Nobody Wants My Money - Part II

Wed, 10 May 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Despite my unnatural and disturbing affinity for SCSI and Fibre Channel I decided to get a bunch of SATA drives for experimenting with some RAID code.

I was particularly interested in Seagate's NL35 NearLine drives as their error handling claims to be better (Guaranteeing correctness as opposed to the consumer grade drives whose firmware is tuned to look good in Windows benchmarks).

I contacted 3 local resellers of Seagate drives. 2 out of 3 got back to me.

Company 1 responded that they couldn't get the Seagate NL-series but recommended a different brand instead. They also couldn't get most of the other items I had requested.

Company 2 hadn't actually read my email and sent me a quote on the consumer drive plus a bunch of other incorrect items. As a matter of fact, none of the parts I had asked for a quote on were listed in the quote. None!

I reponded to Company 2's email and they sent me a new one with roughly 50% of the correct items listed. Again, no response on the NL35 inquiry. Once again I responded, this time asking about the NL35 only. I got a reply: That drive was not available in Canada.

So I contacted Seagate's Canadian sales manager who quickly responded that the drives were indeed available, and that he'd contact the distributor dealing with Company 2 to set the record straight.

I waited a week. Nothing happened.

I poked the Seagate rep. again. Great guy, immediate action. He put me in contact with the distributor, who in turn pointed me to their contact person at Company 2. This contact person turned out to be the CEO of Company 2, which is a chain of computer stores in Quebec. I sent the CEO a mail explaining the sitution.

I waited a week. Nothing happened.

So I'm sticking with my SCSI drives for now. Bonus points to Seagate for being extremely responsive. Too bad their resellers are not willing to do business.

mkp's blog 10 05 2006

Nobody Wants My Money - Part II