Flexing my tech muscle

A few months ago I bought a hard drive and product services plan from Futureshop.

Recently I decided to installed the hard drive because my computer was running low on disk space. That hard drive was a Seagate Barracuda 500Gb SATA drive. It was on sale at the time for $99.99(CND) so I thought it was a good deal.

After a few days of use I started getting a prompt from my bios about the hard drive.

"S.M.A.R.T status of Bad. Back-up and Replace drive."

S.M.A.R.T stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. Just to be certain about the status of the drive I download some utilities from Seagate to double check. Sure enough the utilities gave me the same results. The next day I download Darik's Boot And Nuke to properly wipe the drive.

My previous experience with returning items to big box stores like Futureshop have been relatively painless. Especially when you have a product service plan. This time was different. They didn't have a hard drive in stock of the same size or features instock. I told them that I wasn't going to drive to another store and I want at hard drive tonight! But they still couldn't offer me anything but a hard drive at a different location or store credit. That didn't make me happy so I told them to give me my money back. They seemed pretty happy do give me my money back just to get me out of the store.

So I decided to hunt around online to see if I could get the save drive for less money. I was really happy I did because Canadian Computers had quite a few deals for BlackFriday. I got the same hard drive for $62.99(CND) after taxes that's a $20 dollar savings.

You can check out the BlackFriday special at Canadian Computers here.

Thank goodness for poor customer service at Futureshop.

Tonight I'm reinstalling Windows and all of my software. Which should go much faster this time because I save all of the application files.