Hello, I am writing this in sheer frustration with the small hope someone may read this at WD and understand how small and utterly powerless I am as a individual consumer. I purchased a 4TB My Passport drive from Amazon in July 2019. It began failing approximately 10 months later. several groups of sectors were unreadable and it would bind up my system as it struggled to read from these bad sectors until finally timing out with an error msg. I submitted it to WD at my expense for an in-warranty eval in August of 2020. The result was a report of "damage" and I was given the option of having it returned, again at my expense, or allow WD to keep and dispose of it using whatever means they use to do so. The MyPassport drives are a product meant to be portable and should be more resiliant than a typical consumer level drive. I always transported it in a padded case purchased in the same order as the drive. It had never been dropped or struck by another object and my natural reaction was to question "damaged". Of course it was damaged, that was the reason I was submitting it for evaluation and I wanted to know more about the nature of the problem and how it could have manifested. All of my inquiries went unanswered. I used the company's service portal and thought I was complying with the correct procedures. I even asked for my drive to be returned and was willing to pay but I never got a response nor were any of my follow-up emails answered.

I appreciate the size of WD's operations and the large number of parts they must deal with every day but I can not settle with that as an excuse for the feeling I was simply abandoned and left empty handed with no drive, no explainations, and no recourse for the failure of an item less than one year old. The pain of this sting comes so sharply because I am and have always been brand-loyal to Western Digital for thirty years. I am 50 years old and started building my own systems in the early 90s. The first hdd I ever bought was a 650MB IDE drive that cost around $400 at the time. I can ballpark the number of drives I have purchased for every desktop, laptop, and server I have built at 80 over the past three decades. I can imagine many people make similar claims in an effort to endear themselves to the comany they have issue with but I do have many of the receipts still available in various forms.

The bottom line is simply this, I have always purchased and recommended WD drives because I beleived they put out superior products. The fact that I have had only one problem among all those drives purchased over the years is a testament to that fact. (there are actually two issues as my WD MyBookLive drive failed one month after MY Passport drive issue. It had been running 24/7 for at least 7 years so I don't fault it for failing.) The first time I ask for support for a drive that was still in warranty was a complete letdown and had the same effect as if I had been betrayed by a long-time friend. I know that sounds overly dramatic but it is the only way I can describe the feeling. I have friends who said I was a fool to expect anything different and that concepts like brand loyalty are as outdated as that first 650MB IDE drive but I still want to fight against that cynicism and hold out hope that I am not as foolish as I fell.