Hard drives agogo

[susandennis]

Just today davmoo told about his delight with Seagate.  And he mentioned how rare an actual harddrive failure is for him.  I had my very first harddrive failure yesterday.  When my brother built this PC he insisted on two harddrives with RAID backup.  I thought it was overkill but didn't want to make a thing about it.  Bro 1, Me 0. 

On the phone as he was walking me through getting the correct one out of the machine, he explained that Western Digital would send me a free replacement.  This PC is coming up on 18 months old so I asked how come free?  He allowed as how Western Digital has a 3 year warranty and a very handy return system and just excellent service.

Lightbulb.  I have to Western Digital pocket external drives.  One is perfect and the other one will never hold a connection.  I hook it up and then all I hear is the OS sound for USB disconnecting and reconnecting over and over again.  I finally gave up and sent the sucker to the storage closet.  But I know it's younger than 3 years old.

So yesterday I pulled it out and fed the serial number into their website. Sure enough, the warranty ended in March.  But wait!  It further says that if I have a receipt from where I bought it that shows the actual purchase date, they will re-evaluate my warranty end date.  So I get the receipt from gmail and send it in.  Tonight I get the news... my new warranty end date is 9/2009!  Full replacement. 

I have the prepaid UPS label all printed out and ready.

Oh and their RMA information said that they no longer made my drive so they would be replacing it with equal or better technology.    It's an 80GB drive.  The smallest pocket drive they make now is 120GB.  I'm down with this.

Comments

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

I'll make you feel better about your bro...I have a pair of drives set up for RAID also. Anything important goes on that drive. And anything on that drive goes to off-site (online) backup daily. Drives and RAID-capable motherboards are so cheap now I advise everyone to move to that when getting a new computer. Drives are cheap...replacing your data may not be.

About the only thing not actively backed up like that is my pr0n collection, and most of it also gets burned to DVDs. And all of my pr0n files are encrypted...when I die, they go with me, and I don't have to worry about mommy finding that stuff.

[susandennis]

I think you are being mean to your mommy. When you die she won't have you and won't even get to finally see the porn!

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

Let's see if I can put this in a way that's not going to turn this into a XXX discussion. And let's see if I can enter it in the right place this time, instead of accidentally sending it as an email reply from gmail...

When I was a teen, my mother walked in on me having oral sex with afemale friend, both giving and receiving at the same time. The factthat my female friend had considerably darker skin than my own did not help. This event came so close to killing her (and after she killed me, of course) that it would be in both of our best interests if shenever saw my porn collection ;-)

[pinkrose70.livejournal.com]

Whoa!

You two are cracking me up.

This is what I came home to find when I logged into LJ!

:)

[howeird]

Western Digital used to make the most reliable drives for RAID, and I used them up until a few months ago when I finally got tired of them dying when I had to hard-boot the machine (when everything is frozen and you have to hit reset). Their RMA process is excellent, it can be done online if you have the drive's serial number, and the turnaround is about 2 weeks.

But a drive should outlast its warranty, so I have switched to Seagate - I had two RAIDs in the machine for a while, a pair of WDs and a pair of Seagates. The same pounding which killed the WDs had no affect on the Seagates.

I will probably donate the WDs to the school recycle program.