Western Digital: Let the Buyer Beware

I bought a new Western Digital (WD) hard drive.  The drive's label indicated a date (of manufacture, presumably) of February 29, 2012.  It was supposed to have a five-year warranty.  And perhaps it did.  But when I went to WD's Warranty Check site and entered the drive's serial number, it indicated that the warranty would expire on July 11, 2012.  That would be a warranty of exactly five months, not five years.

I wanted to ask WD whether this was an error in their warranty check page, or whether perhaps the merchants selling such drives were deceived as to the actual duration of the warranty.  Unfortunately, WD offered no way to do so.  I spent 20 minutes screwing around in their website, trying various possibilities. 

For one thing, I had to create an account, which I was willing to do, though it seemed unnecessary.  Also, the Support link at the top of their webpage took me to a Service and Support webpage, where I tried several possibilities.  The Warranty & RMA Services link on that page led to an End User Customer page that, unfortunately, provided no way to make contact other than those appearing on the Service and Support webpage.  Specifically, the Contact WD link at the bottoms of these pages led to the same phone and email support webpages as were available on the Service and Support page.

Between those two, the email option led to a page that promised an opportunity to ask a question if I was just willing to Continue to WD Support Portal.  But that was false; there was no opportunity to ask a question on the resulting Manage Your Account page.  Meanwhile, the phone option led into a voice tree that provided no option for asking an actual question.

This was all very time-consuming and frustrating.  I appreciate that WD can make more money if it can force everyone to find answers to nonstandard questions somewhere else.  The exception I would point out is that WD will make less money if those nonstandard questions, or their handling, have to do with the purchase decision.  Specifically, (a) I expect to see a five-year warranty when I am promised one, and (b) if there is an error or falsification on that point, I expect to be able to find that out before, not after, buying a drive from WD.  Otherwise, at a certain point, I would fear a run-around and a possible nasty surprise.  No consumer wants that.

In my case, I don't have a defective drive.  So the standard RMA procedure is not applicable.  I have a drive that I am trying to sell.  I want to be able to assure my potential buyers that the drive is under warranty.  WD is not giving me that assurance.  Had I been aware of this sort of problem, I would not have bought this drive.  It may be great, and may last five years.  Or it may not.  In the latter case, I want warranty coverage, not a hassle.

I will have to discount my drive by some amount in order to overcome reasonable worries of potential buyers.  So in my case, it was a mistake to buy a Western Digital drive, counting on its resale value.  Two months from now -- by which time WD may have sorted out its warranty portal -- the situation may be different.  I'll consider that possibility if I feel like buying another drive from WD then.

External Hard Drive Problem: Cypress AT2LP RC58 Error

I bought an Apricorn EZ-Bus-DT (sometimes called an EZ Bus DT, without the hyphens) external hard drive enclosure from Newegg. I really liked it, and I got it with a big rebate, though now I see I could also have bought a discounted, refurbished one directly from the manufacturer, whose current products webpage led me to understand that this newly purchased product was no longer state-of-the-art. One day, the system stopped recognizing this external drive. Instead, I was getting a Found New Hardware dialog. It wanted me to insert my disk or install the drivers for a Cypress AT2LP RC58. I didn't know what that was, so I went online to research it. Sources there said that this meant the system was no longer recognizing my external hard drive enclosure, which apparently uses Cypress hardware. I verified that the problem was not just with my computer, by connecting the external drive to another computer, where I got the same message. The drive itself was fine, they said, but I would have to install it directly inside my computer as a slave if I wanted to access its data. I was hoping that the Apricorn would actually resume working, though, so I forged ahead in the search for alternatives. I found no FAQs at all on the Apricon support webpage, and they said no drivers were necessary for Windows XP. The product manual itself did not address any troubleshooting problems. I dropped them an e-mail and continued my search. A Google search turned up several hundred hits, from all over the world, so it seemed that this problem affected a number of users. I found no downloads for the AT2LP RC58 on the Cypress downloads page. For some reason, Cypress required me to register and log in before searching its webpage for a solution, so there would be no point providing links, here, to the various webpages I searched. (They kept requiring me to log in again and again when I checked those pages.) Suffice it to say that I found no answers in their Communities (which did not appear to be user forums in the usual sense), and eventually figured out that this was different from their Discussion Forums. I think I found the latter by using their Contact Us link and selecting Technical Support. (When I tried the link for actual technical support, a/k/a contact with a human, I got "Sorry, an error has occurred and has prevented your request from being processed." A search of their KnowledgeBase took me back to their homepage. In a general search for AT2LP across their webpage, I found a document called AN14569.pdf that alerted me to the existence of some software known as the Cypress Configuration Utility, which looked like it might enable the technically very knowledgeable user to reconfigure the programmable chip that was apparently responsible for the existence and possible resolution of this problem. I also found a link to a mass storage driver for various versions of Windows (including WinXP), but it dated from 2003, so I had to assume it was already incorporated in whatever I had done when I first received and installed the unit and found it to be working. I found a simplistic solution on the MVIXUSA.com webpage, but someone said that this did not resolve the problem for them. The MVIX solution appeared to be a shorthand version of a much longer and many-dimensioned investigation of the problem by Barrington Daltrey. His page offered a number of different possible solutions and perspectives on the issue. Someone posting in the Cypress forums (which I did ultimately find) offered this shorter summary of what was apparently Daltrey's most pithy suggestion, as follows: Downloading the files --------------------- 1. Download this file: http://daltrey.org/linux/DBFlash.exe. Save it to your desktop. 2. Double click the file. It will prompt you to choose a location to unzip it to. Doesn't matter where you put it - unzipping it to the Desktop is easiest. 3. Click "Unzip" 4. Go to your desktop and check that you have a new folder, called "PH-1003 EE SW". If so, you're good to move on. Installing the new driver ------------------------- 1. Click Start -> Control Panel 2. Double click "System". If you can't find an entry labeled "System", click "Switch to classic view" on the left hand side of the window, then check again. 3. Click the "Hardware" tab 4. Click "Device Manager". This will open the device manager, and let you view all your devices. 5. Find the Cypress entry. It should be pretty obvious. You might need to expand the "Universal Serial Bus controllers" section to find it. Most likely it will have a yellow question mark next to it. Once you find it, right click on it and select "Update driver...". 6. Select "No, not this time" and click "Next" 7. Select "Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)" and click "Next" 8. Select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install." and click "Next" 9. If a big list of different types of devices appears, click "All devices" and click "Next". If you don't see this list, don't worry. 10. Click "Have Disk..." 11. Click "Browse..." 12. Browse to your desktop. Enter the "PH-1003 EE SW" folder. Enter the "Driver" folder. Select "CyUSB.inf" and click "Open" 13. Click "OK" 14. Click "Next" 15. Windows will now install the new driver. Once it's done, click "OK" or "Done" or whatever it says. 16. The question mark next to the Cypress device should now be gone. It's name might change too. 17. Reboot your computer. Resetting your hard drive's firmware ------------------------------------ 1. Back at your desktop, open up the "PH-1003 EE SW" folder. 2. Double click on "Primer.exe" 3. Wait... it should display some messages about plugging in your hard drive, then it should find the hard drive quickly and do some stuff before saying "Successful". 4. Shut down your computer 5. Unplug and turn off the hard drive. 6. Wait a moment... 7. Plug the hard drive back in and turn it on. 8. Turn the computer back on. 9. With any luck, once it boots it will show up as a hard drive again! I decided to wait for a response from Apricorn before undertaking all that. I also pondered the possibility of returning the unit to Newegg as defective. It wasn't entirely clear to me, from either Daltrey's long page (which I did not read word-for-word) or this summary, whether this would be a one-time fix, a reprogramming of the hardware, or whether this was instead a driver issue that might need to be repeated from time to time. A few days later, I did get a reply from Apricorn. Here's what they said:

Yes, it sounds like there is a problem with the USB controller chip. That is
the default prom chip information. Please call support and have them set up
a replacement for you. If this is not possible, you can send me your
shipping and contact information and I can set it up for your, but it will
be quicker if you can call in.

So I was pleased that I got tech support on it; pleased at the prospect of having a model that did not suffer from the problem ... and uncertain as to whether I wanted to keep the unit. I had meanwhile considered that maybe I should have bought a model that would handle SATA as well as IDE drives, since SATA was the wave of the future I already had one SATA drive that I thought I might be wanting to convert to external usage at some point. Preliminarily, though, it looked like those enclosures were more expensive, and anyway I didn't really need one right now. So I went ahead with Apricorn's RMA option. On that point, they were very cooperative. They took my credit card information and sent me a replacement unit, and they allowed extra time for my return under the RMA. The replacement enclosure worked without problems. One possibility is that I was more careful in never powering it down or switching it to the other computer when it was working. Basically, this meant that I always had to shut down the computer before switching, because the system tray icon for "Safely Remove Hardware" would always give me a message indicating that the hard drive can't be safely removed right now. My only other note on this item is that, as of this writing, it appeared Apricorn was going to screw me out of my rebate. I was really surprised. They had seemed like a class act. Maybe I can get them to get with the program on that. Not sure.