While I’ve mostly switched away from Seagate hard drives after losing three hard drives to the firmware bug that hit the 500 GB models a few years back (although I was able to recover 2 of them after building one of these). I had to do a warranty return for one of my customers the other day, and had an excellent experience.

For $10, and a simple warranty validation check, Seagate shipped out a replacement drive with a return shipping label. The new drive shipped out right away and arrived earlier than expected. Since I’d already recovered the data from the old drive, all that I had to do was pop it in the box especially designed for the return, slap the return shipping label on and drop it of at the FedEx depot.

All in all, a very pleasant experience, and well worth the $10 – much cheaper than the shipping alone would have cost me.