I purchased a mini X+ with drives directly from iXsystems because I wanted to support the company.
What I didn’t realize was that if I also purchased drives at the same time through iX then these drives which normally have a 5 year warranty if purchased anywhere else (and they are also cheaper), iX effectively reduces the warranty to 1 year unless I bought an extended warranty on the whole system. So now I’m stuck buying a new drives one month past iX’s one year warranty.
Don’t assume that those drives - if purchased anywhere else - will necessarily have a 5 year warranty. Generally only drives from a retail channel will have the 5 year manufacturer’s warranty. Unfortunately plenty of online sellers will sell drives from OEM channels as well and those do not come with the manufacturer’s warranty (or might have a significantly reduced manufacturer’s warranty).
I recently bought WD Red Pro HDDs for my first TrueNAS system and some of the sellers on amazon sold OEM drives without disclosing that fact. Even amazon itself has carried OEM stock from time to time in the past. (I sent the affected drive back right away.)
Your drives might be from a retail channel. You can check that by going to the manufacturer’s (e.g. Seagate, Western Digital) website, use their warranty checker and enter the serial numbers of your drives. (For 2.5" SATA drives the serial numbers are generally on the side opposite the power and SATA connectors.) If your drives show up there in the manufacturer’s warranty database with the expected warranty end date, then you have drives from a retail channel and the manufacturer’s warranty is good.
If your drives do not show up or are already listed as out-of-warranty, then you have indeed drives from an OEM channel without the manufacturer’s warranty. However that doesn’t mean that you need to replace them after iX’s warranty expires.
Also: Have you asked iXsystems, whether they will honor the standard retail warranty (5 years in your case) on the drives?
For anyone else reading this:
Since a long warranty is an important product feature of an HDD, make sure to ask the seller, whether the HDDs you’re about to buy originate from a retail channel and will have the manufacturer’s warranty. (I consider “store” warranties from individual online sellers, e.g. on amazon to be useless.)
When you receive the drive, verify the seller’s claim. Don’t open the package right away, but check the serial number (which is usually on the outside of the product box) against the manufacturer’s warranty database. (Depending on the manufacturing date, the displayed warranty might be off by a month or two, but that just means that they’re guessing based on the manufacturing date, until you register your drive.) If the drive’s serial number doesn’t show up or the warranty is significantly shorter that you’d expect, return the drive.
Always use a seller with a no-hassle return policy and no restocking fee. And if a seller misrepresented their stock, don’t buy from them again.
Do the ixsystems drives have a private label on them? (I don’t know never bought drives from them just hardware). Does it have brand name? WD and Seagate drives have a Warranty Status page where you enter the drives serial number(s) and it will tell you how much warranty that drive has left.
LOL, we were typing at the same time.
LOL, indeed.
Thanks @tangofan and @alleykat for these answers. The drives can be returned/replaced directly through WD.
Thanks @tangofan @Brett @alleykat
The drive I need to replace is a Micron 5400 used as a SLOG. iX has put their own label over it. Micron website does not list iX as an authorized reseller, and I didn’t purchase directly so I get nowhere there. I called iX about it and the support person saw that I was one month past the iX warranty and got stuck there. It’s not a lot of money, more the frustration in a gotcha that by purchasing through iX I am effectively reducing my warranty that upsets me.
Hopefully iXsystems Sales department can resolve this for you. I don’t know why iX would place a label over the drive, unless it was just for inventory purposes. but that doesn’t matter to the end user, the warranty matters and product support.
Best of luck to you and hopefully someone will resolve this for you, sooner than later.
@kris Not sure if this is something in your realm.
Hi @mathew,
We can fix this. If you send support an email with this dialog, I can approve the drive replacement.
We’re not a “reseller” of Micron, they view us as the end-user. The SLOG sticker is there because the drive is formatted specifically for the SLOG role so that it can (normally) sustain a higher write rate.
We do offer a 3 year warranty option, but AMZN makes this complex to sell.
Morgan
I bought my mini and hard drives from iX but I don’t remember a sicker (I bought an extra one too). Is that a recent thing (but to be honest, I don’t know what “slog” is now or then though–I paid iX because I didn’t have any experience with ZFS coming from OpenBSD at the time)?
BASICS
iX Systems pool layout whitepaper
Special VDEV (sVDEV) Planning, Sizing, and Considerations
Nice. And, thank you very much. But warning though, I’m not a hardware guy so I’ll probably fall asleep a few times reading all of that and it may also have to wait a bit because I’m still building tools for my server (but that might be a good thing too; because I’ll probably annoy you when I get around to parsing that info :P).
Thank you @Captain_Morgan - I’ve sent a support ticket. Much appreciated.
Unfortunately, this is a pretty common thing across the industry. Bare drives purchased separately, that come with a 3 or 5 year manufacturer warranty, usually have no manufacturer warranty at all when sold as a bundle with another device such as server or a NAS. The warranty is dependent on the company who sold you the hardware, IX System in this case.
