Briefly: GPL revisions; Apple support bad?

Although it is certainly true that Apple should stand behind their products and 3 drive failures out of 6 is highly unusual, this blog definitely implies that the drives failed out of warranty. Unlike consumers, businesses rarely run important computer system without a hardware support contract. Oddly, it seems like this site is trying to run on the cheap and go without support. That is hardly a problem with Apple. Also, Apple does not make the drives; they were probably Seagates, IBMs, etc. and hence I would think out of warranty issues with drive life would be taken up with the drive manufacturer.

Out of warranty hard drives that fail are just that: out of warranty. If they are in a RAID setup, then there shouldn't be any data loss. If they were all in a JBOD setup, the guy was dumb to begin with. But with the knowledge that there is no coverage past one year, he shouldn't be whining about things that are not getting replaced for free past one year.

I manage Wintel servers for a living. We typically buy, no require, 3 year warranties on all our servers. Just because of this stuff. Drives fail. Asking any company to cover them after the warranty period is stupid.

Dell won't cover them either - trying to get parts out of them for servers in warranty is hard enough. Anyone will tell you the same thing - you're SOL.

We are an IBM shop and use only IBM servers from our PC based servers (290 servers throughout the USA) up to AS/400's and a ton of AIX. We accidentally let the maintenance on one of our PC-based servers lapse. We had a memory failure in one. IBM charged us for the tech to come out and $4k later we had new memory.

No whining - we fooked up and admitted it. No whining to IBM, no nothing. We'll still use IBM and be more careful with our contracts.

That's how professional businesses work.

I agree - this guy is an amateur. He had a bit of bad luck which can be upsetting, but he should have a warranty or support contract.

I notice he doesn't have feedback on his site - it's probably just a rant to get web site hits.

Hard drives are warrenteed for three (sometimes 5) years by the manufacturer. Instead of bothering with Apple, contact the hard drive manufacturer (Hitachi, Western Digital, Quantum, etc) directly. They'll honor the warranty, ship out a replacement drive and ask that he send the broken one back to them within 2 weeks. Simple.

I have a lot of experience with drives in raid arrays and, in high traffic situation, they burn out *fast*.

Always contact the manufacturer of the drive. They'll check the date of manufacture by the serial number and they're excellent about honoring warranties. No need to go to the OEM the computer was purchased from.