You’re also fundamentally wrong about the economics in these situations. Regardless of the quality of a product, all manufacturers must be prepared to accept returns for products sold at retail. As such, the cost of bearing returned and failed products ends up being spread out over all the devices: if you get 1/1000 returned, and it costs X to refurbish it, then you add X/1000 to cost. It may be a special case, but it’s also not a special case companies can ignore. Unless your product is really cheap (and hard drives are not really cheap), it makes no sense to throw away returns if you can resell them or offer them as warranty replacements, even if it costs you some money to do so. As long as the cost is lower than the resale point, or the cost of a new device (for warranty replacements), it’s economically sensible to do so.

Postage costs don’t change the situation either. They only have to pay postage one way (in the US, at least) and they ship the drives using the cheapest method available. They negotiate pricing deals with the shipping companies. Cost of shipping buying a drive from newegg to my house is $6.25 (guaranteed three day), so the manufacturers are doing as well, if not better, on warranty returns. As a point of reference, Newegg sells refurbished drives for around $30-50 dollars each, while the cheapest new drives is about $70 (which is admittedly price distorted due to the flooding). That’s probably workable for the HDDs manufacturers.

When the amount of computer gear is worth legal action it still doesn’t happen. Any time a company buys a $1,000,000 computer there are a variety of pressures on management not to escalate the dispute. My experience is that the Trade Practices Act is routinely violated by vendors of expensive gear and none of their customers complain.

One of my friends bought an IBM drive when they were going through a bad period. He had it replaced with refurbished disks three times before he requested a smaller disk (from a different series and therefore without the same defects).

The only reason for getting into a legal battle over a small amount of money is when there’s a political battle and the money doesn’t matter. EG the Linux users who sue for a refund of a MS license fee.

Really I can’t understand why drive manufacturers don’t just use returned drives as scrap metal and supply new disks. The costs of postage both ways would be a significant portion of the manufacture price of a new disk. So it should be better for them economically to just send a new disk and get the matter resolved. Posting drives back and forth three times is just bad for business. The economics of corporations is to not do special cases, they have an assembly line and run it as fast as possible. Refurbished gear is a special case and only makes sense if the gear is really expensive, and drives just aren’t that expensive.

Maybe what needed to be backed up was too tedious for them to be bothered coding it in Java?

IBM used to do it, before they sold the business to Hitachi (returned disks had a “certified repaired part” sticker on them) – I asked about this and they said by law they had to put the sticker on (heaven forbid they just sent out new disk). Seagate still does it – I have 2 disks here that have a green disk sticker with “Certified Repaired HDD” on them, and then one of them died just out of the replacement warranty period.

I think the better question is: which disk manufacturers do not send out repaired disks? Are Western Digital or Samsung any better?

> Nick, I have seen email in the event of actual MD RAID-1 failure.

Doh! Just tested, and this was my fault. I changed ISPs and the outgoing smarthost was still set to the old ISP’s, so outgoing mail was backlogged.

So yes, you should in fact get a mail with a subject like so: “DegradedArray event on /dev/md0″, and mailing can be tested with: sudo mdadm –monitor –test –oneshot /dev/md0

> I presume they’re not sending people back their original drive

No, they’re not – they make a big song and dance about how you won’t get back the same drive, and for a seagate one, I just checked the replacement drive’s details against the original’s, and it’s not the same serial number, and not even the same model number (it’s a similar model number, and the disk has the same interface and capacity). Looks like the returned ones go into a big pool and are reused as spare parts for repaired disks if possible.

> If you don’t trust their ability to QA a failed drive then there’s
> no rational reason to trust their ability to QA a brand new drive, either

But they might have lower standards, and it’s probably in their financial interest to do so. If the warranty on a new drive is 5 years, and then you have drive fail after 4 years (which has happened to me), then they have no incentive to return you a repaired drive that will last more than 1 year, since beyond that period you’re out of warranty. Furthermore, even if the replacement subsequently fails in the warranty period, since the manufacturer is sending out repaired parts, and you’ll know this after the first replacement, your incentive to get it replaced is reduced, since you’ll suspect that the 2nd replacement is more likely to fail too. Because of this, I’ve come to feel the warranties on drives are relatively useless. It’d be different if I knew at the time of purchase that I’d get a new drive in the event of a failure.