Dreadnought: A Digital Storm Undertaking My Review

That would be nice!

Update:

As part of my plan to keep this review updated when anything happens, I am reporting my first issue with my DS rig.

My WD Caviar Black 1TB HDD died suddenly and without warning last Thursday evening. It had been performing fine and had even passed a recent HDTune check-up. Well, lucky me, it crashed hard and corrupted the entire MBR, and MFT. I spent many hours trying to fix it, but to no avail, not even with DOS based repair programs.

I called up DS, where I first spoke to a Maria (I believe? See next sentence). This was the only downside to the contact because there was a TON of background noise on her end and I could barely understand anything she said. She took my information and said Technical Support would call me back. About 10 minutes later (Fast!) I got a call from Gordon, who was a pleasure to deal with. We confirmed what I already pretty much knew, the HDD was toast. Now, what really pleased me was that he actually suggested I go through WD themselves in order to avoid the two-way shipping that DS would charge for the replacement HDD. I'm not here to argue about whether DS charging for shipping both ways on warranty parts is right or not, but in my mind, because thats the policy it was VERY awesome of him to suggest this to me. Most companies would just happily charge you and move on, but DS actually seems to care about ME. So thats what I did, and yes I saved money.

So my RMA HDD is on the way from WD, I was able to use Linux and TestDisk to recover my Data before the HDD ceased to even spin, and all is well.

Until next time!


Edited by Tidgxor - 30 Jul 2012 at 3:57pm

Hi Tidgxor.....Glad to see the fix is in the mail.  I'd be curious at how long it takes to get the new drive from WD. 

Originally posted by Tidgxor Thanks! I submitted the RMA on Saturday, so I'd imagine things probably didn't get rolling until yesterday. I'm curious as well, I chose the "Advance RMA" which is supposed to be 3-5 business days, so If I'm lucky I'll be back to normal sometime this week. I will say that WD's online RMA process was super slick and easy (thus far)!

I have had very little difficulty RMAing dead drives from WD. The turnaround time is also fairly speedy - I usually get the replacements within a week of sending out the malfunctioning drive. They also have the most lenient packaging requirements of any drive manufacturer I have had to return drives to(save your original packaging if you have other mfg. drives: Some will refuse a return if the drive is not shipped in a very specific way).

Bonus on the DS support response. That's the way to handle it.

That was pretty quick.     Good to know and congrats on being whole again.

Mr. Bojangles is one badass X58 rig, especially with that 990x upgrade! You can even apply to EVGA's step-up program and get yourself a pair of new cards, should you ever feel the need (not that you do as it seems )

Two Year Update

Well, it has officially been two years since this day that I received my DS rig (12/7/10). As part of my commitment to provide updates for the full 5 year life of my DS warranty I’ll be sharing a few notes about Mr. Bonjangles in the past year. I don’t actually have that much to add, which is a good thing in this kind of situation.

I haven’t made any configuration changes to my rig, I really haven’t seen the need, especially in light of the 990x upgrade. I know that the X58 platform is starting to move further and further behind us, but Mr. Bojangles still has no issue with anything that I throw his direction. My long term plans probably involve a GPU and RAM upgrade when it becomes necessary, but I’m looking at the 2^nd refresh of Kepler at the earliest and even then I might not upgrade unless I have reason to. As for RAM, my 6GB of Corsair Dominator GT is still doing wonderfully. When/if necessary I will likely upgrade to 12GB, but I don’t see the need for that anytime soon.

I did have my first hardware failure this past year when the WD Caviar 1TB HDD died without any warning whatsoever. That was pretty much a pain, especially when I had always imagined that my RAID 0 SSD’s would be the first to go (and that’s what I planned for), but nope, they are still going strong, so believe all the Intel SSD hype you read. I will certainly be sticking to Intel SSDs for the rest of my days, until given a reason not to. But the HDD went kablooey, and thankfully DS helped me out. I ended up going to WD for the warranty in the end, but that wasn’t because of anything DS did wrong. You can see my earlier posts in this thread for more details.

Luckily that was it, and the story ended on a decent note because I was able to recover all my data via Linux in the end.

So, the year two summary of my experience with Digital Storm thus far:

• Two Years In – Still 100% Recommend Digital Storm

• Had an HDD die, but no other hardware or software issues

• No noticeable decrease in performance (My boot time has slowed by about 3 seconds over 2 years, I can live with that  )

• I still play at the highest, or near highest settings at 1920x1200 with average FPS above 60

• Digital Storm technical support has continued to help me when needed

• The community is still the best I’ve found for a manufacturer’s website

• I still love my Noctua NH-D14, and have likely become a Noctua fanboy for life

So, I still highly recommend that you strongly consider Digital Storm for your purchase, I don’t think you will be disappointed.  

Edited by Tidgxor - 07 Dec 2012 at 7:44am

Awesome

I.. just wish, not the way this sounds but that my words meant something to people. Digital Storm, as also detailed by your 2 years of updates continues to care of you as a valuable customer every single day past your purchase date. In this business you just can't beat that -- I have trouble getting someone from D*** and Cybe****** or Ibu****** to even fix defects they send me.

The difference between Digital Storm and all the others is its all about quality not how many PCs they can ship.

Sorry for hijacking the thread mate.