Seagate warranty, peturned products

The certified repaired HD is not really a concern. It was assembled in a clean room and fully tested just like the retail drives, and still carries the balance of your warranty on the original drive. Thus, it too can be RMA'd if necessary.

I have not found any difference in the Seagate drives based on the manufacturing location.

I just went through the same thing as you. I had an Antec Power Supply fail and wipe out my motherboard and many peripherals (DVD writer and 2 hard drives). One of the hard drives was a Seagate Barracude 500GB. I sent it in for warranty replacement and they also sent me a refurbished drive. I'm only going to use it as a backup drive in an external enclosure now. Western Digital seems much better. The other drive was a WD Raptor 150GB. With their warranty service they take your credit card number as a deposit and mail you your replacement drive right away. When it arrives you simply stick your drive in the box and send it back. Your card only gets charged if you take over 30 days to return. I also can't see anything on the Raptor indicating it is refurbished. Seagate wanted $20 to ship the drive earlier. I decided to wait 2 weeks for them to receive my fried drive and receive the new one. I haven't heard of their refurbished drives failing and they are a reputable company so I hope there's nothing to worry about.

You're running a RAID-0 with desktop drives. If the "data on the array matters" you need to address your problem there before you worry about Seagate's (or anyone else's) RMA practices.

Again, I believe your priorities are backwards.

You are the one that says that the "data on the array matters". OK, great. My question is, if that is how you feel, why are you running RAID-0, on desktop hard drives?

Hard drives fail periodically. That's a fact. It's up to you, the end user, to proactively have planned for this possibility.

Seagate owes you a functional hard drive for the duration of the warranty period. They have met and will continue to meet this responsibility by replacing any failed drive you have.

Why you feel that this arrangement is somehow unsatisfactory, I have yet to figure out. Nor have I figured out why you feel you are entitled to a hard drive that has a 0.0000 % chance of failure.

If your data is important enough that you cannot sustain a drive failure, you need to be running RAID-1, RAID-5, or RAID-6, and you need to be using high-reliability hard drives like the Barracuda ES.2, and you need a good backup system. Simply lamenting that you're owed a perfect, infinitely-lasting hard drive from Seagate is not a substitute for a disaster recovery plan. Unless I am missing your point, your position seems quite incongruous.

In all likelihood, however, this entire discussion is moot -- your replacement hard drive is highly unlikely to fail anytime soon.

I understand your point, you're right that they should ship you a drive equal in quality to the original drive you had. Even though the replacement drive says "Certified Repaired HDD", I don't think that inherently implies that it's somehow of lower quality.

I have had Seagate replace drives for me before, and yes, they ship the "Certified Repaired HDD". I have not had one of these fail, to my knowledge. I believe them to be comparable in quality to my original drive.

In reality, I would wager they have approximately the same failure rate as any retail Seagate drive.

In theory, your original drive shouldn't have failed, but it did because there is a small failure rate. The replacement will also have a small failure rate, it is unavoidable. You would, however, have to be fairly unlucky to have both the original and the replacement fail on you. If it does happen, I would begin to look to environmental factors in your particular installation - i.e. bad power supply that is taking out the HDD, or cooling issue that is making it run too hot.

my experience w\ seagate has been good. The return process is super easy, and their 5 year warranty is nice because you know you can get your drive replaced easily if it dies.... your data probably not so much !

at least u got a replacement drive
the warranty doesnt cover my problem!!
which sucks
its a five year warranty but i only had it a year and the usb connection came loose and went inside the drive when i plugged in the cable
nothing i could do anout it - i am pretty good at takin care of my belongings and that was NOT my fault
but Seagate sees it as making the warranty void
anyway - i would not suggest buying their products because since this happened to me I have been finding that 1 year is longer than a lot of people's hard drives lasted!
I wish I knew this sooner!!
so BEWARE!!