Maplin - Hard Drive Without UK Warranty

penx

Very disappointed in Maplin. They sold me a hard drive that, according to Samsung, is not intended for sale in the UK.

I found this out after the hard drive failed and Samsung would not honour their manufacturer warranty (using Samsung's warranty/RMA checker I receive error code '103', 'Out of Service area' 'The product has been brought in from outside of this service region and cannot be serviced. Please contact your reseller or distributor.').

The hard drive was less than a year old so I took it back to the store, explained the situation, and said I wanted a refund because not having a manufacturer warranty on a hard drive that has already failed once is unacceptable. They were very helpful in store and sent it off to head office (who I also emailed to explain the situation) but I received it back today with a simple note saying their engineers had tested it but no fault was found.

After calling up their customer services team, they say they can't do anything about the product not having a UK warranty (blaming it on their suppliers), and "stand by the fact that they may sell goods that aren't intended for sale in the UK as it is not illegal" (I'm not sure on this but regardless, it is not great for their image).

Am I being unreasonable to expect a UK warranty on electronic goods bought at a high street retailer?

Alias_Omega

Your contract is with Maplins, and not Samsung.

For any warranty repairs, the item should be returned to Maplins where they will deal with the warranty claim.

If Maplins pass you onto Samsung, they fail foul of the Sales of Goods Act.

Uk Warranty or No Uk Warranty, Maplins will give you 12 months no matter what unless stated in the sales description.

Alias

jd87

I don't think the law requires anything to have any kind of manufacturers warranty. All that matters is the Sales of Goods Act which requires goods to last a reasonable length of time etc. The key thing here is that they have tested it and found no fault. This rather stops your SOGA claim dead in the water, so you might want to get it tested yourself or something.

penx

Thanks!

Alias, the problem with the 12 month warranty offered from Maplin is that hard drives have a much longer life expectancy so are normally backed up by lengthly manufacturer warranties. My worry is that if I continue to use the hard drive, it will likely fail again after the initial 12 months warranty has expired - leaving me with a hard drive that I don't trust and I can't get replaced.

I'll try find some HD testing software to verify a fault myself.

G42

What exactly do you mean by "the drive failed" Did Windows just go through a checking procedure or what? You may be worrying about nothing.

penx

Thanks for posting - but I'm fairly tech savvy and have a good idea of what happened. If you're really interested ;-) I mean the volume slowly started having read issues over the course of a week, when I realised I tried to recover as much data as I could by copying it to a different volume but the drive failed during this process and was no longer recognised. Possibly one-off disk corruption but it was a relatively new volume.

The main issue is that I don't want to trust the drive again, then risk having a broken drive without a manufacturer warranty in a few months time.

ashleypride

penx wrote: »

Am I being unreasonable to expect a UK warranty on electronic goods bought at a high street retailer?

Pretty much all Samsungs on sale in the UK are grey imports. Places like Ebuyer and Scan extend their warranty to cover 2/3 years.

penx wrote: »

I mean the volume slowly started having read issues over the course of a week, when I realised I tried to recover as much data as I could by copying it to a different volume but the drive failed during this process and was no longer recognised. Possibly one-off disk corruption but it was a relatively new volume.

Sounds familiar, my Ecogreen had the same problem, started having read errors, and a 3rd party SMART tool showed the allocated sectors slowly creep up, copied everything from it, losing several files, then used Samsungs util with scanned the drive and passed it. So I'm left with a drive I don't trust, and Ebuyer will probably reject it back to me.

JamesK10

What's the exact model number of Samsung drive? Is it the Spinpoint F3?

[EDIT] Never mind all that, if you're tech savvy you know all about Seagate's buy-out of Samsung's (mechanical) hard drives.

So at the moment, it seems like it's still the in-between phase where there's no set procedure about exactly where a drive would go in terms of RMAs, or whether Samsung centres would just be rebranded with Seagate logos or whether Seagate takes over the whole operation leaving you with the retailer as the first port of call - who from the sound of it, also wants nothing to do with the rigmarole.

I stuck with Samsung as they had the best price Blu Ray player at the time, but I'm not buying a TV or any further items from them.

penx

Thanks James. The model is 'hm500ji' (Spinpoint M7). Are you suggesting that I may be able to return my hard drive to Seagate in the near future (once a policy has been announced)?

I decided to buy an enclosure and use the drive for backup purposes only, but on the same day as I created the volume I started getting read errors. I tested the drive for bad blocks and only got 10% of the way through but found 16306/82598912 bad blocks.

So back to Maplin it goes. Makes me seriously wonder what 'tests' they actually did on it in the first place.

JamesK10

Actually penx I never even thought of that even when I was posting it all depends exactly how old the drive is, the Seagate takeover was April so it's been six months. There'd be nothing to stop you getting in touch with Seagate and double checking the right way to return the Samsung drive now if anything has changed about the policy.

Put it this way, if Maplin turn you away again then (on a day when you've nothing else to do) complete that bad sector test so you have the full figure, then you can say to Maplin head office that xx% of the drive has bad sectors, so whether it was shipped like that or it took a knock in transit, you want a credit note as you do actually want a drive in exchange that actually works. Then change to the Seagate brand itself or something else.

Also have to say that this is a surprise, I've only ever had to do one exchange at Maplin in 15 years and I had no problems at all once I showed them what was physically wrong with the item, compared to their display model.

moonrakerz

The vast majority (99.9999% ?) of retailers give 12 months guarantee on what they sell. The Maplin's website says this:

"If you experience any defect in your goods under normal use within a reasonable period of time after delivery and which are due to faulty materials, workmanship or design, this will be made good by Maplin either by repair or replacement or refund"

It would appear that Maplins are not prepared to give a guarantee except under their own conditions. I daresay they would even contest 6 months under SoGA.

One answer for the future: GO ELSEWHERE - I certainly won't use them again after reading that. Other MSEs follow suit !