After my recent hard drive failure, someone suggested I go to the seagate website and type in it’s serial number to see if it was still under warranty. Sure enough it was under warranty until 2010 (must have been a 5 year warranty). Anyway, I followed the instructions to RMA the drive, and wrapped it up badly and posted it back to seagate (I had to send it to Singapore so it cost about NZ$20). Less than 2 weeks later I got a replacement drive. It’s still a 300GB IDE drive, but its the newer 7200.10 model with the perpendicular recording.

It seems to work fine, but I’m not sure what to do with it (I’ve bought a 750GB drive to replace my broken one). It says it is a ‘Seagate Certified Repaired HDD’.

I guess the key thing is that it was a pretty painless and reasonably quick process to get  a new drive. If you’re reading this and you think you’re getting back your old drive with all your data restored on it … then thats a big NO. You just get a new blank drive. I have read that the replacement you get has a warranty that expires at roughly the same time as your original drive (ie. 2010 for me), but I haven’t bothered to check this out.