Western Digital Reviews 665

I am extremely disappointed with Western Digital’s customer service and refund process. I returned a defective product over a month ago, yet my refund is still pending. Despite multiple follow-ups via email and phone, all I’ve received are generic responses like, "Your case is being escalated," or "Our higher department is working on it." However, no action has been taken, and no one follows up unless I initiate contact.

The returned product was defective, as confirmed by one of their technical support team members after checking the error codes. The return was processed over a month ago, and I provided photo and video evidence that the product was returned in perfect condition. Still, I’ve been left in the dark with no resolution.

This repeated delay and lack of communication are unacceptable. At this point, I am beginning to suspect fraudulent behavior and will be taking legal action if this matter is not resolved immediately.

TLDR: Don't buy WD/Sandisk.

£300 SSD stopped working after less than 2 years. All data gone. RMA service is deliberately designed to make you jump through endless hoops from the UK. Their depot is in the middle of nowhere in the Czech Republic with a complicated import policy, even for broken hardware?? Customer service is entirely useless. Take your money somewhere else, it's better spent.

Back In The Day(tm) Western Digital would ask for a serial number, look it up & find it under warranty and issue an RMA and give you an address.

Today you have to send them a photograph of the front and back of the drive, which they will reject if it's the wrong size, wrong angle or clarity along with a copy of the purchase receipt.

Who keeps a $80 cash register receipt from Best Buy from two years ago? Who would guess that WD would change their policy AFTER THE FACT?

I returned the two un-used WD drives to the supplier, tossed the bad one as a lesson learned and ordered 8 drives from another manufacturer

My WD drive just died. Luckily due to good backups, no files have been lost.

Sadly the drive is well out of warranty, their reconditioned drives only got a month worth (drive had about 1.1 years since purchase as the one before I borked by dropping it, human error there).

I have had 4 SMR drives fail one due to human error, two Seagate's and 2 WD in 8 years. The physics of these are so precise you absolutely want a good backup schedule. I'll just buy CMR drives now and SSDs for portable use. I only had the drive for a year and it's been heavily used and around the world with me on multiple flights long and short haul. This one was never dropped or abused (but has been moved around a lot in its past. and it failed during a copy operation with no prior warning.

They gave me a 15% discount code however despite being far out of warranty for a new drive which I would say is good customer service. I want to buy another drive but will go for a CMR drive only, SMR by nature is incredibly fragile with tolerances measured mere atoms wide so I wouldn't blame the manufacturer for this.

Sadly most 3.5 CMR drives need an external power supply which isn't convenient in a lightweight backpack.

Good customer service but be it WD, Seagate or someone else do keep backups, know something going out of place by a few atoms can end these drives suddenly. I'm amazed it survived the amount of round the world it did yet it died on my desk.

A 15% voucher is good customer service considering I used the drive well past it's warranty date and ease of contacting customer support as I got through with little hold time. Be aware if you buy their cheaper recertified drives, you accept the risk of a reduced warranty time, and that cost came due now :-)

Failed hard drives happen but this once great company cant execute its stated warranty as they once could. I buy and use a lot of hard drives, We have decided to no londer use Western Digital or Sandisk, who they gave theiir SSD business too. After several failures and WD changing to Sandisk. It is not cost effective for us to try to get their warranty support so we walk away from failing WD drives with warranty on them.

Well I have been pleasantly surprised since posting WD Elements reached out to me and other than a little argument Barty initially they then offered to recover my hard drive, but alas I had already undertaken that task.

What they have done however is replaced the 12 TB WESTERN digital Hard Drive with their sister product a 14TB My Passport Hard Drive.

So although I did have to spent $1830 to urgently recover my data, I am impressed that they are replacing the Hard Drive with a different product as I would never trust the WD brand again.

So I give Western Digital 9/10 for follow up effort.

Western Digital produce WD Elements Hard Drives in my case 12 TB that fail within 6 months.
I have just spent $1830 to recover 4TB of data.
When I contacted Western Digital I received a templated response email saying they would replace non functioning hard drive for a new hard drive or I had to take my receipt back to where I bought it for a refund.

No apology nothing.

I went to ring their consumer telephone support service, which is a hidden phone no and you have to jump through hoops to find it.

Fist time I had to wait after my call was answered for 7 mins to be transferred to a voicemail account that was full.

Then I called back and the operator kept touching his mouth piece pretending I couldn’t hear him even though he could hear me, pretending there was interference on the line.

I have never been so disgusted by such behaviour in my life in doing business.

DO NOT PURCHASE WESTERN DIGITAL PRODUCTS

The company has become yet another AI shelf company that does not care about its customers and simply ships boxes with products that don’t work and don’t care about the consequences of their actions.

i had multiple hard drives fail on me in the past, a good chunk of them from WD. (WD10SPZX, WD2500AAJS just to name a few)
about six months ago i invested in a 6tb blue my passport drive for general backup purposes hoping my bad experiences were just because of manufacturing defects.
the whole time i had it, it sat on my desk undisturbed and it worked perfectly, until two weeks ago when it made a clicking noise.
going back and forth with their customer service was very tiring and they said mine was a counterfeit?? (purchased straight from their site btw)
please choose any other manufacturer for critical data storage

What a useless company. Trying for weeks to make a purchase on their Web site. Checkout failed several times for no reason. Now I can't put the item in the basket as there is no link, only a sales enquiry for which WD failed to respond to. Useless pre-sales service, can't imagine how poor after-sales service would be. This is one to avoid I think.

This company has gone down the tube.

Lisa Royer, Customer Support Supervisor, and Adrian are the most incompetent staff ever. Oblivious and lost. The CEO, David Goeckeler is no different that the rest of the staff. Rating of 1.3 by more than 500 reviewer says a volume.

What a shame.

DAMAGED GOODS SENT AND THIS OS THEIR RESPONSE _ JOKERS In this scenario, we can either send you a replacement plug ( this can take long time, just letting you know so you have an idea of what expect ) otherwise you can create a return and get refunded and then place a new order, this would be the less time consuming way.

I lost all data on the second use of a 6-month-old SSD Sandisk 2TB portable drive. I registered with support requesting a replacement. I got an email asking me to email support again. I went to the link, and the form does not drop down on half its tabs, and it's the same form I've just filled in. Customer support seems to be designed to send you in a circle without actually getting an answer.

I would not put any stars if I could.
I lost three years of photo memories in a portable hard disk 1TB I bought from wd essential.
The hardest was brand new and there is no any warranty on that. I call a company to retrieve my data, but they are asking for $1000 because of the capacity of the hard disk.

I would advise you to buy a SEAGATE. It is way stronger and I never had a problem with those.

I will never ever buy from WD essential again.
Shame on you

Bought a micro SD card off Amazon which cost over £100.00 and it failed after two months. Amazon direct you to Western Digital who sent me 1x email asking a lot of stupid questions but do NOT want to help. They very quickly started blanking me and have offered me absolutely nothing!!! Terrible customer service!!

I spent a lot of money in multiples HDDs and SSDs for my company. It was almost impossible to do well because they divided it between WD and Sandisk, all website is broken and support is hard to reach and useless.

They made me create new accounts in Sandisk when they're supposed to have been transfered there, and I couldn't buy anything because they had to check for the company when it was already checked in WD.com

If you have personal and business account you're dead, cookies get mixed and you spend the day signing in and out.

My invoice was wrong because the invoice date was later than when I bought and paid it. I needed it to be for the date that I pay, that's what you get when you PAY something, but they said it's for when they process it. Their answer was to just send it back...

Purchased SN580 NVMe SSD to upgrade my Dell Laptop. WD allows you to download a stripped down version of Acronis TrueHome software. When the back up recovery fails Acronis says speak to WD. WD says speak to Acronis. Chat session with WD finally, but was cut short because my recovery disk was on a Seagate External. I was able to fix it myself by down loading full version of Acronis. Next time I will avoid WD altogether.

Ordered an expensive SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD from Western Digital online store.
Tried to register the disk at Western Digital online, which froze the screen and would not allow me to register.
Opened a chat line with WD support who told me I was with the wrong support team and gave me a link to SanDisk Support.
SanDisk support told me I was with the wrong support team and needed to speak to Western Digital Support.
Contacted WD support who then said they would register the product for me.
Some hours later received an email from WD Support who said:
"Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is

We have updated our support process for HDD and Flash products from the Western Digital family of brands. You have landed into the incorrect line of support and will be transferred over to the correct support line by clicking on this link. Thank you for your patience".
Tried to register online and the screen froze and emailed WD to try to get this fixed.
Some hope of that happening!

So many fake SD cards on the market that claim to be real, it's a no brainer to purchase from Western Digital themselves knowing that they're legit. From now on this is my only place to go to for sd cards. Thanks

Last spring my two WD drives (one WD Passport and one WD Passport Ultra) worked great as backup drives. However, both have failed and WD support provides NO assistance as to why, or how, these drives failed. I will never buy WD products again. Their support is completely hands off and uncaring.

Now using Samsung and the performance is superior.

ordered a drive which was never delivered, after a dozen extremely unhelpful email and phone exchanges, no action from WD was taken although they were able to immediately locate and confirm the item was held by a ups access point. 3 weeks later no resolution, no re-delivery, no feedback on my request to receive a refund. In the end I had to take legal action via my credit card provider.

Big company, very bureaucratic and customerunfriendly. Cannot change billingadres after they made a mistake by not asking me and getting the wrong adres from Paypal. To correct this I would have to cancel the order, send back the goods, wait for my money and pay for an new order. That is not a good sollution.
Product send quickly though, so not all bad. Then again send with UPS, which caused some more trouble with the delivery. So one star is actually to much credit. I will not order anything else with WD.