Comments for blog.limedaley.com/post/old-hard-drives-from-amazon-and-newegg

Comment #2836

2011-10-13T02:10:21Z

I think I probably said it above, but I would only buy drives with a five year warranty on them, unless they were half the price, and I wasn't using them in anything that I would miss all that much - so I suppose the only place I would use them is at home, in a RAID1 system.

Comment #2835

2011-10-12T14:07:39Z

We recently bought two external drives from Western Digital. We have many WD drives, and have never had trouble with the warranties, but this time, after I had registered the drives, the site showed less than a year left on a two-year warranty. They have an easy, automated appeals process, however, and after filling out the form and attaching a scanned copy of the receipt, the record was corrected in less than a day. (I do think that having a two- instead of a five-year warranty shows a distressing lack of confidence on the part of WD, however.)

Now I get to see how well the warranty return process goes. My oldest drive, still within its three-year warranty by a few months, gave up as soon as the new drives arrived. Was it jealous? And people wonder why I have backups of my backups....

Comment #2834

2011-03-18T20:44:05Z

Jon, I had never thought to compare warranty date information when buying drives from Newegg. I assumed, especially Newegg, that the product expiration dates would be legitimized. Thanks for the heads up!

Comment #2833

2011-03-18T16:24:03Z

The Seagate lady typed my email address incorrectly, so I called back and talked with another guy, and he told me that drives with the same model number sometimes have a different warranty (how crazy is that?)

These drives only have a three year warranty.

He was happy to update the date to three years, but not to five.

So, now the question is - is it worth $30 to get two more years of warranty, (I purposely didn't buy the drives from my usual vendor because I thought all drives had the same warranty, so I don't normally care about the vendor when buying a hard drive).

Lesson #2 learned today - make sure the warranty is five years - since drives fail pretty often.