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Are Hard Disk Warranties Worthless?
1984 asks: "Earlier this year I returned a Hitachi 2.5" drive under warranty, and got back a replacement which died after a week or so of light use. More recently a Seagate 200GB desktop IDE disk flaked after a few months use, so I sent it off and received a replacement under warranty. The replacement wouldn't even format. So I RMAed that and got another dead replacement. All the replacement disks were 'refurbished', and I see many instances of similar problems with refurbished replacements when Googling. So I'm asking, what experience are people having with getting replacement disks that work, and continue to do so for something approaching the expected lifetime of the original drive? Are current warranties just a sham?"
You sure have bad luck with drives. Even in the late 80's, when capacity was measured in the tens of megs, I didn't have this kind of problem. Sure, drives died after a year or three, but that was when this was a frontier technology.
But as for warantees - they are a joke unless you are a mass buyer.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
In some areas (of the USA) the "Lemon Law" applies to more than just automobiles. One thing it may apply to is computers and computer components. I'd check your local law and see if it applies, if it does then ask the company for a NEW replacement otherwise you'd like a full refund. If they don't oblige you can simply mention that law. (generally 3 faults requires them to give you a full refund or a completely new replacement)
I've RMA'd about three drives over the past six years and the replacements have been fine.
I bought a WD drive a few years ago at Best Buy. It had a three year warranty and died at about 18 months. I brought it back to the store with the receipt and they still carried the same size of drive so they just swapped it out for a brand new drive.
I've had 4 failures out of approx 20-25 purchased or obtained new drives since 2000.
One 30 GB drive crashed within 10 days of purchase, a 160 GB died 10 months after purchase (possibly because of power loss/surge), a 20GB iPod drive damaged by contact with a large magnet (because iPod integration and subwoofers were being installed at the same time). Someone I know had a 40GB that randomly returned corrupt data without any obvious signs of disk failure -- just Windows bluescreens that would normally indicate corrupt RAM.
Of those drives, the first three were repaired via warranty. The 30GB was replaced with a new drive, and guessing by its capacity, is not still in use. The refurbished 160 GB drive is still working today, about 22 months later. The replaced iPod is also still working today.
The 40 GB drive was out of warranty and was replaced with the same model and is still working one and a half years later. My oldest drives were probably made in 2002 and have been working fine. They've been running constantly for the past few years.
I have had a laptop hard drive fail gradually -- it came from a phyiscally abused laptop. The drive worked (slowly) at first, long enough for me to copy the data off of it. Within a few more hours of use, it died.
I know of several folks who've recently replaced drives under warranty. The replacements have worked well. Is there any chance something other than the drives is causing the failures? Bad power? Too little cooling?
As far as RMA'ing drives goes, I've never had a problem with Seagate. The drives have all carried the warranty of the original and none of the refurb replacements have problems.
Now, WD drives...I don't want to rant, but 6 drives in 18 months (2 new, 4 RMA'd replacements) is too much for me.
I don't think drive warranties are worthless; they protect the buyer and give peace of mind. Seems like bad luck on your side to me.
They are indeed worthless but for another reason, I had two hard disks that died under warranty before, but I didn't send them back for replacement because I wasn't sure what would happen to them next, sure, there are tools for wiping hard disks, and it's extremely unlikely that someone would go through all the trouble of restoring data from a wiped hdd, but I prefer to destroy the hard disk physically myself, and sleep well at night, rather than risk exposing my personal data.
PS: First reply with "paranoid" in it gets a free hat.
In the last 4 years or so, I've bought about 30 Seagate drives. Two died during the warranty period. In both cases, the RMA was quick and the replacement drives worked ok. One of the replacements was refurbished, the other was new.
One of the failed drives was shipped via UPS, and the package was pretty roughed up. The drive worked initially, but failed within a week. I suspect that many failed drives haven't failed due to manufacturing defects, but due to abuse during shipping. Of course, this means that they should be using better packaging (and more conscientious shippers). I'd gladly pay a couple of extra bucks for a better shipping container (or better shipper) to avoid the occasional beat-up drive.
1/15 does seem like a high failure rate to me, but it's a pretty small sample size, so my numbers alone don't mean much.
I returned 3 Maxtor drives about two years ago within one week. All three were nfg. These were also brand new replacements for the original drive. The wholesaler told me that he thought quality control was shut down because of all the bad drives he'd seen in such a short time. This was also about the time that Maxtor dropped their warranty to 1 year. On my third trip to the wholesaler, I saw two other guys in there with boxes of the damn things. Last Maxtor drives for me. I have a Seagate now and it's been perfect for over 2 years.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I had a 60gb ATA100 5400RPM Maxtor desktop drive a while back that died after 2 years so I went through the RMA procedure. I got a package from them a few weeks later and to my surprise I discovered an 80gb ATA133 7200RPM drive which I still have to this day (2 years or so now). It still works great and it's the only drive I've gotten through RMA so my experiences have been good.
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I just had a drive die in a DELL desktop that was just over a year old. If purchased direct the disk would have had something like a 3 year warranty. When purchased as part of a Dell computer you get just 90 days warranty in this case, I think the base warranty on other Dell product lines may be longer.
Or lack there off in your case... We have more than 800 ide disks in the systems I maintain. We have a very low failure rate - and if something fails its likely a ibm/hitachi disk.
Anyway, we used to test all drives when they came in... We quickly stopped that and didn't look back. We only have a couple of failures a week (if that) and all our RMA replacements except one came in just fine.
WD seems to be the best there - I only got one drive labeled as remanufactured, all other rma drives we got from them were brand new.
Peter.
From my experience, repeated drive failures are the result of a bad power supply or some other external factor. This doesn't include DOA drives, of course, but otherwise when your drives keep failing, you need to check the operating temperature and power supply.
How do they get the hard drives to refurbish and sell to you in the first place? Someone who's had a pc for a while, beaten it around, perhaps had trouble with it, then traded it in for something else that worked, to abuse? Or someone who's had it, cared for it for a few weeks or months, then said "that's fine, but I want another drive now"?
Just buy a new drive, man. They're pretty cheap, and if there's a problem there's no need to arse around with warranties (at least, not in the UK) - just take it back and get a replacement or a refund. If you're getting more than one or two problems with consecutive drives from a respectable manufacturer such as Seagate or Quantum then you're just very unlucky.
I have drives working for years. I do mean YEARS! I have 2x 173M still running and working quite well in a firewall (486 computer at that).
I did have 2 big failure last year when I was going to 250G drives, less than 6 months old. But both were replaced with new drives and no problems since.
Now, all my equipment in on UPS amd NEVER turn off may make their operating enviromwnt very stable, except for cat hair.
I had a Maxtor 8gb drive, back in 1998, when it was pretty much the largest drive you could get retail. It failed within a year, and I RMA'd it for a replacement. The replacement died within a year as well. I've stuck with purchasing WD and Seagate drives since then, and I've had no further issues.
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...infact, it's a prime purchasing point for my choice of hardware.
Late last year, my RAID array failed - 2 160gb Western Digital SATA drives went. I checked the WD website, RMAed them both, and recieved two replacements. They're still functioning today, better than the first two.
We run a device at work that features six SATA2 320GB Seagate disks. The leverage for purchasing those devices was dependant on the 5-year warranty(, and the presumption that we'd never have to purchase a replacement for a bad disk).
If you're having continually bad experiences with disks, you might want to examine their environment; are you using them at relentlessly high altitude? Is the power supply you're connecting them to bad? The lead from the PSU to the disk? Does your controller need a firmware update?
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Where I work we regularly ship back dead Seagate IDE and SATA drives after RAID failures. Without these long warranties we'd lose far more money than is the case. Further, since these longer warranties have become standard, the MBTF and hardiness of consumer IDE drives have increased dramatically. I used to expect consumer disk to die within a year or two of regular (personal) use. In a heavily RAID array, they would often die within six months to a year. Now, they last much longer. Often, a year or two.
Of course, commercial SCSI / fiberchannel disks still last a good five years of hard constant use. So, as is always, you get what you pay for. But, as it happens, these days you get more reliability on the consumer side than previously. I mean, who remembers the IBM disk fiasco a few years back? The warranties have helped.
I've done warranties for nearly all the major manuafacturers with no complaints. Maxtor's advanced replacement program came in handy (that replacement drive was installed 5 years ago and still works), no problems with WD's drives (again, installed years ago and still working).
Get on the phone and start complaining - ideally, write a letter first (registered ideally). So few people do this that this puts you in a very small group of customers, and these customers are often the ones that know how to cause problems for the copmany. Having a paper trail also makes it a little harder for companies to shrug you off like a random complainer that just dials in every now and then.
But before blaming the company, give them one last try. Inform them of your previous trouble with replacement drives (use dates and serial numbers). The odds of a drive dying are low, the replacement drive being DOA are low too. Then again, people win the lottery - sounds like you've just won the back luck kind. As another poster mentioned, look into the Lemon Laws in your state/province.
You have a good point about cooling. I had terrible luck with a removeable disk drive. I had it replaced at least 3x. The company folded so I had no recourse. I concluded that the drive was overheating as the ejected cartridge would be untouchably hot. People now call me a little crazy about cooling. I atribute the very long life of my curent computer to it sounding like a vaccume cleaner with it's 7 fans. That's 2 regular case fans, two midgit fans in a HDD cooler, one slot fan against the video card, and two processor fansin a dual p-pro system(overclocked of course).
As a side note the dorm I lived in would top 100F regularly. I saw this alone kill many classmates machines.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
That's because drives were a lot more reliable when data densities were lower. I still have the old 40MB drive from my second computer, and it still works perfectly. Every other IDE drive I've had since then, with the exception of the two in my desktop right now, either developed bad sectors or failed catastrophically.
I've RMA'd a few Maxtor drives, and their replacements haven't died yet. I haven't had to RMA any from other drive manufacturers.
So, Maxtor is a mixed bag: (apparently) less-reliable drives, but with decent-quality replacements with a straightforward RMA policy.
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...and this seems to extend beyond the hard drive market. Virtually every computer component I get repaired has some refurbished part. Seagate has recently started labeling their refurbed drive. The branding sticker on the one I most recently replaced had a green border and read "Seagate Reconditioned Drive" at the top. I wonder if this is to stop people from selling them outright.
My Advice:
1) If you can, buy from a store with a good return policy (best buy, etc) - although often I find those stores only carry the boxed drives which tend to have lower warranties. If it dies in a very short period - return it and get a new one. Don't let them scam you into getting a warranty exchange.
2) Before you buy check out the MTBF on the various models of drive. Some differ significantly.
3) Back up religiously and/or use a RAID. My RAID 5 is composed of seven drives and I lose a drive probably every 18 months or so but it's virtually a no-pain situation. Pull the drive - send it out for repair - take the refurbed drive and assign it to the RAID as a hot-spare. RAID rebuilds itself.
But to answer the question: "Are the warantees worthless?". My last drive I exchanged to seagate was 200G they replaced it with a 400G! Not bad IMHO.
I havent found reliability going down, actually I have found just the opposite. I have had one in the past 5-6 years. In the past my clients would have at least a couple a year.
Im rather fond of Samsung they have a longer warranty than any other drive manufacturer at the moment and its pretty much no questions asked.
I'll take it, as you haven't said, that you're in the US. Here in the UK I've never had a problem with warranties. The product fails, I return it to the supplier and get a new replacement. On the few times I've had to return something to the manufacturer, it's also been replaced with new (and not refurbished). Although thankfkully I've not had to return a drive to the manufacturer yet, only the retailer. In the UK your contract is with the company you purchase from under The Sale Of Goods Act, and not who made the product (ok it's not quite that simple after a certain period of time). There are a number of excellent guides online covering the UK - I'll leave that as a googling excercise for the reader
for the past 4 years I have been dealing with RMAs for a medium size institution with ~1300 workstations and two large SAN systems. One of my tasks is to maintain our replacment parts inventory, pershipped warrenty parts. Our technicians are certified from the vendors for most of our systems. Over the past 4 years probably about 30 Hard Drives have failed under warrenty when I have gotten the RMA replacment it hase been a refurbished drive, never once have I gotten a DOA Drive. the vast majority of drives are segates.
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I've always thought hard disk warranties are worthless.
I don't care if the manufacturers offer a 100 year no fault protection. No person in their right mind should ever send their hard drive off in the mail which contains their personal data on it.
Well, with that said I guess the only exception would be if you _absolutely_ need to retrieve lost data from the hard drive.
Backup... backup... backup...
Quit buying all your crap from Fry's Electronics. Problem solved. =)
Although, I cool the hell out of my systems. So much apparently that I've never even had trouble with WD, which had a stretch of some pretty notorious drives.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
To be honest, I've had drives from every major manufacturer die. By far the best warranty coverage came from Maxtor, however, who would send out a replacement drive before requiring the old drive back (for a drive which was starting to show bad sectors, I would take it offline, wait for the replacement, then transfer my data over directly). As long as you send the defective drive back within a month, you're golden.
In my case, the new drives were always actually new, and performed very well. Recieving them basically "reset" the warranty to day 0, as well. Finally, the RMA process is completely automated, not requiring you to wait on a phone line. Just download and run a little diagnostic tool which will give you an error code, enter it in on the website, and you can handle the whole business without having to talk to anyone at a call center.
In short, having a drive die sucks, and as I said, it's happened to me with most major manufacturers (Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, Toshiba, Hitachi all come to mind), but Maxtor had by far the best warranty coverage.
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I suggest that if you do not have a proper UPS/power conditioner that you look into getting one. A lot of electronic problems come from bad power.
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I quite agree.
I've had to return two drives over the years; both were of course replaced by refurbished drives.
I'm assuming "refurbished" means someone else returned the drive, no fault was found, and now you've got it.
Problem is, some drives are returned because of intermittant errors, or subtler faults which may not be regarded as faults by the manufacturer, such as elevated noise.
So the warranty, really, is a risk - you may get a drive back which is okay, but you may get a bundle of trouble.
Western Digital put out a 12 month drive (they best know their own product quality) plus an optional $15 insurance plan.
You either build a more expensive, higher quality unit that can stand on its merits for 3 years, or you decide to build junk.
But don't let Marketing dictate quality, where 12-36 months out, you pray for less than one in six returns for a break-even.
Have you read the MTBF rating on that 200 gb Seagate drive? They claim 600,000 hours. That's like 70 years of continuous operation. "Mean" time between failure; that means that half of those drives should still work after 70 years.
Is there anyone out there who owns a hard drive they seriously expect to be in operational condition 70 years from now? Anyone?
Its like Tobacco's claims that their product was safe in the face of blatently obvious proof that it wasn't. Someone should file a class-action.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Having been a SCSI-drive user since my Amiga 1000 days, you need to understand MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) and the difference between IDE/SATA drives and SCSI/FiberChannel drives. Remember that the profit margins on consumer electronics is razor thin, so any manufacturer is going to put any device it can't find a problem with back into service (eg: your RMA'd drives).
Here are some articles I dug up in a few minutes:
http://www.bqr.com/faq/faq.htm
http://www.atruereview.com/Articles/scsi.php
http://www.driveservice.com/bestwrst.htm (a bit old, but has useful info)
To answer your qeustion:
Caveat Emptor!
The Internet Archive has an ongoing effort to measure disk drive reliability. They have several thousand disk drives for which they are collecting data, and for the year 2005, about 2% failed. This is better than previous years; a few years back they were experiencing 6%/year failure rates.
They send them back for warranty replacement, I'm told.
Like swapping out the one year warranty HD for the same manufacturer's more expensive three year hard drive, because the consumer upgrades the coverage on their bare-bones lossleader whitebox to 24 months instead of the minimal 90 days?
I have an HP Pavilion zv3160us notebook that I purchased 10 months ago. It came with an 80 GB Seagate Momentus 5400 RPM ATA100 drive. The Seagate drive has developed bad sectors on the drive (bunches) and when I called HP to see about getting a new/replacement drive, the clowns at HP told me that my drive was a 4200 RPM unit. I told them NO, it's a 5400 RPM unit. They told me that their "database" says that my model only shipped with 4200 RPM drives. I took a photo of the Hewlett Packard branded OEM drive with the stinking HP part number and HP logo plastered on the Seagate drive at their request and afterwards they told me that their magic 8-ball database still says that I got a 4200 RPM drive with my machine. So, now I'm not only looking at a bad drive, but HP is in essence calling me a liar. Newegg has the drive new for $75. I tore the HP corporate representative a new a*%^$@# on the phone just to get my money's worth and will likely end up keeping the drive as a reminder to steer all of my clients away from HP in the future.
I think I'll gut my laserjet and turn it into a litterbox.
The dirty little secret of the electronics industry is that the vast majority of "replacements" that are sent out were themselves previously RMA'd and then tested and found not to have anything wrong with them -- at least, in theory. In reality, hardware can have problems that only crop up under certain circumstances; perhaps that video card one gets as a replacement was previously returned because it locked up after an hour of intense gameplay, or only during certain types of graphical rendering.
Of further concern are hard drives. That drive you sent in for an RMA might get shipped out to someone else as a replacement. One hopes that any data left on the drive was completely obliterated, but all too often it's just a quick fdisk and then it gets shipped back out. Be sure to eliminate all traces of any sensitive data on hard drives if at all possible before RMA'ing them.
The best way to ensure you don't get someone else's return as your replacement product is to ask to speak with a manager and explain your concerns. Your first shipment, in my experience, will still probably be a previously RMA'd item, but if that one fails then supervisors tend to be rather sympathetic and I've generally gotten a pristine, factory-sealed replacement after that.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
I had a Maxtor drive flake out on me with the click of death. So, I sent in for another, and it worked for a little while, but then it wouldn't even spin up. My current Maxtor drive, while it sort of works, often has trouble unparking the drive head when I first boot up. I have decided to stop wasting my time trying to get replacements, and have stopped wasting my time with Maxtor altogether. Maxtor certainly isn't the only company that makes flacky harddrives. I've had Western Digitals and Quantums (now owned by Maxtor) die on me too. However, Maxtors drives seem to be consistently bad, and after getting 3 bad hard drives from them in a row, I make sure to avoid them at all cost, and let me friends know to do so as well.
It was nearly 10 years ago. It was a 1.2GB WD drive. When it died, I RMA'd it. Western Digital sent me a 1.6 GB replacement. That drive worked fine for years.
It seems that you have just had a bad run of luck.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's actually more economical to ignore hard drive warranties -- go out and purchase a new hard drive if you experience a failure.
When I joined the large engineering company that I currently work for about two years ago, they were replacing four hard drives a week under warranty. When I realized that all of the warranty replacement hard drives were refurbs, I changed that little policy: we started throwing away the bad drives and began purchasing replacements.
Failures have been reduced to fewer than one a week.
So, now we are spending about $80 to buy new hard drives when a warranty replacement would have been free.
HOWEVER, we saving a heck of a lot more than that. Now the sysadmins are fixing other things and our users' downtime has been greatly reduced. We're saving hundreds of dollars per failure by installing new hard drives instead of warranty replacements.
Money is a truthsayer.
Friday morning I tried to put in an RMA for a Maxtor which is developing the Click-of-death. Their site claims to be down for "system maintenance"
Strange how the maintenance covers the entire last 2 days of the month - also the last 2 days of many people's warrantees. Funny, huh?
I've owned a few dozen drives and RMA'd maybe 3-4. All the replacements worked fine. Recently someone on a tech mailing list offered to give away a fairly new 200GB drive because it was broken and he didn't want to deal with RMA process. I took it and got myself a nice replacement drive for free.
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I"ve RMA'd 2 seagate drives, ever (out of about 15 that I've purchased) and both times I got back new drives. shrinkwraped and everything.
The cause of one drive's death was a 5' fall to the floor. I had it on top of my G5 and my roommate was getting something from behind my desk and knocked it off. The computer didn't even see the drive after that. Seagate replaced it in about 3 days.
the other one just stopped spinning up after a couple of days. Seagate took longer with that one (this one happened about a week after I RMA'd the first one), but they did send me back a new drive.
I've had pretty good luck with drives in my life. I've only lost 8 drives, total, ever. 4 Maxtors (all 3+ years old), 1 IBM Deskstar, and one Western Digital (after 6 years of use).
i've still got drives from 1998 in active machines... although I'm toying with the idea of replacing them since newer drives apparently have new features and are a good deal faster.
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Ewwwwww, coconut...
Only drive I ever had crash was a Western Digital 74GB Raptor which died after 1-1/2 years of 24/7 on time. Having a five year warranty, WD overnighted me a replacement at no cost (just had to return defective drive). Been working great ever since.
"Heck, I had some RAM blow 18 months after I bought it and they still replaced it free of charge, without my receipt (hooray for customer databases)."
Except for one mom and pop (more pop than mom) that I dealt with. They replaced the memory under the lifetime warrenty BUT they first wanted to send the original back, I'd wait, and then get my free replacement. Unfortunately my machine would have been down during that time. So I requested a replacement a bit sooner. They said yes, but I would have to pay $5 to send the original back, and they give me a replacement. I've checked with other shops and they do a straight swap, no money involved.
What's the motto of this story. Make certain you get all the stores policies IN WRITING! And ask a LOT of questions.
We have more than 800 ide disks in the systems I maintain. We have a very low failure rate - and if something fails its likely a ibm/hitachi disk.
If not IBM/Hitachi, then whose drives have worked well for you?
Thanks!
I've had a couple of seagates die on me and they've been replaced under warranty. Does this mean they're unreliable? Not really considering the vast majority of drives I buy/use are seagate. One of them was even replaced with a larger capacity drive (several years ago) as that was the smallest capacity they sold at the time of replacement (though this could have been the vendor's doing, as i returned to a vendor rather than direct to seagate).
On the other hand, I still have a notoriously unreliable model hard drive (IBM Deskstar 13.5gig aka the "Deathstar" for their high failure rate) that has been working flawlessly since 1999 or so :)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A 4GB Seagate HD that came with my system that I bought in September 1999 died literally just a few days before the warranty expired three years later, around August 2002. I had already lost the receipt long since but they replaced it with a brand new 20GB HD, no questions asked. A lot of shops these days have shortened the warranties from 3 to 1 year, and even then, make it hard for you to collect. (No scratches, etc.)
Of course they will be refurb drives. Why would you get a new one? Your drive was used when it died so it is replaced with a used but tested drive. Not sure what's to not understand there. WD has been good to me with RMA's. Fast shipping both ways and replacement drives before I send mine in. I have never had a problem with them, only with maxtor have I had any sort of issue.
I have been repairing computer for a living for years, and this is how I see it.
Here are the problems:
1. Some hard drive companies have both a QA & QC issue that stats with the Hard drive design.
Prototype Hard drives are generally tested in a room that is about 70 degres F.
Operating specs are theoretical and not actual or tested in realistic environments.
2. A lot of Hard drives are made in clean rooms in other countries, other then US.
These clean room are anything but clean and do not measure up to the quoted clean room standards.
This is not picking on other countries because Korea has some of the best on the planet, and China has the worse.
(I know I helped to design them in the 80's when they were first getting started. In china their workers were smoking in the clean rooms when putting them togather. Heck their techs were known to be smoking while cleaning bell jars during operations)
3. Post production testing can be as little as does a mother board read it correctly, to can we boot an OS.
Some companies do real stress testing but they seem to be few and far between.
The less time they spend on testing the more they increase in profit.
4. Return testing is almost non-existent.
(Stock people not techs test return goods, if they think it is ok, they slap a refurbish sticker and send it back out)
I am Compaq certified and all they use to do was test the return hard drives with a bios test.
After many complaints they up the testing to see if it would format.
And they would always complain that the hard drives I turned in were good and send them back out as refurbished.
Stay away from the following HD companies:
Maxtor (loses packets and read/write arm issues last between 6 months to a year)
Seagate (Over heats easily with out extra cooling and then loses packets or not longer read/writes last about a year)
Hitachi (other then death star issues I have had good luck with them so far)
As far as warranty's go, if they make a 5hit hard drive, you can bet they are going to send you a 5hit replacement
Tetalon
I had a WD400 that died long ago (had bad sectors, managed to save everything though), RMAed it to germany (I'm in france), they sent back a refurbished one. It's still working, mostly, but since I got it it sometimes locks up and makes funny noises. So I only use it to store video and mp3s as I don't want to risk data on it. I should really have sent it back right away.. now it's long since warranty has passed.
I had to buy a WD800 to backup this one when it died, but I'll definitely not buy WD anymore.
But then again, it seems every other brand does the same. Anyone knows better ?
For me, hard disks are The Weakest Link. I work on a few thousand PCs per year, so I see way too many failed drives. Sometimes I can recover the data, sometimes it's way too late. Some of these drives are long out of warranty, some are a few months old.
The customers often have a warranty from the PC manufacturer, especially if it's a Dell: they do the best job of selling extended coverage. When they do, I encourage the customer to arrange warranty repairs directly. (About half of the customers would rather pay me for the repairs than deal with the manufacturer).
I encourage customers who need a hard disk to buy it themselves. I would rather spend the few minutes necessary to identify the right drive for them than provide it through my company.
When I do sell a hard drive, I buy it locally, give the original store receipt to the customer, and sell it at exactly my cost. I make it clear -- verbally and in writing -- that the warranty on the hard disk is between the customer, the seller, and the manufacturer, and that my company offers no guarantees on the part or labor.
I also explain hard drives to all of my customers in exactly these words:
1. Your hard drive is a complex system of parts moving at extremely high speeds.
2. Every hard drive will fail, including yours.
3. Some will fail tomorrow, some will fail in 2039, and nobody knows when yours will fail.
4. When your drive fails, you will lose all the data that you didn't back up.
This speech often results in profitable backup system design jobs...
And develops confidential code and 0-day exploits...
Perhaps he does lots of finance work...
Maybe he just values his privacy...
To assume someone with something to hide is simply wrong. Not to be offtopic but your reply is similar to the government's arguement that warrantless wiretapping is 'OK'. "If you're not hiding anything, you shouldn't care that we're listening."
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet
wow, I must be very lucky with my oldest Harddrive still working. I bought it 1995 and it's about around 800megs of size.
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
Am I the only person here that still believes that if you break something by dropping it you should cover the cost of replacement? Breaking a HDD by knocking it off the top of a PC, then RMAing it sounds incredibly unethical to me.
Don't bother with a warranty return. Go buy an identical drive from a local or online retailer with a decent return policy. Then, the following day, return your dead drive in place of the new one for a full refund.
Make sure you tell the store that the drive is dead. The store will then send it back to the drive vendor for a credit or free replacement, costing the drive vendor the full shipping costs.
yeah yeah yeah... well, I needed a drive and didn't have the $ for one. Plus, it was the first day I had it. My roommate offered to replace it if seagate didn't.
When I got my first iPod (the 5GB one like 5 years ago), I was opening it as I walked out of CompUSA, and being confused by the packaging, the unit slipped out of the box and hit the sidewalk, poping in half and coming apart... so I walked back in and showed them and they replaced it. I was quite happy.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Yeah, what next, he buys a laptop, drops it in the car park while juggling it to get the car boot open, and then says "It was like this when I got it"? Bleh.
So that ballparks at what, about 98% still working at 5 years old? That would be consistent with my experience -- HDs that survive their first month usually run reliably for 5+ years.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I bought a 60 GB USB WD drive for personal use. It broke down after three days. I sent it back (expensive) and they sent me a 120 GB drive. Nice, even though I spent more than I hoped.
temporarily sigless
In the US, (well, my experience is pretty much limited to the Midwest) don't ship via UPS. Demand FedEx ground. I've never had stuff arrive in ragged torn busted up boxes with FedEx, but I have with UPS- numerous times.
A penny saved is a penny earned. Good job, stick it to the man!
I have only sent back ONE HDD ever! When the package comes, it gleamed like it was packaged by an angel it was so perfect...then i open the box to reveal my replacement hard drive THAT LOOKS LIKE IT WAS CRUSHED widthwise in a hydrolic vice! i sent it back since i didn't have any 3.1243 inch hard drive sslots. Second RMA was brand new and still kicks.
I have had a major videocard manufacturer replace my RMA with somebody else's (obviously by mere visual inspection) broken card that actually had more problems than mine!
And now finally the most expensive mouse made by the most major mouse manufacturer is 3 weeks old and in a constant state of 'something is wrong, allow me to reset myself'!
$210 HDD
$550 VID CARD
$100 High End Gaming Mouse
I include _Just_ this year and not including the hardware at the major cable company i'm an IT Admin for.
i take great care of my machines, several are on UPS and i never overclock anything.
There is absolutly NO reason for all these failures, yet even the most 'elite' 'flagship' 'glorious' 'hyped' 'solutions' are all showing signs of being nothing but deluxe piles of shit!
When is the absurdly high price of equipement going to manifest itself in the form of long term, consistant performance as promised?????
This would make a good poll. I have had several Maxtor drives fail and have had no problem getting them replaced. I had good luck with them even to the point of taking the charred electronics off an old drive and recovering it and then transfering the data to the replaced drive and electronics. Life expectancy of the replaced drives has been good, I'm still using one from 10 years ago.
I used to run a scan of a new drive and tested them for bad blocks with a variety of patterns in a registered shareware program I had. When the drives broke 2 gig that is not very damn easy to do any more. Even writing 1s to it verifying and writing 0s takes too damn long.
If the data was critical. I'd run a raid with every disaster recovery option I can think of or invent.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty