Felt Marker Voids Your Hard Drive Warranty?

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Does this story sound right? I have RMA’d a few hard drives in my time, more than a few with felt marker scribbles all over them, and never had a problem like this. What about you?

I had a sticker on the drive as a label, as they went into a RAID. Everyone labels their drives with a sticker, or they just write on the drive. I guess this is a warning to all computer users out there. Do not allow anyone to write on your drive, it will apparently void the warranty.
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yes it does, but only with Maxtor. They used to be awesome about HD replacements, then got progressively.....less helpful. I started putting a piece of scotch tape on the drives and writing the number on that about 6 years ago.

I also stopped buying Maxtor drivers... about 6 years ago.
 
Where exactly was the writing/label? Was it near the breathing hole? The company may have saw to bitch about that.

If it wasn't near the breathing hole(and even then, who gives a fuck if the breathing hole isn't covered?) whats the big deal?
 
Does anyone know if this rule applies to all HDD manufacturers?
 
Doesn't surprise me, there seems to be a real push to lower the number of returned drives.See also, the new $25 fee for the RMA of your drive.

After factoring in my cost re: shipping, plus their new fee. It made more sense just to bin the drive and buy a new one. I suppose that's cheaper (in the short term) for them, then say, addressing quality control issues. Thanks Seagate!
 
I only buy Western Digital and Hitachi now because of this nonsense. How would a sharpie mark void a warranty? They need to just include stickers with their drives so you can label them like most of us do if we are RAIDing multiple drives. This really sucks for those that marked on all of theirs....Like me.
 
i think these practices should be investigated further

as Unexploded said, by the time he adds up time, shipping, RMA fee, etc....he may as well just buy a new one, not good...
 
I could see it being voided if the Serial #/Model # is defaced because of said marker.

It could be these were refurbs that were already tossed. Someone went to a trash bin and fetched them out to get a free HD. Wouldn't be the first time I heard that happening.
 
This goes in the list of reasons why I refuse to buy Seagate products, and do my best to avoid products built with Seagate internals. Hitachi has been very good to me of late.
 
According to the act mentioned in one of the comments:

a written warranty must disclose, fully and conspicuously, in simple and readily understood language, the terms and conditions of the warranty
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Do the manufacturers say anywhere that you musn't mark the drives? It's not mentioned here, for example.
 
nobody_here said:
i think these practices should be investigated further

as Unexploded said, by the time he adds up time, shipping, RMA fee, etc....he may as well just buy a new one, not good...
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I think it should be investigated for another reason - going into tinfoil hat mode by the way - they might want to restock the drive and find another sucker to deal with it. Marking it would upset the next person who owns the drive.
 
Funny, I've had the best luck owning Seagate drives.

I've had Maxtor and Western Digital drives die on me, but not Seagate.

My current Seagate drive is a 500gb Laptop drive and it overheats if I play games on my little Ion based computer. So I have to run it with the panel off :(
 
Litfod said:
Do the manufacturers say anywhere that you musn't mark the drives? It's not mentioned here, for example.
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It goes further than that. Here in California, as in most states, they would have to show that the writing actually caused the drive failure in order to void the warranty. If this is commonplace, they will end up on the losing end of a class action lawsuit.

This is like your car dealer refusing to cover a warranty engine repair because you put a bumper sticker on the back of your car.
 
Borgschulze said:
Funny, I've had the best luck owning Seagate drives.

I've had Maxtor and Western Digital drives die on me, but not Seagate.

My current Seagate drive is a 500gb Laptop drive and it overheats if I play games on my little Ion based computer. So I have to run it with the panel off :(
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I've had all brands fail in warranty and at one time the WD's were worse than the others. I have also had good service from Seagate.
In the past few years, the only drives I have bought that were DOA were the WD Green series. I guess everyone's mileage varies.
What burns me is you buy a new drive and it dies in the first year and they send you a refurb to carry out the warranty remainder.
 
Maxtor used to be great. I've still got several 40-250Gb drives that still function perfectly fine. Although they're too slow to bother using them; since much larger faster drives have gotten so cheap. About 5 years ago I started having troubles with their drives. RMA'd almost every one I bought within a year of purchas date and stopped buying anything they made all together; because of it. Switched to Western Digital and other than a green drive dying recently; because it got too hot in my media player. Other than that I've not been happier. RMA was quick and painless and reliability has been top notch.
 
Bunch of FUD in the article and this thread for that matter. I RMA seagate and WD drives all the time and have yet to have either one refuse a drive under warranty. As a note all the drives I deal with are Raid drives and all are labeled with sharpie.
 
As if I needed another reason not to buy seagate lol...

I mark every one of my hard drives with their size and brand using a silver permanent marker, just so when I open up my computer, I don't have to look at each label to see which is which.
 
Unexploded said:
Doesn't surprise me, there seems to be a real push to lower the number of returned drives.See also, the new $25 fee for the RMA of your drive.

After factoring in my cost re: shipping, plus their new fee. It made more sense just to bin the drive and buy a new one. I suppose that's cheaper (in the short term) for them, then say, addressing quality control issues. Thanks Seagate!
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Is that just to do an advanced RMA ala EVGA's $30-50 fee to to prevent 2 week+ downtimes or is that a fee they charge to all RMAs?
 
Everyone labels their drives with a sticker, or they just write on the drive.
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Whaaaaat? I've never written on a drive's physical casing before. Ever. Why would you need to?

Anyways, yeah stupid rule if they don't allow it at all. It really seems like a case by case decision should be made.
 
It sounds like this guy bought gray market drives if they didn't even show up in the warranty system. I had the same thing happen. I bought a few seagate drives from a local computer shop and the failed a few years later and seagate basically said they were sold to an OEM, and somehow trickled down to that shop and I was SOL.

I went Western Digital and haven't looked back. I label my drives with a dynmo sticker label with the purchase date and capacity.
 
Hard for me to really have much of an opinion on this until I see a picture of the hard drives. He took a picture of the hard drives for Seagate, not sure why that same picture couldn't have been included for the story.

There seems to be a little contradiction in the story. He said he put a sticker on the hard drive to label it, but when Seagate saw the picture of the drive they said he wrote on the hard drive. If he actually wrote on the hard drive then why did he say he used a sticker? That kinda confused me.

Not sure I can blame Seagate just yet since I think the details are as clear as his picture taking abilities were.

And yeah, I'd never write anything permanent on really any piece of hardware, especially hard drives. I keep hard drives for a long time and they will go from one computer to the next, so any labeling is bound to need changing frequently over time. I use a label maker, or at least a post-it.
 
First off I would never write on my drives thats just asking for trouble if you need to RMA.

Second Seagate has sucked in m experiences in the past year. Alot of HD failures and the drives you get back from RMA I just dont trust as many have failed within a month.
 
They are just being douchebags so they don't have to replace the HDD. When I buy OEM HDDs the OEM supplier sometimes put their own sticker on the HDD with magick marker writing on it. What would the manufacturer say in that situation? I expect if someone tested this policy in a court the HDD manufacturer would lose.
 
When I read the headline, I thought to myself "this sounds like the doing of the D'bags at Seagate". Sure enough!

After buying a 2TB external drive from them, only to have it die in a week, and the two replacements they sent me also die, I swore to never buy their stuff again. It seems to me, this is just one more reason.
 
Yet another reason to add to those that make me no longer purchase Seagate drives for myself, and go out of my way to discourage my customers from getting Seagate drives for their builds.

In just a few short years Seagate has gone from my 'go to' drives to the absolute top of my shit list. First it was the apparent removal of all quality control with the 7200.11 (and onward) drives, and then horror stories like this.

You know what's REALLY a fucking hoot? I've received RMA replacement drives FROM Seagate that have stuff written on them in permanent marker!
 
WozniakMac said:
I only buy Western Digital and Hitachi now because of this nonsense. How would a sharpie mark void a warranty? They need to just include stickers with their drives so you can label them like most of us do if we are RAIDing multiple drives. This really sucks for those that marked on all of theirs....Like me.
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I only buy Western Digital and Hitachi after I looked at how many complaints people had about Seagate drives :)
 
The drive manufacturers replace the stickers on the drive when they refurb the drive. That means they put the cases through some sort of wash and rinse to get the old stickers off. That doesn't remove tape or sharpie marks? Have they not heard of goof-off? I've even had monitors marked 'bad' on the case or screen in sharpie and have had no problem getting a warranty replacement.
 
Out of the 8 Seagates I have running, I've only had one RMA, a three year old 7200.11 with the firmware problem. The RMA was painless.
 
wtiger said:
Maxtor used to be great. I've still got several 40-250Gb drives that still function perfectly fine. Although they're too slow to bother using them; since much larger faster drives have gotten so cheap. About 5 years ago I started having troubles with their drives. RMA'd almost every one I bought within a year of purchas date and stopped buying anything they made all together; because of it. Switched to Western Digital and other than a green drive dying recently; because it got too hot in my media player. Other than that I've not been happier. RMA was quick and painless and reliability has been top notch.
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I support a bunch of old Dell systems (over 4 years old) at work, and everytime one has had a drive problem, it's been a Maxtor drive. The seagate and western digitals drives are still working fine.

At home, every Maxtor drive I've bought has died after 2-3 years.
I finally had my 1st Western Digital drive die this week. It was a 7 year old, heavily used 120GB drive that I was testing before I dumped it on Ebay. So far all my Seagate drives (not quite as old as the WD) are still working as are my Hitachi's.
 
if the sticker is covering the label or the breather hole I can see them voiding the warranty,

I have RMA'ed 300+ drives in the last 10 years to seagate, a large number of them have had stickers indicating their fail status, fail date, and use location.
if the drive cannot be wiped we tend to give them a magnetic realignment, (stick them on an old linear motor magnet, with over 600# of pulling force, leave the drive there for 20 days and nothing is recoverable)
 
I used to use Seagate all the time, but haven't since the 2008 7200.11 fiasco. Almost exclusively WD now, and I take the sharpie to most of them. When you have 5 or 6 drives installed, some of them identical, it sure helps to identify them. Better than trial and error, at any rate.
 
Unexploded said:
Doesn't surprise me, there seems to be a real push to lower the number of returned drives.See also, the new $25 fee for the RMA of your drive.

After factoring in my cost re: shipping, plus their new fee. It made more sense just to bin the drive and buy a new one. I suppose that's cheaper (in the short term) for them, then say, addressing quality control issues. Thanks Seagate!
Click to expand...

$25 to return a drive THEY messed up? wow, sure there has to be some law against that, charging people for your defects?
 
Ahh Seagate... My story isn't about marking on the drives necessarily, it is about an external hard drive (still a rediculous story nonetheless).

A client of mine had some external seagate drives and when one of the drives crashed I sent it back to seagate (like anyone else would). The client got the drive back and turns out it wasn't fixed. I was forced to call Seagate and ask why - they told me because the case of the external had a tiny nick in it. They then proceeded to tell me they wouldn't fix it because they thought maybe it was dropped and that's why it crashed etc etc. I talked to a manager and he was a clown as well. So everyone, please wrap any of your seagate external drives in plastic, get a custom made piece of kevlar to fit on it, and store inside a atomic and hydrogen bomb/water/fire proof safe filled with inert gases in an underground storage unit. Seagate just may replace the drive then.
 
I'm gonna go with the harddrives are so cheap I just go buy another one option.

The only drives I have spent enough on to consider RMA'ing are my SSD's, but those havent failed yet.

I also use a Dymo to put printed labels on my drives...newer drives aren't to bad about it, but older drives didn't use to have the speed/cache/size printed on them so I just got into habit.
 
All,

I rarely post here anymore, but this story peeked my attention enough to do such. Having worked in Storage for several years now (Milpitas, CA. based drive manufacturer) I can note with a high level of truth why this is.

First of all, Maxtor is the only manufacturer that ever had this silly "Sharpie" rule and thus, since acquisition by Seagate, so do they.

The reason why Maxtor implemented this in the first place is because too many drives were being returned from the Enterprise market (not consumer) with sharpie marks covering the serial numbers, making them illegible, thus making it difficult to process. Other managers in the RMA Dept noted that they found it difficult to repair said drive and reissue it as a "green" marked refurbished unit back to customers as some of the marked drives contained sometimes vulgar comments (EX: P.O.S. Drive!!!). This all cost the declining company money and so when audits were passed around to figure out how to recoup costs, executives listened and implemented said clause: "Deny RMA claims for non-manufacturer implemented graffiti". Shortly before acquisition, when Maxtor got into the consumer space with, it became icing on the cake to expand this practice and save more money in the RMA process by not fulfilling requests when such graffiti was noted.

After Seagate acquired Maxtor in 2005, they continued to keep everything in place with Maxtor's RMA Department (which included some of the silly rules). You will note that as a company does better OR wants to regain more market share, they tend to be more lax about such policies. However, Seagate is starting to feel the pinch and thus such policies help them save expenses around the edges.

On a side note, has anyone ever seen a refurbished Seagate drive? Examples:
http://cdn.overstock.com/images/products/3/P11518872.jpg
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/asset...00GB_SATA_300_7200RPM_16MB_HDDmhxStandard.jpg

These are the same drives we all return. Imagine getting your RMA drive back noted as "repaired" with the words: "Shit drive" in Sharpie written on it. I bet many of you would return it again.

So why doesn't Seagate just use some GooBeGone or replace the top plate?

First, using any type of cleaner would potentially damage the unit. Second, removing the top plate and replacing it requires a whole new Serial Number, Inventory listing, and manufacturing process that Seagate will never spend the money to do as it is a costly process and one they are not geared for.

While I find this practice painful from the end-user standpoint as well, you are all a bit more understanding why they do it.
 
I have owned many many hard drives over the years. The only drives I have needed to RMA were all Seagate. Of my 4 RAID drives: Two are refurbs from failures and one is on it's deathbed. 25% success rate on the 7200.10... wooo Seagate.

I also had a Seagate external hard drive jump an inch off my desk with a loud bang (I have four witnesses). I popped it open and sure enough I had a dead 7200.11.

My next HDD will be Western Digital.
 
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