Sending drive back to Western Digital.. should I be worried?

lol, pr0n
don't leave your pr0n on there man!!!!
definitely don't leave your personal finance documents on there.

I am pretty sure they will, i mean - i would, wouldn't you?
LOL!
sorry about that, but it seems to be the truth. Unless it comes across the HONEST GUY OF THE YEAR, which i highly doubt it!
Try and find out if there is a policy about it on their website, like saying that all private data are destroyed or back up and sent back to the user or something like that.

There is a chance that they just accept your word that the drive is bad, dump out the guts (including the HD platters), install the new guts and send it back to you. That is what you are wishing will happen.

But I would think that they would have to "see" if the drive actually works. Maybe they will just load the drive into a system that attempts to write and read several specific files off the drive. At that point they are just reading their specific data files. Room on the drive for the files with no read or write = dumps the guts and move onto giving you a new drive.

Considering the company is going to want this entire transaction (and the dozens just like it every day) to go as fast as possible, there would not be a lot time alloted to snooping into your drives. And because the customers returning the drives could include government agencies (state, city, Feds, local law enforcement etc etc) as well as real corperate customers, I assume (assume being the key word) that there is a lot of oversite in that particular division of the company.

Also, when the guts get dumped into the trash, the guts will be shredded. There is just waaaaayyyyy too much risk for governmental or large corporate files to mixed into the trash. Shredding and burning is cheaper than the risk.

So your only concern is the line tech that reads the drive to insure it works or not. IF that tech has a long lunch period and some extra time on his/her hands and your files had names like "don't let mom see these pictures" and "secret Swiss bank account numbers" then you should be worried. Otherwise just return the drive and don't sweat the small stuff.

Hard drive manufacturers do not have time for such nonsense. The drives are mass processed through a diagnostic and even when they find the drive is good, the platters still are processed to a complete wipe. The good controllers are recycled and mated with good platters further down the line.

I agree with Onestar. They could careless about what is on the drive. Time is money in the market. They have no time to snoop.