larrymoencurly said:
Exactly how do manufacturers refurbish HDs? What parts get replaced?
Presumably that varys with the manufacturer and the problem.
Back when WD had a user forum at their website,
a WD employee wrote that everything was replaced
except for the aluminum casting, which they said
received a new organic anti-stick coating to shed dust.
Sounds VERY implausible indeed when it
would be cheaper to make a new one than to get
everything out of the old one and treat it like that.
But at the other extreme, I read that one company screened used
HDs that had been returned by customers, and they sent out some
of them as warranty replacements without doing any repairs to them.
Yeah, it wouldnt be surprising if some operations did it like that
given that some returns are sure to be user stupidity or a failure
outside the hard drive. Just check that it works and ship it out again.
The big risk with that approach is that an intermittent fault
may not be seen until the second sucker gets the drive.
Stupid way to operate in my opinion.
Another message somewhere else said that the
platters, bearings, and seals were always replaced.
I find that hard to believe too, essentially because it would
cost more to do that than to have some monkey in a third
world country make a new drive on the assembly line.
Thats not to say that some operations arent that stupid tho.
