eric93se wrote:How often do your hardrives fail? I've never had a failure, in almost 15 years. So who really cares about "advanced repacement" (sounds like a gimmick anyway). Read the reviews they are top performers.
There are plenty of other drives the equal of Hitachi in performance, or 1-2% less, that have better customer service. I'm willing to sacrifice 1% to get that service if that's what it takes, but Seagate and Western Digital have top performing drives too, so I really don't have to.
If you haven't had a drive fail, then you're lucky. I worked for a mom-n-pop computer shop for 3.5 years, as a systems engineer for a year and a half, and a systems administrator for over five. I've seen plenty of drives fail, several of them mine. I've also seen plenty of times where a user didn't back up their data. It's kind of hard to try and attempt to recover data from a drive when you don't have a new drive to direct the data to. I'm not just talking about ny own drives; I have clients of my own to look after. Getting them a Hitachi drive would be hurting myself if it failed, because lacking advanced replacement, Hitachi has to receive the drive from me, test it, then decide to send me a replacement. Everyone else diagnoses the drive on the phone, sends you the new drive, then gives you a set period of time to send the bad drive back. This gives you a chance to attempt data recovery, and gets you a replacement hard disk in half the time. And I don't have to pay more money to get this good service, either.
Advanced replacement is NOT a gimmick. It's an incredibly useful feature. It ensures that you have a new drive before you send the old one out. Back when the IBM "Deathstar" fiasco occurred, some users were waiting for 1-3 MONTHS for their replacement hard disk drives; I've also seen occasions (not common, but it happens) where a company can suddenly find no record of having received the drive someone sent in for RMA, and the ensuing runaround takes a week or two to resolve. I'm not willing to fork out extra cash just to have a hard disk sitting on my shelf at home in case one of mine fails, and I don't want downtime.
If you don't ever have a hard disk fail in your lifetime, you'll be the one with a charmed life. But generally, there's two kinds of people: Those who have experienced a hardware failure, and those who will someday.