Warranty terms on ext usb drives ? what if the enclosure only fails?

[winh8r]

I was just wondering what disks sit int the usb 2.5" enclosures that are sold as one product, like in those LG or adata ones? (in case of WD or samsung I think it will be rather obvious it's their standard disks inside). These are more affordable then enclosure + drive separately these days and even more now when prices gone mad because of the taiwan floods. But...
this is a big but because from my experience the electrnics/enclosure is more likely to fail suddenly (disks show symptoms often earlier) and then what... I cannot get the drive out probably without loosing warranty and when I send whole part for service then they might just replace everything so there's no chance to recover data ?

I guess other's will agree on that but more important is if those who had an ext usb drive failure can give a word on this ?

 

[Hawkeye22]

My guess is if you bought it as a whole unit, you will need to return the whole unit for repair. That is how it works for most everything else.

When you car motor gets a recall, you don't just bring in the motor. When the thermal diode blew out on my coffee pot, I had to send in the whole unit. When one stick of a matched set of DDR2 failed on me, I had to send back both sticks. Ok, enough examples. 😉

 

[winh8r]

OK so it seems, you risk data more with these usb drives than on a standard 2.5 drive alone
Can people who had problems with these drives say what failed and what was replaced ?

 

[Hawkeye22]

It is for this reason that I always purchase a seperate drive and enclosure instead of the pre-built ones. I also backup regularly so that it is a non-issue anyhow.

I don't own any pre-built external drives, but from what I see on most forums is the enclosure fails. If it's just the logic board in the enclosure that failed, the drive can normally be saved. The only time the drive seems to get physically botched up is if the enclosure over volts the drive and fries it.