Quote:
Warranty replacements take so long to complete, that most people just buy another drive in the meanwhile, and treat it as "bonus" if the replacement ever arrives.

I haven't had a drive go bad in the past year or so, but that's definitely not the case in the US. I've probably sent back 50 drives for RMAs between WDC, Seagate, Maxtor, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and IBM. In each case, the process was relatively painless and replacement drives were sent promptly after sending out the old one. A couple of times I even got larger drives back from WDC.

After the 2004 European meet, I brought back about 10 dead empeg drives that Rob S had given-up on getting replacements for. I could only RMA 2 at a time, but despite being purchased outside of the US and being non-retail (empeg OEM parts), I was able to get a free replacement for every last one of them.
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-Rob Riccardelli
80GB 16MB MK2 090000736