After I asked to be transferred to someone else, the representative told me that "WD has no official answer yet and to call again in a day or two", I pointed out the blog post that specifically directs customers to call their hotline, but then I got back into the loop of "WD has no official answer yet and to call again in a day or two"....

If they were here to help they would have done so already. It’s just a distraction.

Expecting them to proactively contact customers and to recall all existing drives seems like an unreasonable ask.

I think the point is that in this case, WD have already given us plenty of reason to believe otherwise. There isn't much doubt left now to give them its benefit.

As I said above, I don't think it's reasonable to ask WD to proactively contact everyone who bought one of these drives, so a message on their official corporate blog which reads "please reach out to customer care if you're experiencing performance problems" seems like exactly the right action to take.

So, that's the lens I'm looking through: what I'm seeing, versus what would I expect to see from a company reacting appropriately. Right now, they match.

Now, if WD had a history of posting such explicit, official messages publicly and then refusing to help customers privately, I would no longer be willing to give WD the benefit of the doubt. As far as I'm aware, we're not there yet.

I would present Facebook as an example of a company that has lost this trust. I unfortunately can no believe a single thing they say in any capacity. They have issued far, far too many apologies.

I think WD ought to offer some compensation for everyone who bought drives with worse performance than advertised. Likely they will be sued and be forced to pay something like that anyways.

I'm not sure there is only one good answer to that, but I'm quite sure that any good answer would involve not still having the broken product and misleading presentation all over the WD website right now.