Not that long ago I upgraded my primary home workstation with some larger hard drives, effectively doubling the internal storage capacity of my machine. I ordered the drives through Dell (Yes, I know, probably my first mistake), mostly because they were on sale, I had a coupon for an additional amount off, and well it was convenient. Upon arrival, one of the drives was bad, with continuous noise and causing the machine to hang up every 5 to 10 minutes because of read/write issues.

I isolated the affected drive, removed it from the array and proceeded to have to deal with Dell to get a RMA replacement. After nearly 90 minutes on the phone I was able to procure my replace, but only after frankly lying to the representative on the other end, who I could barely understand and wouldn’t accept the fact that I had diagnosed the problem already before I called. So I get my replacement and of course it is a refurbished drive, which why I even accepted it was beyond me (I think I just wanted everything back up and working).

Fast forward a month and now that drive has completely died. Even in an external enclosure it won’t spin up. This leads me to my dilemma and question.

Do I even want to attempt to spend another 90 minutes of my time to get this replacement drive replaced? Which makes me wonder in some sense, is there not some sort of equation that companies the size of Dell use to determine the maximum profit level obtained by using bad service?

What percentage of people will just order a new part rather than have to go through the painful process of acquiring a replacement? Obviously the company needs to account for what percentage won’t purchase the replacement through them, but still, even then, isn’t that cheaper than supplying a replacement part? Obviously this approach would never work in a service oriented business, but in someone that deals with tangible goods could possibly actually raise net profit by reducing the quality of their service and even possibly increase the number of sales.

Frankly, if anyone from Dell is out there, I’d love some assistance on getting this Hard Drive replaced though, but I’m really not willing to deal with the offshore techs who can’t understand that my problem is diagnosed just because it’s my home machine and I don’t have some spiffy high-end warranty that lets me speak to a support person in Texas. Otherwise I’ll just get on Newegg and order a replacement drive, and pretend I didn’t make a mistake by ordering a parts upgrade from Dell the first time.