Do Western Digital drives suck or is it just me? Or maybe they don't?

Typical.. as noted I created a nice new system to test Windows 7 and what happens? My 250GB Western Digital drive now thinks it's name is

WDC ROM MODEL-HAWK-----

and it is 8 GB. Not that anything can see it anymore. It still in warranty but without any proof of purchase I definitely won't get squat...

In some countries I could march back in and say it's broken and they'd bend over backwards to help me. We don't really have a customer focus in retail in New Zealand.

We have a some law named the Consumer Guarantee Act but you still feel like you're asking someone if you can beat their mother up for even thinking about returning something.

Anyway this drive is broken and there are a lot of hits when you search for the phrase above. Looks like they're not the most reliable things on the planet. So I think I'll give them a wide birth for the moment...

Update a few hours later: I turned everything off for a while (this is usually a 24/7 machine) and the drive is back. Not sure how well but seems ok so far. So give that a go if you're WD drive goes weird...

Update some 18 months later...

I've had two more western digital drive die in the last few months and they were not coming back noway nohow. So in my eyes western digital have some very severe quality issues and I will not be buying any more anytime soon.

So I have two dead drives (both blue advanced format EARS models if any one is searching for "western digital dead drives are rubbish") fortunately both are backup drives but I now have no backup and my main drive is also a western digital so it's getting replaced as soon as I can get a new drive. Need to check reliability on other drive brands...