Re: [PLUG] Hard Drive warranty RMA

[James Barrett <jadoba@jadoba.net>]

Nobody really needs to protect data from WD.  The real worry involves
refurbished drives.  Some RMA'd drives are refurbished and resold, so
my personal worry would be more along the lines of whether or not some
random end-user will get the sensitive data.  Perhaps WD performs a
low-level format, or otherwise does some other QA procedure that might
just happen to destroy the data in the process, but I have no clue.
I've never examined the contents of a refurbed drive, fresh out of the
packaging.

I seem to remember someone mentioning that some drive companies will
accept the breadboard or the faceplate.  Remove the circuit board or
the faceplate from the drive and send it, and they will send the
replacement drive.  Can anyone echo this?

--
James Barrett

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Gordon Dexter<gordon@texasdex.com> wrote:
> 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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