending to RMA.

2) you may see that even a power loss / reset / improper shutdown trigger one weak sector on the hard disk. While this is not a serious problem (Hard Disk Seninel reports it with 99% health and "1 weak sector found...."), it is completely enough for the drive to fail both the short / extended self tests in both Hard Disk Sentinel and the tool provided by the manufacturer (not surprising, as these tests are same regardless of which tool starts).

Personally I know that nowadays more and more services, manufacturers work in a more user-friendly manner, for example they accept such drives, "repair" them by the above mentioned mode (simple overwrite or even better, using the Disk -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface function in Hard Disk Sentinel) and then give it back - or give back an other such repaired drive instead of yours.
But this may not be true for all drives, models, manufacturers and services. Also it may cost you time and money to send back the drive, so it may be even better if you can perform the required actions yourself and repairing the drive.


Of course it is not recommended to wait 0 % health - as most hard disks may completely fail before that point (and of course RMA is possible if the drive does not work at all but _in theory_ the manufacturer should provide warranty replacement only if the error-threshold is reached - when the displayed health is 0 %.

Thanks for the explanation of what may happen and the MFR end as for the drives I have had RMA previously were replaced with "remanufactured" drive that I guess were just someone else’s reinitialised drive surface! HDS is really a great product when you get your mind around all what it does

I've been comparing both and I thank you for posting this article as it provides experienced services made by HDS.