How Western Digital has failed me

I’m posting this on the Shutters Inc blog in the hopes that I get Western Digital‘s attention.
As mentioned on the podcast, I bought a WD MyPassport wireless 1TB drive a week before I left Australia. As you also know, that drive was DOA. The first time I powered it up, ready to set up the wireless network, I got the alternating LED’s which signalled that the drive was faulty.
I took it back to JB Hi-Fi and swapped it for another unit, believing that this would be a one-off failure.
Well, here I am, a scant 2 days into a 20 day holiday in Borneo, and the replacement unit has just died, taking with it the first 2 days worth of backed up photos. Thankfully, I have not cleared the memory cards!
But of course, now that I’m not in Australia, I can’t just pop back down to JB Hi-Fi to tell them that the second unit has carked it, can I?
No.
Now I’m in a foreign country with no recourse.
All I can do now is commit to buying ANOTHER drive, or perhaps a bunch of 64GB USB keys to back-up my images to.
Seriously unimpressed, as you can well imagine.
I guess my other option is to create jpegs straight from the RAW files, and back those up to the cloud, but that is really only a viable solution if I have both the tools and the time to caress the RAW’s prior to generating the jpeg’s…. I have neither. What I really want is back-ups of the RAW files themselves.
I have used plenty of WD drives in the past, and most of them have lasted years. These two failures have seriously shaken my confidence in the brand. Hopefully, this is an issue isolated to just their wireless products and not indicative of the brand as a whole.