How do I get an RMA for a failed disk?

I've been all over the online support site and cannot find any help at all from Apple. The drives came in the Mac when I bought it. It appears that I have to pay for a support incident to talk to anyone.

To clarify: the first thing I did when the drive failed is go to WD's site and try to get an RMA for it - since expensive drives like this one have 5-year manufacturer warranties. WD's response is that the drive's warranty has to be serviced by Apple since the drives were sold to Apple. But trying to get them serviced by Apple seems to require a support contract. Which is lame for a product that has a 5-year manufacturer's warranty to begin with - can't imagine why I would expect to give up my right to service under that 5-year warranty just because I bought the computer from Apple.

H.

Found what I am certain is going to be the answer here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/250877-32-drives-warranties

Totally lame. 😟

H.

They were in the computer when I bought it, along with the RAID card, of course. Knowing what I know now I would never have bought the RAID card. It's a terribly overpriced piece of hardware. And I've been totally screwed on the drives due to getting them from Apple instead of direct.

H.

Indeed. Frankly, the RAID card is an embarrassment. It's almost as bad as Apple not supporting Blu-ray. I took it on faith when I ordered my Pro that a nearly $1k RAID card would be, as is true with most Apple products, a state-of-the-art device. What I got was something that didn't even have the features of the integrated hardware RAID on my 7-year old PC's motherboard. And the design is terrible. The card is tucked up directly under the drives it runs with no ability to relocate it to a lower slot, so that the heat sinks are mere millimeters from the bottoms of the hard disks. The card is so high up that it gets basically no airflow from the slot cage fan. As a result, I'm certain that the heat from one of the chips trashed the disk in question. After I let it cool down the drive came "back to life" and it's being rebuilt (which was also an effort to trigger).

Anyway, the whole thing *****. No more trust for this stuff, from now on I'm going to research Apple hardware as fully - if not more so - as I do PC hardware.

H.

P.S. sorry about the asterisks, apparently Apple censors the word that starts with an "S" and ends in "ucks", for what reason one can only speculate.

Message was edited by: hoppah