Testing Zip Zoom Fly's RMA process. WD 1 TB DOA Drive.

DonDon

[H]ard|Gawd
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Well, I realised I needed to upgrade my Nas box last month when I ran out of room for my Po... er the wife's digital picture collection. So, I dug around a bit and decided on a Thecus N5200 from Newegg with 3 WD Green Power 1 TB drives from Zip Zoom Fly.

I decided to give ZZF a try because I heard about the nice packaging they provide for OEM drives. Well, I got things in and started formatting the RAID5 with the 3 drives and wouldn't you know it, SMART errors from slot 1. Crap! So I pulled the drive and reseated it, and it finished formatting a few hours later. I started copying a few hundred gig of video files over to it, fully expecting it to crap out again and it did.

So I got on ZZF's web site on Sunday night, and filled out an RMA request. I recieved my RMA # on Monday afternoon. I am on the road tonight, so I will be shipping it out on Tuesday afternoon, I hope.

I will update this thread with the results of my experiences. Wish me luck. Stay tuned.

It makes me wonder if WD even turned the damn drive on in their factory. It never even completed it's first format. I wish I would have gone with the Seagate 7200.10s now instead of the WD drives. I suppose I can just fill the last 2 slots with 1.5 TB drives instead of 1 TB models, and then update the original 3 drives to 1.5's when I need the room. We shall see.

I'm gonna walk across the street to the Bennigans and have a few beers and then call it a night.


Don
 
While not a hard drive, I recently had to RMA a Zalman CPU HSF through Zip Zoom Fly and the turnaround time was quick on their end (though ground shipping from NY to CA takes about a week). I did order six Seagate 1TB from them and all arrived in working condition, as well as in those nice styrofoam containers they provide for OEM drives :D
 
zzf have great RMA system, I only had to use it like 2-3 times at work but no issues at all. Nice clean, simple process.
 
Tuesday 4pm, drive shipped out USPS Priority mail. They should have it by Friday. $7.25 for shipping.

BTW, the other 2 drives are still working fine in a "DEGRADED" Raid 5. The new NAS is not online yet. I will wait for the replacement drive.

Don
 
Label/Receipt Number: 0103 8555 7493 6116 4721
Status: Delivered

Your item was delivered at 11:54 AM on September 18, 2008 in NEWARK, CA 94560.

Delivered to ZZF at noon on Thursday.

ZZF Status at 11pm central time on Sept 18th.

RMA# Order# Product Desc RMA Status Tracking#

N28156x Z439806x
WESTERN DIGITAL WD10EACS 1TB SATA 7200 RPM 16MB Hard Drive ***Free Shipping***
Processing Return

Here is where they can really shine, or flop on their face.

Don
 
Hmmm, a day and a half after recieving my dead drive, they still show the status as processing return. I was hoping they would get the new one in the mail today.

Bummer.

Bad ZZF! :(

Oh well, till next week then.

Don
 
Still processing my return. For almost 4 business days now. Their shipping is great. Their return process is beginning to annoy me. :rolleyes:

Don
 
Status update. They finally shipped it. Well, their status shows as shipped. They haven't given me a tracking number yet.

Don
 
4 days is not that shabby IMO. Sounds about the same as a previous ZZF RMA experience I've had.
 
Well, after they receive your dead drive, I figure the engineers have gotta test it to (a) make sure its dead dead and (b) if its dead dead whats wrong with it. With a reasonably big company like ZZF they probably receive a decent amount of RMAs daily so there's probably backlog? That'll take a day or two, then after that's done they have to issue a new drive, and packing and shipping almost always takes a day or two.

Of course, I've never worked RMA/product returns at any of these places so I'm just talking out of my ass here...
 
It makes me wonder if WD even turned the damn drive on in their factory. It never even completed it's first format. I wish I would have gone with the Seagate 7200.10s now instead of the WD drives.

QFT

IME, WD and Maxtor are cheap-ass commodity consumer crap. I'm a big time Seagate fan.
 
Well, after they receive your dead drive, I figure the engineers have gotta test it to (a) make sure its dead dead and (b) if its dead dead whats wrong with it. With a reasonably big company like ZZF they probably receive a decent amount of RMAs daily so there's probably backlog? That'll take a day or two, then after that's done they have to issue a new drive, and packing and shipping almost always takes a day or two.

Of course, I've never worked RMA/product returns at any of these places so I'm just talking out of my ass here...

Admittedly, it has been a while since I have had a drive die under warranty, but in the past, I always RMAd the drive to the OEM, gave them a CC # and had the replacement cross shipped so I knew I had approved packaging to return it in. I have never had an OEM question a warranty return.

I generally DO NOT buy expensive things online because of this issue. It's much easier to return to a local B&M store. But the 1 TB GP drives were expensive locally. And the Nas I wanted was not available at all locally.

Oh well, I'll live. I may sound like I am dieing, but honestly, I aint. ;)

Don
 
WD and Maxtor are cheap-ass commodity consumer crap. I'm a big time Seagate fan.

Maxtor == Seagate now.

Personally, I love WD and haven't had any significant issues. Honestly, I don't really see any particular major HDD manufacturer as more reliable than the other. We mainly sell Seagate at work, but all the brands we sell have very similar failure rates. *shrugs*
 
Yeah, in all honesty, a lot of the perception regarding different hard disk manufacturers is based on personal experience, you'll see one post swearing by WD while the next one wouldn't touch a WD with a ten foot pole. If they made inherently crap drives, I doubt they'd be in business for long in this kind of industry that demands reliability.
 
Yeah, in all honesty, a lot of the perception regarding different hard disk manufacturers is based on personal experience, you'll see one post swearing by WD while the next one wouldn't touch a WD with a ten foot pole. If they made inherently crap drives, I doubt they'd be in business for long in this kind of industry that demands reliability.

Google did a study on their hard drive failure rate a couple of years ago. They claimed there was no difference in manufacturers accept for 1. But they refused to name the crappy manufacturer. The COWARDS.

BTW, they just issued my tracking number. FEDEX ground, wont get in till the 29th. :rolleyes:

I recently learned about TLER in another thread. My drives are desktop drives without TLER enabled. My brand new drive still had lots of errors on it, but having TLER on might have kept it from being dropped from the array. I will have to ponder whether to turn it on on my drives before I put it into service.

Don
 
I've been 100% WD since I built my first in '03. No problems. I had a Samsung 160 die out of the blue - that one experience scarred me for life. I will never buy Samsung again. See, if my WD's clicked (at all) - I would advance RMA it and a new one would take it's place. I only had to do this once b/c a 250GB was damaged from a thunderstorm.

I'm pretty sure it's either Samsung or Maxtor that is the guilty party. Particularly Samsung, b/c I got no SMART errors before I lost ripped music/OS/school docs/etc.
 
I've been 100% WD since I built my first in '03. No problems. I had a Samsung 160 die out of the blue - that one experience scarred me for life. I will never buy Samsung again. See, if my WD's clicked (at all) - I would advance RMA it and a new one would take it's place. I only had to do this once b/c a 250GB was damaged from a thunderstorm.

I'm pretty sure it's either Samsung or Maxtor that is the guilty party. Particularly Samsung, b/c I got no SMART errors before I lost ripped music/OS/school docs/etc.

According to the report, only like a quarter of all failures are preceded by SMART errors. BBBUUUUTTTTT, SMART errors almost always mean imminent failure. Smart is not perfect, but is better than nothing.

Here is the REPORT! It's a fascinating read for the GEEK inclined.

Don
 
I'm a huge seagate fan. I use basicaly every brand out there and have a lot of experience with each, out of the current lot I have I have about (4 Samsungs, 6 WD's, 4 Maxtor, 20 Hitachis, 38 Seagates) and some other assortments (cant wait for the 2tb drives). While they are all fairly reliable, I do prefer the seagate warranties and compatibility with high end controllers.
 
IBM SCSI drives were notorius for being about as damn near bulletproof as you'd ever get.

Obviously Hitachi bought the HD division of IBM, but its kinda been not the same signal to noise ratio for positives.

Regardless, I dropped one 6 ft to the ground while building, powered it right up, never had a bad sector on it after some 3-4 years of being in use in a 4-6 disk SCSI chain (I forget how many of them damn things I had).

Thankfully, knock on wood, I've only had 1 premature bad HD, and it was an old WD SCSI drive. That covers some 15 years of PC's, and nay a sqeak outta the rest of them, no matter which brand it be. Lucky, maybe, but with the actual HD failure rates, I'd say my percentages are well within line :)
 
interesting the different perspectives here - personal experience can override even the most convincing and statistically sound studies, eh?
Perhaps my view is colored a bit due to the fact that nearly all of the Seagate drives I've purchased have been SCSI, while the others (maxtor, WD) were IDE... hmmm...

I know for sure that I have taken a lot of flack over the years for paying such a premium to have SCSI in my home rigs, but I just absolutely hate HD crashing and poor performance. One of my rigs (main file server) has SCSI everything, and it is an absolute joy to rip/burn CDs, while multitasking. Never did have a lot of patience for doing nothing while waiting for a rip or a burn to complete!
 
Unless you are a system builder, IT manager, or something similar, basing opinions on personal HD experience isn't the most reliable thing for those who understand statistics. Even personal experience with up to 100 drives is relatively insignificant because that's still a small population number, and the 100 drives are likely spread out through years worth of experience throwing in many other variables with each batch.

So for the people who think "I got burned once I'll never get a XXX drive again" mentality... Why even bother looking through statistics or researching products before you buy?
 
Unless you are a system builder, IT manager, or something similar, basing opinions on personal HD experience isn't the most reliable thing for those who understand statistics. Even personal experience with up to 100 drives is relatively insignificant because that's still a small population number, and the 100 drives are likely spread out through years worth of experience throwing in many other variables with each batch.

So for the people who think "I got burned once I'll never get a XXX drive again" mentality... Why even bother looking through statistics or researching products before you buy?

I have been preaching that around here for a long time. It does no good though. :rolleyes:

My replacement drive left a Fedex location in CA at 6:30 am on the 24th and no updates since. Still scheduled for a Sept 29th delivery.

Don
 
Well, it's within 20 miles of my house, but Fedex does not do home delivery on weekends, so it will sit there till Monday. :(

Oh well. I can go 3 more days without playing with my new toys I guess.

Don
 
Now it's about 5 miles from my house, but they still won't deliver it until Monday.

Don
 
Ok, it did show up today while I was at work. Luckily no sig was required. Fedex even stuffed it in a plastic bag due to a threat of rain that did not show up.

About 2 weeks door to door. Ok i guess. I guess I get what I pay for when I go with the low bidder. ;)

I turned TLER on for all 3 of the drives. Rebooted with the 2 working drives. Then stuffed the replacement drive in and it started a rebuild. The original RAID 5 was 3, 1 TB drives. I copied about 300 GB of data onto it while it was in degraded mode. The rebuild in that state will take about 8 hours.

Overall, I would give ZZF a B. I shipped it USPS Priority mail, and they returned it Fedex Ground. 2 vs 4 days. It took them almost 4 days to turn it around at their end. It was returned inside one of their foam boxes with a couple of inches of peanuts on all sides. They even took the time to stuff some extra peanuts inside the foam box to keep the drive from bouncing around.

A very good effort. Not perfect, but very good.

Don
 
A four day turnaround on a RMA is actually quite good, IMO. The only case I would expect better would be for an advanced replacement/cross ship type of deal.
 
Well, in many years of playing a working with computers, this is my first DOA drive from an online retailer. When I go to a B&M store, I get instant satisfaction. When I had warranty issues with OEM's, I always cross shipped. The OEM's usually overnighted or 2 dayed the replacement drives. So 2 weeks for them to take care of me seems glacially slow. But I did go with the low bidder. I could have bought them locally, for 60 bux more per drive.

All in all, ZZF did OK by me. My only minor gripes are their somewhat slow turn around and the fact that they shipped the replacement drive UPS ground. Deal breakers in the future, NO! Just something I wanted to pass on to the others who frequent these forums.

I do not buy alot of stuff online just because of this reason. I am lucky that I live within an hours drive of a Microcenter, a Fry's, and a Tigerdirect Outlet. So I don't have to buy online that often.

My experience was good, just not perfect.

Don
 
I've had RMA's through newegg and ZZF. Both were god in the sense that I was able to get my money back or a replacement item, but ZZF fought me every step of the way. They had me go through every trouble shooting thing they could think of before allowing the RMA of a hard drive.

I call up newegg with a problem and they waive all restocking fees if they apply, e-mail me a UPS shipping label, and I'm good to go.

What I have learned from both retailers is call them for RMA's. Do not just use their on-line form. Much better results when you can actually talk to someone.
 
I've had RMA's through newegg and ZZF. Both were god in the sense that I was able to get my money back or a replacement item, but ZZF fought me every step of the way. They had me go through every trouble shooting thing they could think of before allowing the RMA of a hard drive.

I call up newegg with a problem and they waive all restocking fees if they apply, e-mail me a UPS shipping label, and I'm good to go.

What I have learned from both retailers is call them for RMA's. Do not just use their on-line form. Much better results when you can actually talk to someone.

Well, there was nothing that could be done to troubleshoot mine. 2 identical drives worked fine in my NAS, and the bad drive did not. I reseated it once and it failed again.

They never questioned my RMA.

Don
 
I know you were testing ZZF's RMA process, but just in case you didn't know, WD has an advance replacement RMA program on their website.
 
I've had RMA's through newegg and ZZF. Both were god in the sense that I was able to get my money back or a replacement item, but ZZF fought me every step of the way. They had me go through every trouble shooting thing they could think of before allowing the RMA of a hard drive.

I call up newegg with a problem and they waive all restocking fees if they apply, e-mail me a UPS shipping label, and I'm good to go.

What I have learned from both retailers is call them for RMA's. Do not just use their on-line form. Much better results when you can actually talk to someone.

I gotta agree with you here.
Basically the Intellipark on the the WD 1TB GP was driving me insane. I have a very quiet system, so I prefer constant sounds - not random *click* noises, that is an inherent part of the GP series.

Anyway, I filed the RMA within the alotted time for "RMA for Returns" - and they initially tried to deny me! It was only after waving the shipping confirmation around like a mad man _AND_ bolding their own return policy did they actually give me an RMA #.

Kinda scary if you ask me, and it totally shook my confidence with ZZF. Maybe it's a good thing though...better not to ever get comfortable with one retailer anyway. Sooner or later, they will disappoint you.
 
I know you were testing ZZF's RMA process, but just in case you didn't know, WD has an advance replacement RMA program on their website.

It wasn't really time critical, so I went with ZZF to ensure that I would get a new drive, and not a refurb.

Don
 
my seagate 1TB 7200.11 was DOA from ZZF. Thing is my retail version was made in singapore but the OEM from ZZF was made in the big red China. Good luck w/your replacement
 
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