Let me give you some back ground information…
I have an HP Proliant server that uses Seagate Barracuda Hotswap SATA drives. After installing the server about 8 months ago, a hard drive failed and was promptly replaced under warranty by HP. The firmware issue was not known at this time so I put the failure down to a faulty disc.
After a server rebuild with the replacement drive, everything seemed to be going fine! About 3 months down the line, similar drive read failures were occurring. So, another phone call to HP to get a replacement drive. All good as expected.
Whilst discussing the drive failure issues with an industry colleague, he mentioned he had read somewhere about a dodgy batch of drives with firmware issues. I decided to look a little further into this and managed to find a magazine article that claimed Seagate were offering free data recovery through there recovery partners, I365.
Excellent, so I thought I’d get this most recently failed drive recovered for free! Bearing in the mind that my client weren’t happy to pay for more than one disc to run the server with a RAID array! All data that was on the drive was corrupted and because Windows SBS 2003 couldn’t read the drive, it had corrupted the multiple location backups! NO DATA! Not good!
I promptly contacted I365 UK office to discuss this issue and was told that any free recovery request had to come through the US Technical support. To cut a long story short, I was told by Seagate US that the drive was an OEM and would have to speak to them to get support. Now, HP are only legally obligated to replace the drive under warranty, and not offer any further services! What a pain – Seagate were offering free recovery to consumers but not to myself!
I then phoned HP and spoke to many different people over about a week about this issue and was eventually told nothing could be done! After threats of legal action, I was told I would be contacted by management and sure enough I was. I ended up speaking to the UK Sales Director and was eventually told after a few days that nothing more could be done but I was ok to keep hold of the faulty drive rather than send it back! Well, I had no intention of sending it back as by this time it was in the hands of I365!
I had sent the drive off a week before and subsequently received a quote for £1,056 to have the 250GB SATA drive recovered. The data on this drive is business critical with no available backups so I thought I’d just have to pay it and get it recovered. Don’t want to piss my client off!
Well after about another week, the recovery results were sent to me and as expected everything was readable! Great! I365 needed my approval to go ahead and actually recover the data, so the other day I emailed to say let’s do it! About an hour later I received an email asking for the invoice address which I provided.
Here’s the good bit - The next day I received a phone call form I365 stating that Seagate were now paying for the recovery!
I’m not quite sure why they are paying as they don’t really have a legal obligation to, but hey! Great!
So anybody that is facing a similar situation with an OEM drive which is apparently not supported – it would appear that Seagate have started providing the free recovery that they offer to Joe Bloggs!
Well done Seagate – good choice!
