Newegg, Seagate and Warranty Issues?

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mattlach

Active Member
Aug 1, 2014
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Hey all,

I am going through a storage update of my ZFS pool. The plan is to buy larger drives, a couple at a time for the next 12 weeks, and one by one replace the drives in my pool with larger ones, to autoexpand it.

After some research, I decided to go with Seagates 10TB Enterprise v6 drives, based on a combination of the fact that they are enterprise drives sealed with helium, decent price compared to HGST, and they came with 5 years of manufactuers warranty...

...or so I thought.

I just got the first two drives last week, and decided to look up the serial numbers in Seagates Warranty Validation tool to see if I could get their production date. (I want to make sure they are from different dates to limit the risk of multiple drives failing at the same time.

To my surprise, the warranty validation tool told me they were OEM drives, and not covered by Seagate warranty.

I immediately contacted Newegg. They informed me that Newegg has a 30 day return policy, and after that the warranty is through the manufacturer. They confirmed that their store page indeed listed the drives as having 5 years of warranty, and asked me if I had contacted Seagate directly to make sure this wasn't an error.

So, I gave Seagate a call. They confirmed to me that the two serial numbers I provided were indeed OEM drives, originally sold to Supermicro International, and that they would not be honoring any warranty for them.

Has anyone else ever had this happen?

I'm waiting for Newegg to get back to me, as they said they'd look into it further for me. Both drives have passed 4 sweeps of badblocks (which took over 115 hours each) and one is already resilvered into my pool. If Newegg and Seagate don't figure things out and honor the 5 year warranty, I am going to have to return the drives, which would be a major pain in the ass at this point.

I'm just glad I checked the serial numbers when new, and didnt wait until I had a problem in a few years, only to make fighting this battle much harder.
 

mattlach

Active Member
Aug 1, 2014
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Yeah, I did see that last Friday. I'm not sure what to think of it yet. They are allegations at this point, from banks in Korea looking to recoup losses. It is unclear based on the limited information in the articles I've seen thus far as to whether Newegg is actually complicit, or why they would even need to be complicit, when the company could easily have forged purchase orders should they have wanted to.

It will be an interesting case to follow, for sure, but as of yet, not enough information to say what actually happened.
 

mattlach

Active Member
Aug 1, 2014
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As far as Newegg goes, they have an open ticket for me, and say I should expect some sort of resolution within 3-7 business days.

If they don't resolve it, the drives are going back. It will be a pain in the butt, but that's what will have to happen.
 

mattlach

Active Member
Aug 1, 2014
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Was this a third party seller, or actually sold and shipped by Newegg?
Sold and shipped by Newegg. Not on the marketplace.

link

Anyone can make a mistake. I suspect either a contract error or some sort of mistaken communication between Newegg and Seagate is the result.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and their 3-7 days to fix it.

If they don't I'll be pretty peeved though, will return the drives and probably won't order from them again. Which would be too bad. I've been a customer of theirs for almost 20 years.
 

mattlach

Active Member
Aug 1, 2014
323
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UPDATE:

So, not quite sure what they did, but I called Newegg back today, and they claimed they had resolved the warranty issue.

So, when I got home from work, I re-ran the serial numbers in Seagate's Warranty Validator, and - indeed - they now show as being covered by warranty. (they expire a couple of months short of the 5 year mark, but close enough. I don't know what they use as the start date. Is it date of manufacture, not date of purchase?)

Anyway, I'm confused but satisfied.
 

Terry Kennedy

Well-Known Member
Jun 25, 2015
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New York City
www.glaver.org
So, when I got home from work, I re-ran the serial numbers in Seagate's Warranty Validator, and - indeed - they now show as being covered by warranty. (they expire a couple of months short of the 5 year mark, but close enough. I don't know what they use as the start date. Is it date of manufacture, not date of purchase?)
It is date of manufacture plus some expected slack (shipment to distributor, etc.). Most hard drive manufacturers will either start the warranty as of the current date if you register the purchase online, and/or will accept an "out of warranty" drive as long as you can provide an invoice from an authorized seller showing the actual date of purchase putting the drives within the warranty period.

WD uses registration, HGST uses copy-of-invoice. I don't know what Seagate does these days (haven't bought one in years).