If you use Seagate Hard Drives in a Storage Pool, make sure you buy spares...

…because Seagates Warrranty/RMA/Service department won’t take care of you anymore.


I’ve been buying Enterprise class hard drives from WD, Seagate and HGST for two decades now. Never before has the situation been this bad. I’ve occasionally had drives start to fail. You contact the manufacturer, and because you bought enterprise products you had more options than with consumer stuff.

Most important of those was “Advanced Replacement” which is crucial for storage pools.

You give them the serial numbers of the failing drives, they overnight you replacements, you pop the replacements in the storage pool and resilver with zero downtime, and pop the failing drives back in the packaging they came in, and send them off to the manufacturer. Simple.

Then maybe a decade ago they started charging for advanced replacement. it wasn’t much. Probably just enough to cover the extra shipping. It annoyed the hell out of me that I now had to pay for something that previously was part of the deal when you bought enterprise gear, but I grumbled and accepted it, because I didn’t have much of a choice.

Now it is utter nonsense. The online automated RMA form only offers “standard replacement” with a 10-14 day replacement timeline. (You have to send them the drives before they even start processing the claims)

This just won’t work. The pool can’t sit in a degraded state for that long. That is an unacceptable risk.

So, I figured I’d just call them. I’ve spoken to Seagate customer service many times over the years. Maybe they are just hiding the advanced replacement service behind a phone call now?

…but you call the 800 number and there is no way to get a person on the line for drives. They inform you that the only way to get service is via a chat on their website.
So I suck it up and go on the chat.

…and I can’t even tell if I am speaking to actual human beings. Chances are I am just being bounced between chatbots. And the outcome is unchanged. Warranty is now only offered via standard replacement.

I don’t understand how one can operate a hard drive business like that. Enterprise drives are always going to be used in storage pools. No operator of a high criticality ZFS pool is ever going to be able to tolerate having a degraded pool for 10-14 days while they wait for a replacement.

Essentially they have rendered their warranty completely worthless, forcing customers to buy new drives to use while they RMA the failing ones. It feels like a bait and switch. Advanced Replacement and other premium service options was one of the reasons you bought enterprise drives. I've spent thousands on enterprise drives, and now all of a sudden, none of the service options this used to get you are available anymore.

It’s enough to make you want to burn the whole damn company to the ground.

I feel you, but I'm also not surprised. Only three companies left in the business, extended supply crunch, customers get tossed under the bus.

Seems like at least they could offer advanced replacement with a deposit or something.

Maybe next step will be just a simple refund of the original purchase price?

Not blaming the OP here, but welcome to the Enterprise world. As far as the manufacturer is concerned, if you are running Enterprise gear under warranty, you also have necessary temporary replacements on-hand to maintain your uptime. What you are trying to do (as far as they are concerned) is called warehousing. It means using them as your IT storage closet, and then blaming them for not getting a replacement to you as soon as possible. Again, this is NOT meant to blame the OP, this is just to let you know what it is truly like out there for people who are prosumers with enterprise gear. In many cases, enterprise doesn't get you better service, it gets you to the right people to solve your issue as soon as the contract you signed makes them do it!

are closed said:

Maybe next step will be just a simple refund of the original purchase price?

Click to expand...

That's what a lot of sellers do now. Often when buying drives on Amazon and the like they do not carry the manufacturer warranty, as the drives were OEM drives sold by a third party. You have to check all of your serial numbers as soon as you receive them to make sure they don't fall into this category. For these sellers right now, it is cheaper to offer a full refund - even four years later - than to replace the drive at current prices.

mwroobel said:

Not blaming the OP here, but welcome to the Enterprise world. As far as the manufacturer is concerned, if you are running Enterprise gear under warranty, you also have necessary temporary replacements on-hand to maintain your uptime. What you are trying to do (as far as they are concerned) is called warehousing. It means using them as your IT storage closet, and then blaming them for not getting a replacement to you as soon as possible. Again, this is NOT meant to blame the OP, this is just to let you know what it is truly like out there for people who are prosumers with enterprise gear. In many cases, enterprise doesn't get you better service, it gets you to the right people to solve your issue as soon as the contract you signed makes them do it!

Click to expand...

I hear you, but this doesn't change the fact that advanced returns were the way it worked forever prior to just a few years ago. Last one I had to RMA in 2022 and every one before that from three different vendors dating back almost 20 years worked that way.

It feels like just about everything is going to shit across every industry in the last 10-20 years and it is utterly intolerable.

Zarathustra[H] said:

I hear you, but this doesn't change the fact that advanced returns were the way it worked forever prior to just a few years ago. Last one I had to RMA in 2022 and every one before that from three different vendors dating back almost 20 years worked that way.

It feels like just about everything is going to shit across every industry in the last 10-20 years and it is utterly intolerable.

Click to expand...

I do not in any way disagree! This is the way it was. Unfortunately, it is no longer the world we live in. I have a crapload of contracts on my desk getting ready for CY27, increases in price from per box or socket to per core, psychotic increases in VM costs, etc. This is not the market right now, and unless/until enough people push back this is the world in which we will live.

How can we push back?

no one cares about the regular schmoes now, theyre all in on ai and data centre...

are closed said:

How can we push back?

Click to expand...

pendragon1 said:

no one cares about the regular schmoes now, theyre all in on ai and data centre...

Click to expand...

Unfortunately you are correct.

The way the world was 10+ years ago, we could threaten to go to a competitor or just not buy their products. If we made enough noise, eventually the company would get scared and backtrack.

The sad part is that we don't matter economically to any of them anymore. They can get all of the business they can handle, and then some by selling to Enterprise/AI/etc. They don't need or want us anymore. They just throw us a bone every now and then for old times sake or as a hedge against the bubble bursting and suddenly needing us again.

Zarathustra[H] said:

Unfortunately you are correct.

Click to expand...

15 years ago there were 6 major memory manufacturers, now there are 3. 15 years ago there were 5 major spinning disk manufacturers, now there are 2. As choice goes, so does innovation (well, at least the speed of innovation when you have 1 or NO competition.) There are two sides of every equation.. Lets say you have 2 companies left making widgets, and they are both doing eh. Do you let them merge so they can make MegaWidgetCorp and be the sole vendor who can then screw their customers, or do you make them stay separate where either (or both) go out of business because they are run by morons. If you don't think this is an issue, look at vaccines.... They are quite important, the are essentially a low margin business and a lot of companies (who are megacorps) don't think it makes corporate sense to make the next drug-resistant fauna out there because it would take too long to break even.

I think it was about 25 years ago but I had a 10GB or 20GB Western Digital Caviar drive that I had to RMA. This was a consumer drive and I'm just a regular guy so I had to send the drive in before getting one back as I didn't have the money for advanced replacement. However, the moment WD received the drive (which was about 2-3 days after I sent it via UPS) they overnighted me a new drive. That was service. Less than 5 days for full turnaround and most of the time was from my end.

Don't see this type of service ever coming back again.

In a past life, even with WD drives I always had spares on hand and swapped them in then RMA'd the failed drives - just makes it easier.

Recently, I purchased some of my NVR's from a certified assembler that my camera supplier recommends I use. When drives fail, they get mad if you remove the drive and put the spare in ... that I bought from them.

You have to contact their support and go through this rigmarole with them, just to have them tell you to pop in the spare, and they will send you a replacement.

They seem to forget that DRAC logs don't get cleared automatically and that a failed drive is still failed whether they see it beforehand or not. My logic is, if I was returning drives that were not actually dead they would quickly realize I was abusing RMA and block me so of course I don't do that (ethically and for this reason).

bigdogchris said:

In a past life, even with WD drives I always had spares on hand and swapped them in then RMA'd the failed drives - just makes it easier.

Recently, I purchased some of my NVR's from a certified assembler that my camera supplier recommends I use. When drives fail, they get mad if you remove the drive and put the spare in ... that I bought from them.

You have to contact their support and go through this rigmarole with them, just to have them tell you to pop in the spare, and they will send you a replacement.

They don't seem to forget that DRAC logs don't get cleared automatically and that a failed drive is still failed whether they see it beforehand or not. My logic is, if I was returning drives that were not actually dead they would quickly realize I was abusing RMA and block me so of course I don't do that (ethically and for this reason).

Click to expand...

I've never had to provide anything beyond smart data to show that a drive is failing and needs RMA (usually reallocated sector count and pending sector count on SATA drives, or "Elements in Grown Defect List" on SCSI drives)