Dear sirs,
last week I decided to buy new hard disks. I dithered between Hitachi (I already owned about 10 of their disks before), Western Digital (i also have good experience with WD) and Seagate. The reasons for taking a Seagate product was on the one hand the very good price and on the other hand the very customer-friendly 5-year warranty.
I bought one 200GB Seagate ST3200822AS (SATA,8MB Cache) from one of the biggest dealers in germany, "Mindfactory" (
www.mindfactory.de).
After having received the Hard disk, I wanted to verify warranty on your homepage.
The result:
"Component
The product you identified was sold as a system component. Please contact your place of purchase for service. Seagate sells many drives to direct OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) customers. These products are usually configured for the OEMs only, as components for their systems. You must contact your place of purchase for any warranty support on these drives.
If you purchased this unit directly from Seagate, please return to the previous page and verify your Seagate customer number, because the customer number you entered () does not match our records."
My Serial number: blabla
My Part number: blabla
Maybe you understand my disappointment due to the fact that I bought an product that in my opinion had 3-5 years of warranty and got an product that has only 6 months.
I bought only the single drive without any other component.
So I expected to buy an product that is planned for end-customer-sale.
In my opinion I had no possibility to foresee that I bought an OEM product.
As my dealer doesn't respond to my inquires I would like you to answer the following questions to me.
1. Is Mindfactory allowed to sell OEM products to their customers without specifying these parts as OEM products ?
If not I would like you to investigate for the advantage of your customers
2. If I intend to buy any further Seagate product, is there any possibility for me to detect if I buy an OEM product before buying the product ?
3. If not, is there any possibility that Seagate clearly classifies OEM products in the future, maybe with different modell numbers ?
4. Is it possible to extend the warranty of my Hard disk to non-OEM warranty as a gesture of goodwill ?
if you need to verify my concern with Mindfactory, my Mindfactory customer ID is "blabla"
regards,
Rolf Hanßen