4 ms·

To be fair, Seagate's RMA process is similarly painless. The reason I've bought Seagates and WDs is for the warranties and I've had to RMA both brands; both wer

by pdubs 15y ago

To be fair, Seagate's RMA process is similarly painless. The reason I've bought Seagates and WDs is for the warranties and I've had to RMA both brands; both were easy and didn't try to give me the runaround at any point in the process. If Seagate is only offering 1-year warranties it's simple; I just won't buy Seagate. It really doesn't matter to me.

Silhouette 15y ago
The trouble I have with the whole warranty idea for hard drives is that the real value in such devices is the data on them, not the mechanics. I'm trying to think of any hard drive that I or any of my businesses have owned in the past decade or more that could reasonably have been returned under warranty other than for being DOA, given the amount of sensitive data that would have been stored on each of them with even a few weeks of use. The only ones I can think of where it would be acceptable (or, indeed, legal) are the company ones that are in a fully encrypted RAID array, which was an experiment we probably won't repeat because of the horrendous performance hit we see on that particular NAS box. In this sort of context, I wonder how much all these extended warranties were ever really worth. Do some businesses just return failed drives as a matter of procedure, without regard to the possibility of commercially sensitive data leaking because it was still readable with patience and/or the right equipment? Do home users return drives under warranty without realising that all those juicy bank details in their personal accounts spreadsheet might still be accessible to someone who gets hold of the physical drive later, and that such a person might just be buying these things thousands at a time in some foreign country with no goal other than to harvest things like bank details that can be sold?
- pdubs 15y ago
  Seagate wipes the drives they get returned [1]. I imagine other companies have similar processes. [1]http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=data_overwriting&vgnextoid=f52d29e293eae110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=...
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    I appreciate the effort they go to, and perhaps for typical home users they might consider it an acceptable risk. However, for my business dealings, Seagate's statement there has limited value, because I still have to release the faulty drive into some sort of postal/courier system with any retrievable data intact and trust that it reaches Seagate to be securely wiped. Unless they provide a specialist collection service with the appropriate certifications that they have taken responsibility for destroying the drive securely, nothing that only kicks in when something reaches them via a third party is likely to be an acceptable risk if you're dealing with data protection for credit card data, medical records, etc.
    - ComputerGuru 15y ago
      Why aren't you encrypting?
      - Silhouette 15y ago
        As I mentioned before, in some cases, we do. Obviously if you're dealing with, say, sensitive customer data like card numbers or any sort of legally privileged information, then you have to have robust security in place across the board. More often, in the particular cases I'm familiar with, we're talking about commercially sensitive information, where we have to weigh up the costs of complete end-to-end encryption by default against the loss of productivity that results when things like big network file transfers slow way down. In a self-funded small company, with limited staff time and limited cash, total encryption is not always the answer. For example, I think you can reasonably have a policy that encryption of any removable media is required but anything screwed into a rack in the office is biased toward performance, and in fact that is basically what we do in most cases. But it does limit the value of the kinds of warranties we're talking about, because we're not going to just hand over a hard drive that has probably had sensitive company documents on it to some random delivery service. Similarly, from a personal point of view, I don't consider theft of my home computers to be a very high risk, so I don't routinely encrypt all the hard drives, even though I have some potentially sensitive data like downloaded bank statements and bills on there. Instead, I expect to keep the hard drives for a relatively long time anyway, and then have them securely wiped/destroyed when they are too old/broken to be useful any more. Just to be clear, I'm not saying these choices are anyone's problem but my own. I accept the cost of the occasional hard drive failure as a natural consequence of these policies. I'm just saying that it means hard drive manufacturers' long-term warrantes are effectively not worth anything to me or the companies I run. I suspect that in practice plenty of other people/small businesses follow similar procedures, and therefore the warranties probably aren't worth much to them either.
- ComputerGuru 15y ago
  I have copies of all the data I had on there, and my company has strict rules about using TrueCrypt encryption on any external drives.

by pdubs 15y ago

Silhouette 15y ago

The trouble I have with the whole warranty idea for hard drives is that the real value in such devices is the data on them, not the mechanics. I'm trying to think of any hard drive that I or any of my businesses have owned in the past decade or more that could reasonably have been returned under warranty other than for being DOA, given the amount of sensitive data that would have been stored on each of them with even a few weeks of use. The only ones I can think of where it would be acceptable (or, indeed, legal) are the company ones that are in a fully encrypted RAID array, which was an experiment we probably won't repeat because of the horrendous performance hit we see on that particular NAS box. In this sort of context, I wonder how much all these extended warranties were ever really worth. Do some businesses just return failed drives as a matter of procedure, without regard to the possibility of commercially sensitive data leaking because it was still readable with patience and/or the right equipment? Do home users return drives under warranty without realising that all those juicy bank details in their personal accounts spreadsheet might still be accessible to someone who gets hold of the physical drive later, and that such a person might just be buying these things thousands at a time in some foreign country with no goal other than to harvest things like bank details that can be sold?

pdubs 15y ago
Seagate wipes the drives they get returned [1]. I imagine other companies have similar processes. [1]http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=data_overwriting&vgnextoid=f52d29e293eae110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=...
- Silhouette 15y ago
  I appreciate the effort they go to, and perhaps for typical home users they might consider it an acceptable risk. However, for my business dealings, Seagate's statement there has limited value, because I still have to release the faulty drive into some sort of postal/courier system with any retrievable data intact and trust that it reaches Seagate to be securely wiped. Unless they provide a specialist collection service with the appropriate certifications that they have taken responsibility for destroying the drive securely, nothing that only kicks in when something reaches them via a third party is likely to be an acceptable risk if you're dealing with data protection for credit card data, medical records, etc.
  - ComputerGuru 15y ago
    Why aren't you encrypting?
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      As I mentioned before, in some cases, we do. Obviously if you're dealing with, say, sensitive customer data like card numbers or any sort of legally privileged information, then you have to have robust security in place across the board. More often, in the particular cases I'm familiar with, we're talking about commercially sensitive information, where we have to weigh up the costs of complete end-to-end encryption by default against the loss of productivity that results when things like big network file transfers slow way down. In a self-funded small company, with limited staff time and limited cash, total encryption is not always the answer. For example, I think you can reasonably have a policy that encryption of any removable media is required but anything screwed into a rack in the office is biased toward performance, and in fact that is basically what we do in most cases. But it does limit the value of the kinds of warranties we're talking about, because we're not going to just hand over a hard drive that has probably had sensitive company documents on it to some random delivery service. Similarly, from a personal point of view, I don't consider theft of my home computers to be a very high risk, so I don't routinely encrypt all the hard drives, even though I have some potentially sensitive data like downloaded bank statements and bills on there. Instead, I expect to keep the hard drives for a relatively long time anyway, and then have them securely wiped/destroyed when they are too old/broken to be useful any more. Just to be clear, I'm not saying these choices are anyone's problem but my own. I accept the cost of the occasional hard drive failure as a natural consequence of these policies. I'm just saying that it means hard drive manufacturers' long-term warrantes are effectively not worth anything to me or the companies I run. I suspect that in practice plenty of other people/small businesses follow similar procedures, and therefore the warranties probably aren't worth much to them either.
ComputerGuru 15y ago
I have copies of all the data I had on there, and my company has strict rules about using TrueCrypt encryption on any external drives.