So far, the rebuild process is going along well.  Later on the 14th, I went through the hardware on the system, thinking perhaps a controller had died, or a power splitter had failed.  Neither was the case, as I had forgotten that I don’t have any controllers with only two disks plugged in, and the box isn’t actually using any splitters at all.  I went through the whole thing and cleaned it out and checked all of the connections, and swapped a few SATA cables that seemed to be iffy just to be safe.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

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.