<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 11:59 AM, James Hall <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Hall.JamesR@gmail.com">Hall.JamesR@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I had a drive in my Windows 7 desktop fail on me in Feb. I think it was a seagate actually. Windows gave me a warning one morning and by that night it was dead. At least I got some of my least replaceable stuff off of it first before it died. It was 4 years old at least, I should check to see if there's a 5 year warranty and if I can get it replaced. 500gb is still not all that cheap.</blockquote>
<div><br>It's worth checking -- Seagate has an online tool you can enter the model and serial number in to see the warranty coverage (didn't need to find the original receipt). My drive itself was labeled as a 7200.11 OEM drive, so I though it wouldn't qualify, but it had been a boxed retail purchase that had been sold as a 7200.10 for some weird reason, and their system correctly showed it eligible for warranty.<br>
<br>And it's often worth paying I think $10 for the "expedited" service -- they ship the replacement first, with a prepaid return label, you stick the bad drive in and send it back. While it galls me to pay for replacing a defective product, I couldn't find a way to ship it for less than that, not to mention finding a box and packaging that they couldn't claim was the cause of the damage.<br>
<br>Basically, $10 for a 500GB refurb drive is an okay deal (I ended up with a 600GB, because the first one they sent was a 7200.10, and they didn't have any 7200.11 500GB to upped me to the next available size). Probably wouldn't be worth it for a much smaller drive.<br>
<br>Josh<br></div></div>