Seagate Warranty

[Oldjim]

It may only be an Ebuyer problem but I intend to buy a Seagate 300GB or 320GB SATA drive from Scan which is specified as having a 5 year manufacturers warranty. As these are presumably OEM units are SCAN confident that Seagate will accept the 5 year warranty period. The Seagate warranty states that the 5 year warranty is only for distribution units (whatever that might mean).
On a side issue - other than the fact that the 320GB drives has 4 heads and the 300GB model 3 heads - is there any practical difference between the two to justify the price difference

[nickp8]

What happened in the Ebuyer case is that a supplier wrongly supplied them with a batch of OEM 'component' drives, which are normally supplied only to system manufacturers like DELL, instead of OEM 'bare drive' drives which are supplied for re-sale to end users. Ebuyer did not realise they had been supplied the wrong drives.
As the component drives are intended for system manufacturers who will provide the end user with the warranty on the pc and its components, when you check the warranty of a component drive on Seagate's site it will tell you to contact the system manufacturer. OEM bare drive drives however do carry a 5yr warranty with Seagate.

So basically OEM drives do carry a 5yr Seagate warranty. To verify this once you have the drive, enter the drives model no and serial no on the warranty checker on Seagates site and it will confirm the expiration date of the warranty on the drive.

Nickp.