Scorpio Black - 5 years warranty

What ‘status’ should I insist on when buying a new Scorpio Black drive to obtain a five year guarantee with WD that works?

Choices:

  1. Retail: retail packaged in a store like PC World

  2. OEM: brown cardboard packaged and posted from online company like Misco or Dabs Press

Note: Both of these store types may CLAIM they offer a 5 year warranty.

Why is there no way to confim the validity of an extended warranty before purchase? Should WD consider a 5 year warranty logo or something? Would we be prepared to pay for an extended warranty as a separate transaction?

Your thoughts welcome

Br1an

P.S. I’m posting this as I recently got stung with a failing 320gig drive that the seller claimed had a 3 year warranty, but it turned out to be an OEM System Component drive (i.e. Dell. Compaq, HP etc). I got a refund, but my point is people can be ecomonical with the truth…

Hi ok the retail packaged drive has a 5 year warranty. There are two types of OEM drives one is a branded drive for example a HP drive with HP firmware on it which the warranty is covered by HP for one year. The other type is just a regular drive without the packaging but still has a 5 year warranty. So once you get the drive register it with WD and you will see the 5 years warranty. Legit places don’t sell HP acer or dell branded hard drives, well you can find them but not from normal places and they should specify what they are .

I guess there’s another type of drive; reconditioned. These will typically have a 90 day or ‘remainder of original’ warranty. There’s nothing to stop a VAR or system builder from selling these recon drives, but they are not supposed to sell them as ‘new’.

Does WD reset any SMART data to zero for recons? i.e. POH (Power on Hours) or Reallocation Event Count (bad blocks) for example? I hope so.

BTW, I’ve found a few resellers unable to confirm the 5 year warranty on new OEM/Retail Scorpio Black; perhaps they were’nt really approved resellers so could only do 1+1 (one year with them one with WD).

Thanks

Br1an

Hi well I don’t know where you live but I would not take a recertifed drive unless it was a replacement from WD. Surely there must be a pc shop you can buy from, or order online from a good site. The reason for this is places like staples allow customers to return hard drives after they have played with them for 4 days can’t get them to work, and then there A+ hehe tech tests them and says there ok.

My recent Amazon UK tale regardng a supposedly new Seagte drive is here http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B002JIMYHI/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 (most useful critical review).

It was probably just bad luck, but if it wasn’t for SMART data and Acronis Drive Monitor warnings, I might not have found out my ‘new’ drive was actually an OEM customer return. Anyway, I’ll stick to main distibutors like PC World, Insight etc from now on.

Why don’t OSes provide heads-up disk degradation warnings? Most folk don’t look in their Event Viewer. 

Cheers

Br1an