Over the past month, I’ve had the decidedly unpleasant task of returning three out of four 500 gig Samsung hard disk drives (HD501LJ models) for RMA replacement. One had just been purchased from Newegg, and the others were a few months older, meaning I’d have to return them to Samsung for replacement.
Two of the failed drives had a “smoked” component on the circuit board, near the power connector. I’m not certain if the drives were defective, or if my computer’s power supply may have been to blame. However, the third drive had a read error that caused me to lose data, and didn’t show up until I’d been using it for a few months. A surface scan with one of the hard drive diagnostics included on the Ultimate Boot CD indicated hundreds of bad sectors that were unrepairable.
The RMA procedure was ugly. I tried to navigate through Samsung’s web site to find out how to return the drive, and the page I ended up at said I would need to contact my retailer for warranty service! I tried calling Samsung’s 800 number, and the representative told me the same thing!!! I bought the drive from Newegg, and they were as confused as I was. Nonetheless, they offered to replace the drive, as long as I could get a statement from Samsung that they refused to honor the warranty.
Eventually, I figured out that Samsung’s web site is either unorganized, inaccurate, or out-of-date. Searching with Google helped me find the folks who service warranty work on Samsung hard drives, but how ridiculous is it that I have to use a search engine?
To their credit, Samsung did replace the drives in a timely fashion, and both replacement drives checked out fine with a surface scan. Now let’s hope they last more than a few months…