One of my external hard drives (14tb WD) started making weird “purring/scratching” noises lately. Luckily, I have it cloned on another larger 18tb drive. How does hard drive warranty work, should this guy fail? I suppose you send it back to them for replacement, but how can you trust them with whatever data is on your failed drive, if somehow they can still access it? I’m sure techs have better to do than just copy everyone’s stuff, but even out of principle, I’m concerned.
Has anyone ever heard of something bad coming from techs at a hard drive company that went through the contents of a returned drive and then took malicious actions? If they fix a drive and decide to resell it, do they zero out or reformat the drive? (Assuming you deleted the data from the drive and deleted the partition but didn’t do the whole “spend hours zeroing out the drive”)