Anyone here with experience returning Seagate drivers?

[superboyac]

Hi, I need some advice rather badly.

I need to return a Seagate hard drive for an exchange as it just went bad on me.  I went through their process and got the RMA number and all that.  I also got their information on packaging instructions.  Can anyone here describe their experiences returning drives to Seagate and things I should pay attention to?

For example, should I get shipping insurance?  Can I just send the drive back in it's original box?  And stuff like that.  (I don't mind excruciating detail!)

I've had a horrible day.  2 weeks ago, I bought 2 500GB Seagate drives thinking they were the 7200.10 line, but I just found out they were the dreaded 7200.9.  Just then, my existing 300GB Seagate storage drive died on me.  This would have been a huge disaster, but by a stroke of what I can only call divine intervention, I had just backed up that drive on one of the new drives just hours before!  I mean, I've been planning for months to back it up hoping nothing would happen until I found a good deal on the 500GB drives.  Now, I'm dead scared that the new drive will die sometime before the replacement gets shipped to me.  Please don't let that happen.  PLease.

Also, when i get the replacement drive, what will be the warranty on that?  THe previous drive's warranty would have lasted until 2010, I hope the replacement will last until at least 2010 also, or else, it kind of sucks, right?

Well, thanks for any help. 

[f0dder]

When I've needed to return drives, I've simply shown up at the store where I bought the drive - they have their own RMA procedure. Sure beats having to ship to the hardware vendor.

Once, I did send a drive directly to maxtor, though. First, I made sure the drive really was dead (hook up to old PSU, short-circuit the PCB with a screwdriver). Then followed their RMA procedure, put the drive in an anti-static bag, wrapped some polyfoam/whatever around it, put it in a decent cardboard box, and added some balls of wrinkled up newspaper until the box was full.

Appearantly, that was good enough. Iirc maxtors european department is/was in .nl, and the package got there safely, and I got my replacement.

Thing is, and that's why I prefer buying from a decent store that'll swap a dead drive with no questions asked, is that maxtor sent me a damn refurbished drive back

Dunno about new warranty periods when getting RMA... I think with the "back to shop" strategy I now employ, I get a full new warranty... but only the 2-year .eu whatever warranty thingamajig.

As for drives... go raid-mirror for your important data. While it's not a replacement for backups, at least it reduces the risk of data loss. And do make sure the drives are being kept cool, having a silent 80mm intake fan in front of your drives does wonders for lifetime.

[superboyac]

Thanks f0dder,
I don't think I can exchange this drive at the store.  I got it from Fry's over 2 years ago, I don't think they would allow any kind of return at this point, so I have to go straight to Seagate.

I'm not ready for raid yet.  I have an old computer, and I just want to be able to back stuff up on it for now.  When it's time to get a new one, I'll probably think about raid and all that.  My next blog is going to be about this backup solution I'm doing.  Maybe I'll call it "robust backing up for people with old computers and old technology".  Or something like that.

Man, I'm so fortunate that I copied all that data onto the new drive just hours before the original drive died.  I'm still a little shell-shocked by the whole thing, because my drive crashed 2 years ago (the one this replaced) and I vowed never to go without backing up again.  Then, when I came up with this solution, I waited months for the Seagates to go on sale.  Then, right when I buy it and copy the data over, the drive dies.  I couldn't believe it.  I've taken the new drive out of the computer, and I'm not putting it back in until I get the replacement to copy the data over again.  I'm very tense right now.

[f0dder]

I'm not ready for raid yet.  I have an old computer, and I just want to be able to back stuff up on it for now.

Even if your computer is old enough that there's not some onboard RAID solution, you can do software raid if you have the pro version of XP or 2k. Mirroring really is worth it, even if it's not 100% foolproof (drives of same make bought at the same time have a tendency to fail relatively short in-between, and if failure is because of eg. overheating, even moreso).

[superboyac]

To be honest, I just don't even want to deal with that right now.  I just want to make sure my stuff is backed up on 3 different hard drives and I'll be ok.  Like I said, I'll explain in more detail on my next blog and it will make more sense.  Believe me, my next computer I build, I will be much more sophisticated.

The problem with me is that my computer habits are borderline OCD, and for me to change anything requires months of mental preparation if that makes any sense.  It took me maybe a year to actually switch all my email to the Bat, after I decided that I was going to switch.  Not because switching was hard, but mentally it was stressfull for me.

You bring up an interesting point about that overheating.  My old hard drive practically died immediately after copying over about 200GB onto the new drive.  I wonder if that caused it to die, all that work it did.  That's worrisome, because shouldn't a drive be able to handle that?  It's not like I was doing something the drive isn't designed for.  Should I be careful about this when I do it again?

Speaking of hear, these drives get HOT!  I looked online and the operating temperatures go up to 70 C (which is about 160 F) which is really hot.  So, even though it's hot, it seems like it's not dangerous.  Is this a correct conclusion?

[f0dder]

Seagate was bought by Maxtor, right? And maxtor drives have a history of running pretty damn hot.

The most extreme case I've had in a while was designing a fileserver for the museum. I chose a wrong and way too cramped casing; like, the PSU located right about the CPU HSF, with max 1cm of air inbetween... ambient temperature of ~50C in the case. After less than a month, one of the drives died. Replaced with a decent case and some case fans, and now there's a 170-day uptime.

Yes, heat is an issue in my opinion. For the last several years, I've made sure to have a 80mm intake fan in front of my disks, it made a difference of ~20C on the maxtor drives, a bit less on the drives I have now since they don't run as hot. Haven't had a disk failure since then.