Gordon Dexter on 26 Jul 2009 08:41:36 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Hard Drive warranty RMA


Some big companies like Dell have been offering a service to their 
enterprise customers that allows them to keep the broken drive (for a 
price) to comply with their data security policies.  Since you're not an 
enterprise customer, that option probably isn't available, but you 
should talk to the service rep and see if it's possible.

If it's not, you should talk to the service rep and discuss whether you 
doing further damage to the drive after it is broken, to protect your 
privacy, would void the warranty.  Make sure you get that reassurance 
recorded or in writing.

Degaussing is honestly unlikely to work in most cases.  The magnetic 
coercivity is extremely high on modern high-density drives.  You would 
need a magnet so powerful that it would likely damage the internal 
components of the drive rather than erase it.

Beyond that, you'll probably just have to trust that WD isn't in the 
habit of performing data recovery on returned drives just to snoop on 
it's customers.  If that doesn't sound good enough for you, eat the cost 
of the dead disk.

--Gordon

TuskenTower wrote:
> All,
> How do keep data secure when a hard drive fails and you need to
> warranty RMA the device?  My father's Western Digital usb backup drive
> went south after only a few months of operation.  I think that the HD
> is toast since it started clicking in front of me and I haven't been
> able to mount it on multiple machines.  Thoughts?
>
> thanks,
> Amul
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