After nearly twelve months in operation, my 300GB Seagate ST3300831A I purchased last December has finally failed. I am surprised, as it is operating in far better conditions, temperature wise, than my Western Digital disks.

In any event, I browsed to Seagate’s Web site to track down how to RMA the drive. Ought to be easy, right? One would think, especially in light of their five year warranty program.

First, you have to register for a My Seagate account. Then, you are forced to use either Internet Explorer or Netscape (no, Firefox will not work) to access the poorly documented RMA application. Once you gain access, you’re thrust into a strange application with no obvious indication of what to do.

When you’re asked to enter an order reference number, it’s not immediately clear you can make one up. Yes, it does not matter what number you use. If you use the online help it indicates after some scrolling that you can use, say, your telephone number, which I did. If it doesn’t matter, it ought to just pick one.

Next you find yourself completely lost on the product information screen, where you need to enter some, but not all, of the information. Specifically, you need to include your part number (or model number or your direct customer part number) and the serial number (or carton or pallet id). The only selectable RMA reason is field failure and thus it should not even be an option to select. Finally, you can enter the RMA information, but then as a second step, you must validate the information. Why entering the information and submitting it does not also validate is beyond me.

Seagate offers advanced replacement, but for the hefty sum of $24.95. For another $75 I could order a brand new drive from a different vendor, so I decided to decline (…the advanced replacement, not the RMA).

By contrast, when I replaced my failed Maxtor disk a few years ago, I simply ran MaxBlaster, it returned an error code associated with a failure code that would trigger a RMA on Maxtor’s Web site, and you simply entered the code, some basic information, and selected the expedited RMA option. Easy.

While it’s certainly nice Seagate offers a five year warranty with its disks, it certainly is a pain when you have to take advantage of their warranty program. Better, perhaps, than having to buy a new disk, but you’re still out shipping of the failed product back to Seagate, and an additional $24.95 if you actually want a replacement quickly. If it’s a disk you can’t live without, you may end up buying a new one anyway while waiting for Seagate to ship a replacement.

For the record, it’s interesting to note I have had two Maxtors (120GB 2MB/cache) in production for over a year. Within six months one of the Maxtors failed. Less than a year later, the out of warranty replacement failed. During that period I’ve had five Western Digital disks (four 120GB 8MB/cache, one 40GB 2MB/cache) and not a single one has failed. The thermal temperatures the Western Digital drives have experienced have been consistently a few degrees Celsius higher than the Maxtors. Meanwhile my two Seagate (300GB, 8MB/cache, PATA) have run even cooler, at around 36C, with a single failure in 11 months thus far. All anecdotal information, of course.