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Powered by LifeTypeI bought 6 Seagate hard drives from Amazon and Newegg, and both companies sent me drives that already had half their warranty expired.
Amazon, after waiting for the customer support guy to handle 5 simultaneous chat sessions, and so was quite slow at responding, did send out a mailing label with no restocking fee.
Newegg took a half hour on hold before they answered, and initially said that there is a 3 year warranty. I pointed out that there was only two years left on the warranty, so even if it were true that Seagate only offered a three warranty (which they don't - they have 5 year warranties on their drives currently), this drive is still partially expired. She then said that she could not accept a return because, "Unfortunately, we are unable to make the changes since the warranty was provided by the manufacture directly." I asked if she was authorized to refuse a warranty claim and she said she would be sending an RMA form shortly. She did, after request, provide a return shipping label and removed the restocking fee.
While on hold with the online chat folks, I called Seagate on the phone, and after waiting maybe 5 minutes on hold, got an English speaking person who offered to send out an email where I can take a picture of my invoice, with the appropriate serial numbers, and said that "usually, not always" they would update the warranty date.
She said that often vendors keep the items on the shelf and sell them with expired warranties. So - now I know to always check the warranty right when I get it.
It's irritating that companies sell old devices without mentioning that on their product specifications page.
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.
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!
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....
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.