I've chosen to buy Seagate hard drives over other brands for a long time, they've always been extremely reliable and very quiet in comparison to drives from other manufacturers with similar specs. However, I finally had one die on me last week. I checked its SMART attributes and found that it had been powered on for just short of 9000 hours (about 375 days). I had bought the drive about three and a half years ago and thought that this was fairly reasonable.

I was just starting to look for a new drive, when i remembered that Seagate drives come with 5 year warranties. I went to their site and found all I had to do was enter the drive's serial number to check my warranty was still valid, I did so, and it told me the drive was covered until 2010, i then filled in my details and they issued me with an RMA request, all I then had to do was package it up and ship it off to the address they gave me. A week later, and I now have a new drive!

Better yet, the one that broke was a 200GB drive, it's replacement is 250GB. I had started buying Western Digital drives very recently after Seagate purchased Maxtor which was the one brand of hard drives I went out of my way to completely avoid after having endless trouble with them. I thought as Seagate had bought Maxtor, they might well still be producing Maxtor hard drives and just labelling them Seagate, but if they're going to continue offering 5 year warranties on them, with a returns process as efficient as this one has been, then I don't think I care... so long as the drives don't die too spectacularly, i.e. take all my data with them...