Are Hard Disk Warranties Worthless? 187
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?"
Wow (Score:2)
But as for warantees - they are a joke unless you are a mass buyer.
Well, of course. (Score:2)
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Maybe not 100. Maybe 80, may 120, but somewhere right around there, I think desnity just got too high, and I'm afraid to replace my 80 gig drive before I get some kind of full bac
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according to SMART it had about a hundred thousand hours on the clock
You do know that 100,000 hours is a shade over 11 years, right? Remember the IBM 60GXP-series Deathstars? That was in 2001, about the time when 100GB+ drives were getting hot and bleeding edge on the market. My math tells me that's only been 6 years at most.
I could possibly buy 50,000 power-on hours (5.8 years continuous uptime), but not around 100,000.
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I've had several 120 and 160 GB drives without a problem.
I've noticed that the reviews on disk drives on NewEgg list increasingly more problems with drives that are DOA or that fail in relatively short times when the drives are bigger than 160 GB.
Of the four SATA drives I've bought, all 200 GB or larger, two have failed. I've already replaced one of them, but not the other.
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The most reliable IDE drives I've got are the 80GB and 120GB drives that spin at slower speeds. I've got a bunch of dead 7200rpm 80GB IDEs but all the 5400rpm (80GB, 120GB, 160GB) drives are alive and kicking.
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Agreed -- you're having a terrible run of bad luck with drives. But I wouldn't say the warranties are worthless. I once got a DeskStar drive with bad sectors. I returned it, got a replacement in three weeks and the replacement is still working fine. This was in 2003 and DeskStars are supposed to suck. I have a 20 gig Seagate from 2001 that is also still working fine. My neighbhor has me beat on that; she has an OLD 7 gig Seagate that still works perfectly. These days, I mostly get Western Digital drives and
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-nB
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You must have the luckiest interns on Earth.
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I did that job myself
-nB
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Actually, back in the win9x days, that is what I did in the company I work for. 15 computers, when one died, replaced with another off the shelf, sent it back, put the replacement back on the shelf for the next failure. Just rotating them. Unfortunately, Windows XP has succesfully made it very difficult to do this.
Now we do the same with computers from Dell. Keep one back, if one dies, take the computer off the shelf to
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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.
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The last time I had a Dell tech replace a hard drive, he installed XP home, which I didn't immediately notice, so it added about 15 more minutes of "wtf" until I realized what he had done. I spent more time waiting for him to show up, late, than I would have by doing the job myself.
Lemon Law (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lemon Law (Score:5, Informative)
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Most hard drives work fine for me (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Is it the drives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cooling! (Score:5, Informative)
As a side note the dorm I lived in would top 100F regularly. I saw this alone kill many classmates machines.
Phil
Re:Cooling! (Score:4, Interesting)
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At my former dotcom employer, we had a basement. It was nice!
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Steam heat.
No thermostat.
Phil
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However, a
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Inadequate cooling will really shorten the lifetime of the harddisk. Using a modern power hungry graphics card(s), an Intel CPU , a power
hungry motherboard along with an inefficient and overdimmensioned PSU will generate a lot of heat. Without an extra fan for the hard disk
it may be too hot.
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Re:Is it the drives? (Score:4, Funny)
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Amusingly phrased, but possibly true. I got a huge case running with 5 fans in it right now and have no overheating problems. As the posters above me, said, cooling is very important. But some cases are bad when it comes to coolig; you don't just need more fans, you need something roomy enough for the air to circulate. As another said though, getting a good PSU is also important. A bad PSU can fuck your hard drive, moth
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I have to strongly suspect so... I know the occasional "bad batch" of drives makes it out the door, and certain specific models fail at a high rate (ie, the legendary "deathstars"), but honestly, I've never personally had a drive fail on me. At my current job, babysitting somewhere around 50 computers in a fairly harsh industrial environment, I've had only three drives fail ever (and two of those l
I've never had a problem (Score:2)
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.
Seagate RMAs work for me (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Maxtor Hell (Score:2, Interesting)
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Its Luck... (Score:2)
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 wer
If not IBM/Hitachi, then whom do you recommend? (Score:2)
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!
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I work for a campus maintaining over 3,000 systems, mostly in warranty from the majors. We probably replace a few drives a week on average. Half the drives we get back from RMA are refurbished, but typically don't cause a problem. The majority of failures we must replace are Maxtor (now defunct) and IBM/Hitachi. It is rare that a segate or WD drive goes out within the first year, but after 2 or 3 anything is possible and you are guaranteed failures in a significant percentage.
WD and Segate are the only b
Bad Power Supply (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad Power Supply (Score:5, Informative)
In the course of past jobs, I've probably returned about 200 drives under warranty (out of probably 4000-5000 drives installed). The failure rate for the replacement drives was never above average for the replacement drives with the exception of two models. One was an old Quantum low-end 3.5" model in the 2-4GB range that I can't remember the name of, and the other was the notorious version of the IBM deskstar. However in the deskstar case, the second round of replacements were a far superior drive, many of which I still have in use today.
On the other hand, I have seen machines that seemed to eat hard drives for lunch, and in the end a few minutes with a scope always showed unstable voltage from the powersupply during bootup.
Generaly I'd say my hard drive warranty experience has been positive; especially since, more often than not, I have received either faster or higher capacity drives as replacements.
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Western Digital used to suck, but their quality has inproved signifigantly the last few years as they have tried to move into the enterprise storage market. Just make sure you buy the ones with the 3 or 5 year warranties.
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It sounds like you have lots of drives. After a drive has been in service over a year, failure rates of 8-10% per year are not that uncommon. Your Fireball drives are at least that old, since after the Maxtor buyout, Quantum branded hard drives were no longer sold. If you've got 250-300 machines with older hard drives, you should consider a drive death every couple weeks as normal.
You may be just unlucky (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
HDD Warranties have never let me down... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
No, the warranties are a Godsend (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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My personal and work SCSI disks gave superior service, with 3 year on-site guarantee and 5 years return-to-depot.
We used the on-site replacement just once, out of many many disks, about a week after purchase. My personal backup drive was replaced last year, at (or beyond) the end of the 5-year warranty period, which wasn't unusual. The replacements were new, not refurb, and have the same warranty starting with their "purchase" date.
--dave
Sounds like the poster had bad luck (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Works for me (Score:2)
So, Maxtor is a mixed bag: (apparently) less-reliable drives, but with decent-quality replacements with a straightforward RMA policy.
All warranty repairs are refurbs... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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The Seagate drive the poster refers to has a published MTBF of 600,000 hours, almost 70 years. MTBF numbers are baloney.
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You're assuming a very dangerous thing... that the distribution of failures is flat. It's not. It follows the bathtub curve [wikipedia.org].
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it's just you (Score:2)
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.
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Never had a problem with any (Score:2)
Maxtor (Score:4, Informative)
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.
The Warranty Lottery (Score:2)
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.
When a HD warranty *is* a sham (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
So much BS. (Score:2)
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.
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No. That is not what MTBF indicates. MTBF does not measure lifetime, it measures random failure rates during the expected lifetime of the drive. A good explanation can be found here [t-cubed.com]
Be an educated buyer... (Score:2, Informative)
Here are some articles I dug up in a few minutes:
http://www.bqr.com/faq/faq.htm [bqr.com]
http://www.atruereview.com/Articles/scsi.php [atruereview.com]
http://www.dri [driveservice.com]
The Internet Archive does this for their disk farm (Score:5, Interesting)
The Internet Archive has an ongoing effort to measure disk drive reliability. [hp.com] 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.
Maxtor Warantee gave me multiple bad replacements (Score:4, Informative)
Hard Drive Warranties Have Hidden Costs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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luck of the draw.... (Score:2)
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
Sham? Not in the good old days (Score:2)
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My last hard drive experience was several years ago. It was a nightmare. The M-board in the computer I had was only capable of 4.2GB, I bought a 4GB drive which shortly failed. I sent it in for a replacement and recieved a 13.6GB drive in exchange! I then learned about the Promise UDMA33 controller, and still use the drive and computer today. It is an effective Linux box.
Phil
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Parent: "That's called "good customer sevice" It's becomming rare."
Wow! I've never seen anyone accuse Best Buy of having good customer service. The things that come out of Slashdot users.
On a side note, looks like we registered w/ Slashdot about the same time.
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Answer - use disk encryption or at least file level encryption strong enough to make the take next to impossible to read your tax files or pr0n stash.
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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
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OEM Drives are sold at a discount to the (computer/device) Mfg. and in return the Mfg. assumes responsibility for the drive warranty. The discount can be in the form of a reduced price or an increased shipment that includes extra drive to compensate for the number of drives expected to fail in the shipment (say, 100 extra drives in a shipment of 1,500 drives).
Most Mfg. have websites to check on your warranty f
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Hint: warranties are for manufacturing and operational defects, not user abuse and/or incompetence.
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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 w
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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.
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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.
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Funny thing happened to me. I have an older HP PC with an IBM drive. The drive died in warranty. HP sent me 2 replacements. Somehow my request got duplicated in the system. I was honest and sent one of the new drives back after contacting them so the new drive shipped back wouldn't be scrapped as defective. All shipping costs was on their expense. The new drives came with UPS stickers for return shipping.
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