This past year, not onlymemoryand SSD Prices have been soaring, even HDD The hard drive is also greatly affected. receive AI Data centers are panic-buying, and HDDs are now in serious shortage. WD has previously publicly stated that almost all of its hard drive production capacity in 2026 will be taken away by the top seven customers. Seagate and Toshiba are in a similar situation.
Therefore, when supply is tight and spot prices are rising all the way, the “original factory warranty” that is supposed to protect consumers is also frequently controversial. Recently, foreign users complained that Toshiba not only refused to replace their faulty hard drives under warranty, but also only offered to refund the purchase price at the time, not the current price on the market. This means that even if you get the original purchase price, you will not be able to buy back an identical new hard drive.
Toshiba refuses to replace large-capacity hard drive under warranty! I only want a refund at the original price
According to a report by foreign media Tom’s Hardware, a Reddit user 615wonky shared on the DataHoarder board that the company purchased multiple Toshiba enterprise HDDs of more than 20TB a few months ago. One of the hard drives suddenly failed a while ago, and the warranty is still valid. Normally, it can be replaced with a brand new one, so it applied for an RMA from Toshiba according to the normal process.
High-capacity enterprise-class HDDs usually have a warranty of up to 5 years, the longest warranty of any hard drive product. But he didn’t expect that after Toshiba completed the process this time, instead of replacing him with a new product as usual, he gave an answer that no one was satisfied with.
Toshiba replied: “Currently there is no inventory for direct replacement.” If you want a 24TB replacement with the same specifications, it is estimated that you will have to wait for another full year for a chance to ship. Toshiba is not willing to make customers wait for a year, so it proposes a refund solution, but the refund amount is calculated based on the purchase price of the original order, not how much the hard drive is actually sold on the market today.
Toshiba no longer honoring warranties on large hard drives
byu/615wonky inDataHoarder
Buying an enterprise-class HDD of 20TB or more may only cost a few hundred dollars at first, but after this wave of AI rush, the asking price of Seagate’s 24TB BarraCuda model has reached nearly $600, an increase of 30 to 50%. This also means that the money refunded by Toshiba is not enough for this user to buy another hard drive of the same capacity, and he still needs to add money himself:
This 615wonky netizen was very disappointed and said: “I guess they saw the business opportunities brought by the AI bubble and sold all their safety stocks in one go. Otherwise, the failure rate of these hard drives was unusually high.”
Although many netizens think this approach is really bad, some people still think that refunding the original price is better than delaying the issue for a year, which is a reasonable compromise.
Judging from this Toshiba incident, not only do you have to spend more money to buy an HDD hard drive, but you also have to be extra careful not to damage it when using it, because damage is no longer as simple as “a broken hard drive”. You have to pay thousands of dollars more to get the original capacity back. If you are unlucky, it may be out of stock, so everyone really needs to be more careful.
Source: KOCPC Chinese