I'm looking for advice about where to buy drives for my DS918+.
I've currently got two WD red 4TB drives in SHR configuration and a 6TB purple. I bought the red drives in late December 2018 from an Australian ebay store specialising in hard drives. The drives all appeared to be brand new. However, one has been clocking up bad sectors and showing signs of failing. I initially went to the WD site to see what I needed to claim a warranty replacement, but WD are claiming warranty expired because apparently the drives were manufactured more than 3 years ago. Fortunately the ebay seller offers a 3 year store warranty and offered to refund the faulty drive.
My concern is that online seller and store warranties can be hard to chase up after 3 years so I'd like to know I have a valid manufacturer warranty as well as a store warranty. Are other brands better? If so, what do others buy? Is the problem that 4TB is now small and larger sizes will have been made more recently?
As to why the drives have no WD warranty, when I tried to register them on the WD site, they came up as 'out of warranty' even though I entered the correct purchase date. There was an option to get the warranty status updated by submitting a copy of the purchase invoice, so I lodged it. The reply then came back that my invoice wasn't sufficient proof that I'd bought genuinely new drives and recommending contacting the store where i bought them. After googling, it seems that almost no amount of evidence will convince WD after a few years post-manufacture.
If WD warranties are unusable, which stores are most likely to be around in 3 years? Futu? CA?
Western Digital warranty is based on the disk manufacturer date, but under consumer law you get full warranty through the retailer, as long as you keep the receipt. I wouldnt worry about it too much unless you get a disk with 5 years warranty. To prevent this just buy in person and you can check the manufacture date before buying.