They deserve to be selling more drives! After Seagate's recent performances, in compatibility, reliability, and customer service, it may be that WD will soon be the only maker of reliable hard disks left!

I've been a loyal Western Digital customer since the company first rolled out their 5400RPM drives.

Today I just shipped out my first RMA with the company, a Western Digital MyBook Home Edition External HDD.

Problem was the firmware update procedure. WD has to work on the way users update the firmware on their drives. I do consider it as pointless to come up with such convoluted directions in upgrading firmware especially on this massive 1TB HDD.

Ah well, I'll wait for my new replacement to come next week. I look forward to resuming a positive experience with the company (depending or not I can successfully recover my lost data). =(

Did a count. We have 6 WD drives bought over the last year. All running happily, as are 3 Seagate laptop drives bought over a similar period.

The last bad period for drives we had was back in the IBM DeathStar days. Before that we had 3 of 5 Seagates die in 6 months once. I blame that batch on overheating, so it might pay you to look at the airflow around your drives.

I have had two WD drives fail in less than a year. Considering that I have never had a hard drive fail since 1990 other than a lightning strike casualty that also blew pieces out my motherboard, I am a bit concerned with WD.
I was sent replacements, but I still wonder if they are starting to cut some corners. Perhaps it is somehow my own fault since I started using rubber mounted washers. I have been warned that these can reduce the life of hard drives because of excessive physical movement of the drive.

All I can say is that my external back up with Acronis Trueimage has saved me more than once, and nothing can guarantee that your data is safe other than periodic backups.