Seagate RMA

PistolPete · 20 Aug 2009 at 15:08

Hi Guys,

I had a 750Gb 7200.10 die on me last year. I sent it away to a data recovery company along with a brand new identical drive to clone to and 8 months & £600 later I've got the drives back.

As the original drive was 13 months old I intended to RMA it back to Seagate.
I moved the data from the donor drive (which is 8.5 months old) and it's rattling and clicking and squeeking like a small child on crack. I ran Seatools and surprise it's failing all the long tests.

I RMA'd both drives yesterday, sent royal mail Special delivery.... got an email that they'd arrived this morning... just got an email to say the replacements are on their way.

Surely that can't be right! They've not asked what what's the problem and they've not asked why the 1st drives seals are all busted. Seems a little too efficient.

AbsenceJam · 20 Aug 2009 at 15:30

It's normal. They just check in the drives and send out replacements. You'd have to send a still smoking HDD to get a RMA rejected by the manufacturer.

alternate_UK · 21 Aug 2009 at 00:26

£600 and 8 months. Wow. Did you get all the data back and was it worth it?

PistolPete · 21 Aug 2009 at 13:19

Don't even go there!!

I sent the drive to them on the 3rd December for a free quote.
Turned out it needed new heads, allignment, cloning and data extraction.
Cost for 14-21 day service for 650 odd pounds, 7-14 days was an extra £300.
Naturally I opted for the 14-21. They advised that they were not sure what damaged had occured to the platter but with that asside they are looking at a 95+% recovery rate and that at that time of the year they'd get it done in just over 14 days so back for Xmas, the hold up was the replacement set of heads.

22nd arrived and it appears that the new heads were unstable so would not get it back to me before Xmas as they needed another set of head.

Various problems occured before a file list was prepared and sent to me.... showing 40% of the data.

To be fair it was just the 7000 odd photos I was interested in and they'd gotten about 500. I asked them if there was anything more that they could do or was that it.
I was told they'd try a different way. Several weeks wait and another set of heads and I got a 80% file list including the photos.

I got the disks back in Feb I think and I eagerly plugged the donor drive in (which ironically I ordered to RAID1 the first disk just in case and it failed a few days before it was delivered - doh!!) and all bar about 10 of the pics were corrupted... in fact most files were. Just to see I plugged the "failed" drive in and BAM! All the data intact.
I thought... wtf?? So I started pulling the data off myself. I managed to get 200Gb of about 550Gb off and the heads went again.

I contacted them and asked how come I got corrupted images back when I could get them all off myself with nothing more than an eSata dock on a Vista machine.

I got a very tongue in cheek reply from the MD offering me a job seeing as I did a better job recovering the data then their trained technians with their specials rigs.
I sent him selection of files and asked him to check aginst the copies they held and surprise suprise I was right.

They offered to take the the disk back to recover the remaining 300-odd Gb again.
And despite regular chases and regular excuses it took a further 6 months before they sent the donor disk back.....with just 120Gb on as it was the same data duplicated in several folders!! I just asked for the failed disk to be returned...

...however, the 2-3 week old donor drive has come back in a bad sounding way so I RMA's that too.

Granted, the recovery company did something by replacing the heads, but I've learnt enough about logical failures now to realise it's not that hard a job.
In the last few weeks I've managed to pull 1.8TB from a failed 2x1TB spanned volume set, and then the same data from a failed 4x1Tb RAID10 using just 2 of the disks.
I setup a RAID1 with 2x1Tb disks and filled it with 930Gb of data, then added a 3rd disk and migrated to RAID5 with the intention of breaking that too to see if I could recover the data from 2 of the disk, however the migration actually failed part way through, yet I was still able to recover the original 930Gb of data.

So in short.... I got the important data back eventually, was it worth it? Well the photos are irreplaceable so in that sense it was worth it. Worth the hassle? Nope.
Plus it's taugh me a valuable lesson..... I now store my data in a RAID to try to mitigate a disk failure, the important stuff is backed up to DVD onsite and to an external HDD offsite.