Amazon third party sellers and HDD warranties

[HankB]

I'm in funk.

During my wanderings on the Internet I became aware that there is a site where I can enter the serial numbers for hard drives to reveal warranty status. I have 4 3TB HGST drives (all purchased through Amazon including one which Amazon sold and three from third party sellers.) I checked the warranty status on all four of them. Three came up as 'return to seller' and the fourth listed a warranty expiration date. I don't think the third party sellers I bought from still exist on Amazon. Even if they did exist I doubt their willingness to back up what they sell.

Right now I'm looking at buying one or two 8TB drives. I was excited to find HGST He8 drives on Amazon for $190US (now $200.) But they're all listed by third party sellers. I even found this drive listed as refurbished (90 day warranty) for the same price. That makes me wonder if this 'too good to be true' price reflects seller shenanigans.

I wonder what HGST's policy is if the seller has disappeared. There is a WD rep here and since WD owns HGST perhaps he can comment.

It turns out that other manufacturers (including WD and Seagate) also have web sites where I can check warranty status and for all of the drives I checked, I got a date. HGST was the only one that deferred.

I've never had a drive fail under warranty (though a Seagate 2TB unit did come close.) I'm reluctant to buy something that has a questionable warranty.

 

[trents]

Different manufacturers have different warranty arrangements. Some of them count the warranty period as starting from the date of manufacture rather than the date of first deployment or start it from the date of sale to the retailer/wholesaler rather than to the end user.

Then there are refurbishing/remanufacturing companies who turn out "white label" hard drives at discount prices with a more limited warranty. A couple of years ago I purchased 25 white label 250 gb hard drives for a school I support from a re-manufacturer on ebay. The drives were obviously relabeled Western Digital units. I checked them all out right away with CrystaldiskInfo. Two of them threw up warnings. I immediately contacted the company I purchased them from on ebay and they were very cooperative. Sent me two replacements no charge.

By the way, HGST drives have a excellent reputation for reliability.

 

[HankB]

Yes. Tough decision. I can get a pair of 8TB WD Reds for $210 each or a single 8TB HGST He8 for $200. The HGST is probably a better drive but is provided by a third party seller which gives me cause for concern.

OTOH I haven't given up on the 3TB Red I'm presently using. I wrote zeroes to the drive (using dd) and dd reported that it wrote 3TB. That's good. And the logs are full of error messages. Initially the drive did not respond to SMART requests but after I power cycled it, it reported no pending sectors and no remapped sectors. This is a seeming mix of good and bad news. I'll need to do some more read/write tests before I conclude that everything is good.

Edit.01: I have now given up on the original 3TB WD Red. It's not responding well to poking and prodding. I've also re-evaluated my purchase strategy. I have a 3TB HGST drive in a USB drive sled with about half a year of power on hours. I use it for storage/backup and it is a bit less than half full. For now I can move those files to a file server and put this drive into service in my RAID1. This is my primary backup server and I'd like to get it back to full service. That gives me breathing space to stew about what I want to do next. And time to wait for HDD drive prices to continue to drop.