When my LaCie d2 FireWire hard drive died (it did so after less than 6 months of very light use, but that’s another story) recently, I started shopping for a new external drive for my Mac mini.

After some research, I settled on the NewerTech miniStack v2. Amazon doesn’t carry this item, so I ordered one from Other World Computer. The miniStack is a hard drive + USB/FireWire hub combo designed to sit directly under a Mac mini. Setting it up was easy and I was quite happy with it during the first few hours of use. But a problem soon developed. It started making a very loud high-pitched grinding noise.

The noise is clearly coming from the fan and is so loud that it has to be a defect rather than a design flaw. I wrote to OWC’s customer support and within hours, I got a reply from a guy named Jason. He asked me to open the unit up and see if it’s due to the fan coming into contact with some wires. I wasn’t able to open the thing up following his instructions, and I didn’t want to risk damaging the casing. So I wrote him back requesting a “cross-ship return”. He basically said no problem but I have to pay for shipping the broken unit back to OWC.

Initially this seemed reasonable. Shipping cost shouldn’t exceed $15 so it’s no big deal. But then the more I thought about it, the more unhappy I got. I received a defective unit, and on top of the inconvenience face, I have to fork out an extra 15 bucks? That doesn’t seem right. If anything, OWC should be compensating me for the inconvenience!

This got me curious as to what Amazon, my web store of choice, would do in a similar situation. I googled with the appropriate keywords and found this on their return policy page (emphasis added):

You may return most new, unopened items fulfilled by Amazon.com within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. We’ll also pay the return shipping costs if the return is a result of our error (you received an incorrect or defective item, etc.).

Needless to say, I will continue to pick Amazon over OWC when there is a choice.

To their credit, OWC customer service has been prompt and polite. And cross shipping allows me to wait for the new drive and copy everything over from the bad one before returning it. Overall I would give OWC 3.5 stars out of 5.

Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope the second drive is defect-free.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 2:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.