Very Annoyed With Maxtor External Hd

I bought a 750GB Maxtor HD for my GF to store over 250GB of rare anime files and precious files, it has been two week and today it died, it will not spin up it just flashes it's light over and over.

While I know I can RMA this drive I wish to throw my utter damn contempt and disgust at how they can shift an item which can die so quickly, plus I wish to know my legal rights to sue Maxtor since this HD has been cared for with great delicacy and placed on a desk at all times, it has not been bumped yet it has now died taking data I CANNOT replace with it!.

I am NOT happy at this Scan.

I feel for you mate but if they were that precious and rare you should have used the external drive as a backup only and kept the originals somewhere else too. You wont make that mistake again i can guarantee it.

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Originally Posted by Andydigital

I feel for you mate but if they were that precious and rare you should have used the external drive as a backup only and kept the originals somewhere else too. You wont make that mistake again i can guarantee it.

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Well it was bought to store data until other backups could be made since the media was scratched, just can't win, I guess I shall have to call in favors from friends who have the episodes :telephone:

Fired off en email to Seagate who seem to handle Maxtor's issues if this fails I need to know whether I can drop by Scans office in Bolton and deal with this, as I could use this harddrive to be up and going.

I have been their too buddy, lost all my data I have lernt my lesson but in the defense of Scan its not their fault why its faulty my VGA card has gone toots up but im not taking it out on them I just got a dud lol

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Originally Posted by asmith

I have been their too buddy, lost all my data I have lernt my lesson but in the defense of Scan its not their fault why its faulty my VGA card has gone toots up but im not taking it out on them I just got a dud lol

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Everyone gets arsed when something like this happens, to be honest the first draft of my OP would likely have had me banned twice over.:embarrassed:

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Originally Posted by AndrewJ

I bought a 750GB Maxtor HD for my GF to store over 250GB of rare anime files and precious files, it has been two week and today it died, it will not spin up it just flashes it's light over and over.

While I know I can RMA this drive I wish to throw my utter damn contempt and disgust at how they can shift an item which can die so quickly, plus I wish to know my legal rights to sue Maxtor since this HD has been cared for with great delicacy and placed on a desk at all times, it has not been bumped yet it has now died taking data I CANNOT replace with it!.

I am NOT happy at this Scan.

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I feel your pain, ive had various external and internal drives fail over the years, so I now try and keep at least 2 backups of major stuff.

But . . . I fail to see how this is Scan's fault? How are they to know what could potentially fail? They are all sealed retail units, with no indications as to life span or MTTR. So whilst its damn annoying, nothing much more you can do really apart from RMA it. ( I by no means work for, or have any profesional interests in Scan).

On the issue of trying to sue maxtor, I highly doubt you even have a leg to stand on. Why? Well if a product has failed then as long as the agree to repair/replace/issue a refund then have AFAIK satisfied any legal issues. Unless the drive has breached any health and saftey regualtions or what not, then its not like they have been negligent. If you were to buy a car, and it had faults with it, you wouldnt then sue the company would you?

hard drives have a limited liability clause in the warranties afaik
ie limited to replacement cost of the media, not for any intellectual property thereon.

we have all been there, "oh ill get around to backing it up next week" and 2 days later click click goes the drive... :(

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Originally Posted by rabbid

hard drives have a limited liability clause in the warranties afaik
ie limited to replacement cost of the media, not for any intellectual property thereon.

we have all been there, "oh ill get around to backing it up next week" and 2 days later click click goes the drive... :(

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I always back up all my important stuff online. Images go to photobucket, vids to youtube private ect. After all, disks can scratch, HDDs can fail but it's very rare for a huge server to go down taking all it's data with it.

Exactly if things are that important you want dvd/usb drive and/or 2 hard drive copies and even secured off site storage... If you have broadband then as you say consider online storage as well.

Your chances of suing Maxtor over lost data are zero. Your contract is with Scan, not Maxtor, and therefore any liability Maxtor have will be dictated by and limited to the extent of any warranty they offer. I haven't read Maxtor's recently, but I'd bet my boots (if I had any boots) that it'll be very limited and will exclude consequential loss.

Your chances of suing Scan will be the same. Zero. If you had special needs, you would have had to make those known to Scan for them to have any liability for your data, and if you had, they would no doubt have declined to supply, because it's not worth taking the risk over such data for the sale of a hard drive. NO court will hold a company responsible for losses they had no idea they were running risks over. Your chances of holding anyone responsible for the data loss will be about the same as your chances of holding the Post Office responsible if you'd sent a million quids worth of diamonds to someone by standard parcel post and they got lost.

And, of course, hard drives fail. Most don't fail that quickly, but all sorts of things can cause problems, ranging from viruses to mains power surges to it getting nicked by a burglar. So, if the data was that important, it should have been backed up adequately. How can you expect a court to hold someone else liable for loss, when you obviously didn't hold yourself liable enough to take proper backups.

You wouldn't believe the shenanigans I go through because I have data I can't afford to lose. But those shenanigans include a server with six SCSI hard drives drives in a RAID 5 array, one of which is a hot swap. It also includes backing that server up to another server .... and to Tandberg SLR tape. And the backup server is backed up to DAT tape. The data is then categorised into archive material (such as completed projects) and active data. The archive material is backed up to DVD-RAM, with a couple of off-site DVDR disks, which are periodically replaced. The active material is backed up to DVD-RAM, and I hold an encrypted copy on a remote private FTP server too.

Oh, and that RAID 5 server .... I have a couple more spare hard disks sitting in a cupboard, as well as two spare drive cages and two spare identical SCSI controllers. The boot drive (separate from that array) is also imaged, and I can replace it and reload the image in under an hour.

And that's a home system. :D

Alright I work from home most of the time, and it's largely business data. But you get my point, I'm sure.

Oh, and one more thing. If you're hoping to recover "episodes" of rare anime files from friends, I rather imagine there might be a copyright issue or two involved there. If you try to sue anyone for loss, you might have some awkward questions to answer, and are you really sure you want to bring that up inside a courtroom? :D

Saracen you must have spent $$$ on this back up system. I use at work a bit simpler one, 1 backup server with lot of storage for all servers to back up on this one and later all data going on to tapes.

Anyway going back to topic. As Saracen said, only what you can do is RMA this drive and say goodbye to your data. If you want something more secure, you should buy external raid storage

AndrewJ

We can only sympathise with your situation and hope you can recover the date in some way - To clarify SCAN is not liable for your lost data but of course we will test / replace the drive for you.

Please contact our Returns dept if not already Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Best Regards

Maybe a moot point following on from part of Saracens post but its a possibility in this case...
IF the drive thats failed is returned under warranty... then IF this drive has contents some of which lets say have questionable origin or content, be it of an adult theme and/or copyright infringing nature...
What responsibility does the supplier and then presumably the manufacturer have IF they subsequently discover said material?! Are they bound to report such findings to relevant authorities in all cases, just some cases at their discretion, or what?

Let's not get into hypothetical scenarios... The drive will be tested and replaced if faulty.

Regards

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Originally Posted by AndrewJ

I bought a 750GB Maxtor HD for my GF to store over 250GB of rare anime files and precious files, it has been two week and today it died, it will not spin up it just flashes it's light over and over.

While I know I can RMA this drive I wish to throw my utter damn contempt and disgust at how they can shift an item which can die so quickly, plus I wish to know my legal rights to sue Maxtor since this HD has been cared for with great delicacy and placed on a desk at all times, it has not been bumped yet it has now died taking data I CANNOT replace with it!.

I am NOT happy at this Scan.

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I can understand you not being happy but why are you blaming Scan?
They sold it....they arent the manufacturer.

I feel your pain. As already mentioned, we've all been there.

If the data is incredibly precious, you can send the drive to speacilists you may be able to recover the data - even from dead/corrupted drives.

Trouble is it would probably cost you a lot of money. SCAN may be able to put you in contact with a company that could help. Or does anyone know of any good data recovery service companies out there?