Your hard drive fails in your external hard drive. You contact the manufacturer. But they tell you that if the hard drive is opened, the warranty on your hard drive will be invalidated. Voided. Unless, of course, you use the services of a “recommended” data recovery company. Recommended by the computer manufacturer.
In other words, they are trying to force you into paying what may well be considerably more to have your data recovered. Your data – precious, private and personal – sent to a company you’ve possibly never heard of, and one that you might prefer not to use, if you had the choice.
When we recover a bare hard drive that was sold as a retail product (as opposed to OEM – see below), regardless of who the manufacturer is, they will honour the warranty. Even if we have to dissemble the drive and replace components. We never have issues from Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital – none of them.
Unless the hard drive is OEM – or “original equipment manufacturer” – which means that the drive has been sold as part of a bulk (cheaper) order to someone who manufactures or assembles computer equipment. Like Acer. Or LaCie. The warranty on these drives is often only one year, against three or five years for “retail” drives.
And you cannot return an OEM drive to the company that manufactured the hard drive; being OEM, it has to go to the company who supplied you with the computer. This means that if the drive fails, and needs mechanical repair in order to recover it, you will probably lose the warranty. Unless you use their data recovery company.
Two companies we are aware of who follow this practice (and which we are seeking to have declared illegal) are LaCie and Acer. If you have fallen foul of any company, we would like to hear from you.
