very bad tech support from wd

if you have a western digital drive and a mac and happen to need support from them don't even bother. the guy helping me was so clueless about the very products he gives support for and he had no knowlege of macs at all and said no one there did. he was 100% useless.

wd makes great drives that are very fast but their tech staff are a bunch of stupid apes with no clue of whats up with anything

zimv20 said:

does your sample size = 1?

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huh? what does that mean?

zimv20 said:

is this clueless support guy your only such contact w/ WD?

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no there have been others in the past with the same result. 3 so far.

zimv20 said:

sample size =3. yeah, that's a pretty bad track record. i've got two WD caviars in my mac; hope i never need support on 'em.

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you run them on the same cable or single on a different bus. also what is your ata bus speed? your answers to these questions may help me a lot.

wdlove said:

You had me concerned when I saw the title of the thread. Many call me wd. so I thought that I had done something wrong. Now I'm relieved!

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hehe, fair enough

zimv20 said:

the one w/ the OS is hooked up to the controller on the motherboard, ata/66. the second one, which i use for recording audio, is hooked up to a sonnet pci card, which iirc is ata/100 (though it may be ata/133).

i did this a couple years ago, and i cannot remember exactly why both drives are not hooked up to the card. either i tried it and it didn't work, or i decided that i'd get better throughput on the audio drive if it was the only device on the card.

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how is each one jumpered? sorry about all this but I really need to know asmy caviar 120gb seems to hate every jumper setting I give it. if you have it set to single please say which pins because they have more than 1 single setting.

zimv20 said:

both are unjumpered. fwiw, they're both 80 gig caviar drives and say "WD800" on it; no idea if yours has the same jumpering scheme.

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my ultra ata/33 bus should work the same as a 66, 100 or 133 should it not? other than being slower I mean. I think its all the same tech. just some are faster. an ata 100 drive should work fine on an ata 33 bus but only run at ata 33 speed

bousozoku said:

It's funny to me that this comes as a surprise. Western Digital has long been a joke (they've gotten much better) and the Caviar line in the early days had an 80+ percentage failure rate.

Good luck. I have a Western Digital drive inside my machine too.

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http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1795&p=10

this review is one of the reasons I really wanted a caviar drive. the 7200 rpm ata 100 caviar beats their own 10,000 rpm serial ata raptor in about 90% of the tests. it is also by far the fastest drive out of the 5 or 6 they test.

also, my caviar has never failed on me. it will work perfect for 2-5 weeks at a time then one day out of the blue it will freeze my system. after I press the reset button I get the question mark were it does not see it but then it will boot up on my 6gb maxtor which I have another copy of panther installed and use it to run ttp4 and repair permissions on the caviar. sometimes just unplugging the data and power from the caviar then booting back to the maxtor then shutting down and plugging the data and power cables back will make my system see it again. other times I have to change jumpers and switch the master/slave settings of the 2 drives to get it to work again.

the very odd thing about all this is that every time this has happened and I get my system to see the caviar again I do a full suite of tests on it from the maxtor and it never finds anything wrong. I test volume structure, finder info, everything and its always fine.

very very odd.

I am going to buy a sonnet ata/133 pci card next week. hope it will take this very strange issue away.

thanks!

I was just thinking that my little maxtor 6gb drive that came with my blue and white when I bought it new has been the most loyal/reliable piece of hardware I have ever owned. I had 8.6 on it from sept. 99 to april 02 and never had to reformat or clean install once. it was also the factory install as I myself never once installed 8.6 in my life.

I would say this is a pretty good track record for a classic os and an old hd.