A little while ago I bought a 500GB Seagate hard drive from Overclockers, to stick in an external hard drive enclosure, to give to my Granddad for his Birthday. Unfortunately the hard drive turned out to be faulty, so I opened an RMA request with Seagate. However their requirements for the return of the drive were ludicrous! I needed to ensure I had a certain amount of padding around the hard drive and that the RMA number was printed in a certain colour in various positions of my otherwise plain box. Eventually I decided to return the hard drive to Overclockers, and completely forgot about my RMA request with Seagate.

There was a brief delay, in which time I bought another hard drive to give to my Granddad in replacement (which was delivered within 48h), as I needed another hard drive anyway, so would just have the repaired/replaced one when it was returned. After a couple of weeks, Overclockers identified that the drive was indeed faulty and sent me a replacement, which arrived and worked fine – and I’m now using it.

I got home on Friday to find a slip from DHL, stating that I had missed a parcel, and that I had to go and collect it from them on the other side of the city. I had no idea what this parcel was, as everything I had ordered recently had already been delivered. So, today I went across town to DHL and collected my parcel, and discovered it was another 500GB hard drive from Seagate. What I thought had happened was confirmed by the e-mail I had received by the time I got home to check. It was an e-mail from Seagate stating that DHL were unable to deliver my 500GB hard drive and that they wanted to confirm my address. I replied to the e-mail saying that I had been to collect the drive already, but the reseller had already replaced my hard drive for me. Seagate came back to me and said that the reseller must have returned the faulty drive to them, hence me getting an RMA replacement. They didn’t say anything about me getting a free drive, so I left it at that.

Clearly one doesn’t have to follow the RMA guidelines at all – and one should open an RMA request with the manufacturer before they return something to their reseller, so that they can get free stuff!

So, thank you Seagate/Overclockers!