Western Digital rocks!

My desktop PC has a pair of Western Digital 74GB Raptor drives in a RAID array.  For you non-techies, these are the fastest hard drives generally available, arranged in the fastest possible configuration.

One of the drives died in 2008.  Western Digital replaced it for free.  Their return process is super-slick.  They shipped me a replacement drive, 2nd day, at no cost.  I just paid to ship the dead drive back to them via the cheapest trackable method.

Early last week the other original 74GB drive started to generate errors.  This time the errors were just bad sectors, and my RAID controller just started keeping count of the bad sectors and not using them.  But it alerted me.  I contacted Western Digital and my original warranty still has just over a year on it.  They shipped me a replacement drive for free.

But.....

The new drive I received today was a 150GB drive.  I tried installing it and my RAID controller doesn't like it.  I think that there is probably a hack-around that would get the controller to format the 150GB drive as a 74GB drive, but it didn't want to do it.

So I called Western Digital technical support back and told them my problem.  They said that they sent me a 150GB drive because they don't have any more 74GB drives.  They were discontinued years ago and they just don't have any more.

I didn't make any threats.  I asked very nicely if there was any way or program for me to swap out my old 74GB drive for another 150GB so I could run in a RAID array again.  And they agreed to send me another free upgrade replacement.  Whoo hoo!

So my desktop computer is down until the second hard drive arrives.  But I can live on my laptop for a week.  The drive should arrive Thursday or Friday.  I'll ship both old drives back on Monday, or so.

But with just a little bit of hassle I'm getting to double my hard drive space for very little cost.  Yeah!