Hard Drive Warranty

[BostonDan]

Hi Everyone,

For many weeks now, every day, I receive notification from my ReadyNAS-Duo that Reallocated Sector Count has increased in the last day and that growing smart errors indicate the drive may fail soon. The drive is a 6-month old Seagate ST31000528As with the latest firmware, CC46. Every support forum I have visited indicates the drive is likely to fail soon and I should replace the drive. I removed the drive and tried to arrange for a warranty replacement, but the drive passed the manufacturer standard PC test software and as such didn't qualify for replacement. After passing the manufacturers tests, I placed the drive back in the NAS. The reallocated sector count is continuing to increase daily.

I'm viewing the warranty as useless unless I leave the drive in the NAS and wait until it fully fails. Is this view wrong?
Can anyone provide their experience with warranty replacement:
1) Is this standard support/warranty practice among other drive manufacturers or is drive replacement facilitated prior to failure?
2) Is support/warranty for enterprise drives handled differently?
3) Any other information /recommendations.

Thanks Again - Dan

 

[stevech]

Can you run a SMART disk test, get faults, and send them to the warranty people as evidence?

As a consumer, the three drives I've RMA'd under warranty have been replaced with "re-certified" drives. I hate that, because we all know that drives have only so many revolutions in a life.

 

[claykin]

Use the following code to process the replacement with Seagate:

659DC7AE

See here for info on codes you can use when Seatools says a disk is OK.
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/seatools/seatools-test-codes.html

 

[BostonDan]

Hi Stevech - I tried, but the SMART data isn't resulting in failure and as far as the tech is concerned, your not having a 'problem' and the drive passes the Seagate tests. Some posts on the Seagate forum suggest there is a threshold value of reallocated sector count which must be reached before the software will report a failure code needed for RMA.

Hi Claykin - Thank you very much. I would never had found this had you not posted. Appreciated.

 

[claykin]

Hi Claykin - Thank you very much. I would never had found this had you not posted. Appreciated.

Happy to help. Hope your next disk is of top quality.

 

[BostonDan]

Update - Better Support This Time Around

I wanted to provide an update as my opinion of Seagate has improved. I called Seagate support and connected with a different support individual. She told me that I never should have had to connect the drive to a desktop and run Seatools. Once the NAS reported errors, they should have RMA'd the drive right then with no further requirement. All is well.