Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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 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?
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.
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.
Your paranoid, and I'd like my hat in a fancy silver color.
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.
...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?
Informatus Technologicus
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!
...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.
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.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
It's just a good drive. I've had plenty of 40 meg drives fail and I had plenty of bigger disks that didn't develop issues. It really mainly depends on how many hours you put on the drive -- if you don't use the computer very often, the hard drive will last a long time.
There was an Ask Slashdot on a similar thing a few weeks ago. The comments answer to that seemed to boil down to:
1. Contact manufacture about your policy concerning drive with data on them
2. Most seemed to accept just the face plate once contacted
3. Send in face plate
3.5(opt) Destroy rest of dead drive
4. Get replacement drive
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.
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.
You don't know how true that cost is. Even with my chosen methodology of keeping a disk image of each unique system installation.
Physically replace the hard drive -: 5 to 10 minutes.
Restore disk image -: 3 to 90 minutes (depending on NIC speed and configuration size)
Patch and reboot -: 30 minutes.
Too bad the Dell techs only replace the hardware and enough software to make sure it work. Which means that if your hard disk dies, they would just format and load on io.sys and the other core DOS files.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Spinup/spindown are actually not significant as far as wear is concerned. An otherwise worn-out drive is more likely to fail during a spin-up or spin-down, but those actions don't actually cause any wear. My understanding is that most failures are caused by spindle bearings wearing out, which is directly proportional to how long the drive has been powered on.
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'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.
I suspect that your problem here is cooling. 7200RPM drives run much hotter than their 5400RPM equivalents. Although it requires more case real estate, you should provide proper spacing between drives, and some active cooling (a fan or something more fancy).
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
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.