Two things that are not mentioned in the article which is rather
important:
1.
Western Digital makes use of reconditioned drives.
Western Digital support software such as the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics tool kit may imply the ability to correct certain hard drive failure issues. Disregard the concept. Once a hard drive has exhibited the warnings of a mechanical or digital crash, do not trust that hard drive with your important data. Even the process of reinstalling Windows is too aggravating to trust to an error-prone hard drive. Count in the frustration that is involved in loading and updating all of your favorite programs, correcting email information, and customizing all of the desktop features, and
you will be disappointed by a reconditioned Western Digital hard drive.
Read more: Western Digital Support - Western Digital Support Increases Chances of Data Recovery - Drive, Hard, System, Backup, Information, and Error
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/artic...ases-Chances-Data-Recovery.html#ixzz1BTLosn90
2.
Why HDDrives die.
We put a man on the moon, and a motorized skateboard on Mars ... So why can't we make a failure-proof disk drive? The answer, of course, is that we could. But the question is whether manufacturers should? You know that a more reliable drive is going to cost somewhat more to make, and therefore needs to sell for a higher price. But you can't SEE the reliability of a drive when you look at it. They all appear to be pretty much the same, so there's no way to tell that one drive will be more reliable than another.
Thus, from the perspective of the manufacturer, putting more reliability into their drives is wasted money, since no one will buy their drives for that reason. If one drive costs 20% more than another, say $239 instead of $199, and the drives are the same size and seem identical, wouldn't everyone save the $40 and happily take home a new drive for $199? Of course.
That's why, when you're in the business of making hard drives the first thing you learn is that ...
Reliability Isn't Profitable!
Therefore, NOT ONE DIME is spent on RELIABILITY beyond the barest minimum required. What we get instead, are drives that work "well enough" and are equipped with multi-year warranties to cover the percentage that statistically die sooner than is reasonable.
But what IS reasonable? Your prematurely dead drive is replaced for free. Thank you very much. But what about your data? Nope. There's no guarantee for your data. It's gone forever. Period. And if your drive happens to statistically outlive its warranty, then when it dies you still lose all of your data ... and your drive too.
It's clear that if you care about the data on your system's drives you must think of your drives as HIGHLY VOLATILE storage that's been manufactured as cheaply as possible. And since the drive's manufacturer won't take any responsibility for your data ... YOU must.
Suppliers:
Computer Storage Services
CompuWeb - has specials running on HDD, call them to confirm pricing.
DC3 - call them for pricing.
