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Warranty and Service

If you use computers long enough and often enough, you will eventually have a failed drive that you will have to deal with. It really is only a matter of time and luck. Hard disk manufacturers differ drastically in terms of their warranty and service procedures, which is something most people don't think of at the time of purchase. This section discusses warranty and service issues in general.

It pays, when considering a hard disk vendor, to find out what their policies are on replacement drives. Some companies (for example, Western Digital and Maxtor), will replace a drive that fails in its warranty with a brand new drive, and under most circumstances you will have it in your hands in a few days. They will even ship the replacement drive first and allow you to cross-ship the failed drive to them, to get you back up as soon as possible. Other companies (for example, Seagate and Quantum), replace failed drives with refurbished units and have been known to make people wait for quite some time for replacements. In many cases the user is forced to buy another drive at retail because they can't wait that long with their system down. That drive isn't likely to be another Seagate or Quantum, and the user will think more about warranty issues the next time he or she makes a disk drive purchasing decision.

Next: Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART)

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