🚀 go-pugleaf

Folks,

recently, we had a lot of warranty inquiries for disk drives without
serial numbers.

Please note: Disk drives without serial numbers WILL NOT GET ANY 
WARRANTY from us (unless the customer can prove that it was bought from 
an authorized source.) Of course, this applies to other device types 
(tapes, solid states...) as well.

1. We cannot track where they came from, and hence if they were sold 
under warranty at all (we do sell drives to OEMs without warranty at a 
lower price if the OEMs want to handle all warranty themselves and we'll 
point you towards the OEM if you request warranty for such a drive, 
which is identified only by the serial number.)

2. Customers scrape off the serial number label when they scrap drives. 
The scrap is bought by decent recyclers or filthy "distributors".

3. Quite a few pallets of drives get stolen each year, in warehouse 
burglaries, truck robberies and just by "leakage" where pallets 
inexplicably have less drives on them than they were shipped with.

We *will* refuse the warranty even e.g. under German/other European 
warranty laws, just in case you thought otherwise. Would you try to 
claim warranty with a car manufacturer for a car without motor/chassis 
ID numbers?

One of the sources seems to be a company named Urban in 58675 Hener, 
Germany, who sold drives at Hobbytronic fairs. I don't want to blame 
them - maybe they really don't know, and the drives may have gone ways 
that make them come from a source which otherwise sells legal drives.

Do not buy disk drives without serial numbers. Even if they are so dirt 
cheap that you don't care much if they'll work or not they might be 
stolen.

Take care and watch out for those serial numbers,
Ralf-Peter (not an official spokesperson - just one of the guys who 
sometimes have irate customers on the line)
-- 
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Ralf-Peter Rohbeck                                     rrohbeck@qntm.com
Quantum GmbH-Application Engineering-Central Europe   (+49) 69-950767-18
Berner Str. 28, 60437 Frankfurt, Germany          fax (+49) 69-950767-91
#include "disclaimer.h"          tech support hotline (+49) 69-950767-26