The hard drive industry has been a colossally screwed up place for ages. It’s better now than it was in the past – but it’s not exactly good now either. At least, I suppose, we aren’t living in the dark ages of strictly one-year warranties combined with sky-high IBM 60GXP and 75GXP Deskstar failure rates.
Not that the primary hard drive in my desktop seems to have gotten the notice. I spent a few hours today reformatting it and installing a fresh copy of the OS, which seems to have done in the old drive – a Seagate IDE 200GB drive, which is now chucking up SMART errors on boot and every so often while in Vista. I doubt it will give me actual data corruption in the immediate future but if a SMART parameter is far enough for Vista to be complaining about it, it can’t be good. I at least don’t keep any vital data on it – that’s all on the fileserver on a RAID5 array, with the really critical stuff backed up to a separate off-site server on its own RAID5 array. But I digress, and I should probably post about that later.
So, the drive is dying, (though not completely gone – I’m typing this up on the ‘dying’ drive!) so I pull up the serial number and go to Seagate to check the warranty status. Their warranty and the support I’ve gotten in the past is part of why I bought this drive…back when a lot of companies were cutting to one year warranties, Seagate went to five-year warranties. I check and yes, this drive is still under warranty until sometime in 2010. I go to start the RMA process and, as I’ve always done in the past with Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital , I go to set it up as an Advance RMA – I get the new drive before I ship the old one back, and I also get manufacturer-approved packing materials to ship the old one back in. Really, a no brainer.
Anyway, I go to check that box and – they want $19.99 for this privilege! Plus they’re plugging a ridiculously priced upgrade (wow, I can send you a 200GB drive AND $50 and get a 250GB drive back in return?) and a $15 fee to have your shipping upgraded from slow to less-slow.
The whole thing has soured me on the one reason I have been buying Seagates – the warranty. I’ll be picking up a drive by other means (probably a used one, I have no need for a new 500GB drive and you don’t get to proper cheap $/GB ratios until that point these days), and when I get the RMA back on the 200GB, it’ll go into that offsite backup. No more going out of my way to buy Seagate, and I’ll probably make a point to buy other brands when given the choice.
Tags: hard drive, RMA, seagate, warranty