How long for Seagate warranty replacement?

[Chuck Remes]

I documented my blunder in this earlier thread: https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ng-to-replaced-faulted-drive-now-stuck.97453/

I sent in my drive for warranty replacement and now I'm waiting waiting waiting for a new one. I'm attaching the latest "check RMA status" result and it clearly shows nothing was shipped. How long is it reasonable to wait for the replacement? What's the recommended way of poking Seagate to get them to respond?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

We experienced replacement times of a month or two with various vendors in the past. Warranty =/= emergency replacement. If running a large number of drives in an enterprise environment you just stock your own replacement units and the warranty replacements will eventually refill your stock.

May be a bit disappointing for a home user but even hat home I always have one spare drive.

 

[Chuck Remes]

Ah, that's a bummer. I did have a spare back when I had 6TB units, but with the 10TB unit I didn't buy the extra / 8th drive. I guess I'll cross my fingers that I don't have more failures. Running RAIDZ2 so I should be okay if a bit slow.

Thanks for the guidance on timing. I'll sit on my hands until February and then probably start panicking.

 

[joeschmuck]

That is one reason why I like Advanced RMA, where you toss out your credit card and they put a temporary charge on your card, then send you a replacement normally within 2 days, then you send the failed unit back. If the drive was not really failed or the drive never shows up, your credit card gets hit for a full priced hard drive. Also you use the same box it was shipped in for the return so the manufacturer can't say the box was inadequate.

Also, it was the holiday season, COVID is big, so that may be holding things up as well. Or all the replacement hard drives are sitting on a huge ship off the California coast.

 

[Chuck Remes]

> That is one reason why I like Advanced RMA, where you toss out your credit card and they put a temporary charge on your card, then send you a replacement normally within 2 days, then you send the failed unit back.

I didn't see an option for this on their site. Next time I'll know better and search for it.

 

[Chuck Remes]

FYI to any watchers (and future me), the warranty replacement drive arrived today, Jan 18, 2022. It took a touch over a month to get it. Definitely do an expedited RMA next time if feasible.

Other noteworthy data point is that the drive label says "Recertified product" on it. My guess is this drive isn't going to last forever either.

Going to let it warm up for a few hours and I'll install it tonight for a resilver.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I had three RMA replacments with Seagte (all Exos 16 TB) last year. In every case I handed the old drive over to DHL here in Germany on Saturday and had the replacement the following Tuesday or Wednesday.

 

[joeschmuck]

Other noteworthy data point is that the drive label says "Recertified product" on it. My guess is this drive isn't going to last forever either.

It depends on what was wrong with the drive originally, if anything. The good thing about the warranty is the drive will be replaced so long as the warranty is valid. This is why I say that the hard drives are consumable and once the warranty period expires, you should plan to replace the drives. Plan means just that, be aware and plan for a failure to occur, it doesn't mean go and replace your drives right away. I replaced my first set of drives about 1 year after the warranty, not due to failure but because I wanted a different VDEV layout and slightly larger drives. Those original drives still work well and are in a backup NAS.