HDD Warranty

[MulLa]

Hi All,

Not sure if this belongs here or in general hardware.

A mate and I were discussing about HDD warranty claims one day and we were wondering how safe is it to return a defective drive for RA (data security wise).

If a company has highly confidential information stored on a drive and it failed. Would they even return it for RA or would they just destroy the drive and replace with new drive.

I could imagine HDD companies or system vendors recieving hundreds of RA drive on a daily basis and probably wouldn't have the time to actually try and recover your data to see what's in there. But what if employees were paid off by competitors to hand over your dead drive hm... maybe we're thinking too much


Thanks for listening... or reading

 

[mercanucaribe]

In other words you don't want them to find your gay pr0n.

 

[BigJ]

If the data is worth it, you destroy it (the data). Whether this involves just destroying the data on the drive, or the entire drive itself, that's what you do. It's that simple. Would you honestly want to sacrifice millions of dollars in trade secrets or patented information for a $100-$400 HD?

 

[RichUK]

I work on the defence accounts for the MoD (the complete I.T infrastructure as a Project Manager), and I can tell you now that any secure information on a faulty drive would result in the drive being destroyed.

Depends on the situation (yours for example), but seriously, the cost of basic hardware compared to the cost of a potential compromise of secure data??

 

[Bootprint]

A smart company would just have the HDD properly destroyed.

 

[FoBoT]

drives are cheap compared to data, if it has something important, it'll get melted down into a blob, not turned in for $90

 

[MulLa]

Lol... Well the gay p0rn discussion did come up :S Not that I have any

Very true for the $90 or even $X00 drive (for SAS / SCSI drives), there's no price on trade secrets and confidential information. But for say a small business where the data do mean a lot for the company but probably not so much in public domain, would it be a good idea for them to destroy the drive too instead of returning for credit?

Thanks for the real life example inputs and experience sharing!