[ale] OT - Hard Drive Warranties

[mike at trausch.us]

On 01/24/2012 02:05 PM, Wolf Halton wrote:
> Thus a extra paid 5-year warranty makes no financial sense to me.
> After 5 years drives are more than likely to fail because their bearings
> go bad.  This is why there aren't any out of the box 10-year warranties.
> I have the same feeling about new cars.
> 
> Call me crazy,
> Wolf

You're not crazy; 99% of the time, extended warranties are rip-offs.
They only reason that they are offered is because the companies know this.

I just built a server system last week.  I was offered a $70 extended
warranty for each of 4 components, the motherboard, the CPU, the HDD and
the RAM.  This "extended warranty" was really a "no questions asked
replacement policy" through Fry's and nothing to do with manufacturer
warranty whatsoever.  I declined, several times.  Why?  Because having
built many systems, I know that hardware that is destined to fail is
extremely likely to fail in the first several hours of operation.

On this system, I had run into just that: bad RAM, right out of the box.
 Not a terribly big deal to me, just swapped it out.  Glad I didn't buy
the "extended warranty" -- in fact, I rarely ever do.  I only buy an
extended warranty if the main warranty doesn't seem to be enough ---
sometimes, a device such as a TV that has a 1 year warranty, I will buy
a 1 year extension.  Most of the time, though, the answer is a swift "no".

But I took advantage of their price matching guarantee while I was there
(though note that they do not know how to do the math; their policy
states that for anything you find a lower price on within 30 days of
purchase, they'll "happily" refund 110% of the difference.  Where I grew
up, 110% of $5 is $5.50, for example.  Here in GA, it seems to be $5.25.

In fact, the CSR consistently gave me 105% the difference back, except
(of course!) on the one item that I actually checked, where he did 110%.

Ugh.

As I was typing this, it appears I have a failing drive right here in my
desktop computer.  Yay, GNOME, for telling me!  Seems I'll be going back
there.  I wasn't going to go back for 5% of small dollars, but since I
have to go back there anyway...

(re-sending this, b/c the original one was too big...)

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dd2.png
Type: image/png
Size: 22897 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120125/15e2908b/attachment-0001.png 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 729 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120125/15e2908b/attachment-0001.bin