Resellers Take Western Digital Drive Recall In Stride

Monday's recall of desktop hard-disk drives by Western Digital Corp. is being taken in stride by resellers and OEMs that predict little fallout from the problem.

A problem with a chip from a third-party vendor could cause the drives, ranging in capacity from 6.4 to 20.5 Gbytes, to fail to power up after six to 12 months of full-time use.

Of the 1 million WD Caviar 6.8-Gbyte-per-platter drives the Irvine, Calif.-based company produced between Aug. 27 and Sept. 24, about 400,000 have been sold to OEMs and the reseller and retail channels, according to Western Digital officials.

Western Digital did well to issue the recall in a timely manner, said Jason Windsor, co-owner of Dreamachine LLC, an Everett, Wash.-based reseller.

"I'm staunch on Western Digital," Windsor said. "I really like their products. For them to issue the recall notice is a good thing. It's one of those things that could happen."

The recall could be a major problem, said Gary Shurman, president of Software and Stuff Inc., Metarie, La. "I have to go to our clients, use Ghost or some other program to copy the data to another drive, and reconfigure the system," Shurman said.

Even so, the recall does not shake Shurman's support of Western Digital as a vendor. "I respect their honesty in doing this recall," he said. "It's better than finding the problem months later."

Western Digital is working to get as many drives as possible back before they go into systems, said a company spokeswoman. She did not know how many drives actually were shipped to end users, though the company has determined that only about 4,000 drives were shipped to Macintosh users. Only desktop drives were affected, she said.

Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Irvine, Calif., shipped an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 desktop systems to the channel with the recalled drives, said Mike Wagner, director of marketing for desktop systems at Toshiba. However, the majority still are in shipment or at the distributor, so relatively few have reached resellers, he said.

"We never like to see these things happen," said Wagner. "But Western Digital has been very responsive and forthcoming with information. They've been very proactive. . . . It's a hassle more than a disaster. We have to thank Western Digital. If they had delayed just another week or two, the problem could have been a lot more severe."

Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, posted a notice on its Web site telling customers how to determine if their drive is subject to the recall. The problem affects only 4,660 drives sold in Deskpro systems in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the statement said.

No server drives were affected, said a Compaq spokeswoman.

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