Western Digital RMA Service?
 

I wanted to get my hard drive RMA'ed but their site gives very vague details about the process. Spontaneous crashes, and strange noises leads me to conclude that my drive is faulty. Only when it reaches a certain capacity, do I experience these problems.

Warrantry verifier says I'm eligible, and I want to do chose the "Advance Replacement" method. But I want to hold off because it says on their site "For Advance Replacements, you have 30 days to return the defective product. If no defective product is returned within that time, you will be billed approximately 30 days from the date the replacement was shipped."

I'm just worried that if they don't find my drive defective, I'll get billed and I'm not trying to cheat the system in any way.

Western Digital supplies some tools for checking their harddrives. Use that kind of tool (booting from floppy or CD) and exec an entire check of the harddrive. If the check reveals the drive is faulty (strange noise is a good indicator) you RMA the drive saying it's because of mechanical damage (or something like that).
I already RMA'd two wd drives, one because of mechanical reasons and one because of a faulty controller. I had no problems getting a replacement.

cya
liquid

I've found the WD "Lifesaver" or whatever the hell that is to be absolutely useless. I'd suggest that you go ahead and contact tech support and tell them your story. Use that method to verify that you can send it in.

(This is assuming that the "certain capacity" isn't 100%) :\

This is the correct link:
http://support.wdc.com/download/inde...pid=999&swid=2