I recently rebuilt my workhorse PC at home after a contractor fried my old one by plugging a sheetrock saw into my UPS. One of the new components I bought was a Hitachi Deskstar 1TB hard drive. The drive comes with a three-year warranty.
Less than six months later, the drive began to fail, and my computer told me to back up and replace the drive immediately.
The first sign that getting Hitachi to replace the drive under warranty was not going to be entirely straightforward was when I entered the drive’s serial number into Hitachi’s “Is My Drive in Warranty?” form and got back “Invalid serial”. Um… no. [I later learned that this was because the serial number returned by SMART has extra characters at the beginning that aren't in the serial number printed on the drive label, and the web app doesn't know what to do with those extra characters. Stupid!]
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