Who wants to buy an external hard drive,not me.

This is what I purchased,before you buy any external hard drive please enquire about just what the warrenty covers,such as will it cover extraction of your saved data?

Well in reality I have bought one just recently,the reason being that as I use my PCs more and more,they are filling up with data and slowing the running down,so a friend suggests I buy an External Hard Drive,I can then down load my files and save space,freeing up the computer as I do so.This made sense so checking around I see that one store offers two such units,one with a one year warrenty,the other with a two year warrenty,sounds like a better choice to me?

We have a guy (lets call him John) who has done our PC installations for many years now,so after discussing what is on offer,he suggests another unit that is locally packed,it has a three year warrenty and the company doing the distribution are specialists at retreival of data from such 'black Boxes'as in fact the hard drive inside the locally packed casing, is an international design,thats what I was told anyway.

So our John brings me a nice carton with a locally packed External Hard Drive in it,the carton is proudly showing a picture of the South African flag,saying Packed in South Africa,or words to this effect,plus I know we have a three year warrenty.We connect it to my laptop,I plug it in to the power supply that came with it,John then switches on, tries a few things to ensure its working (there is no tell tale warning light) and he leaves,I continue to down load data I may want later,I then take it home and continue to download untill space is freeing up,later that evening I close down for the day.The next morning I try to find my data in the external hard drive,it will not open and keeps asking me do I want to 'Format' which of course will erase all data saved,trying two other PCs gives me the same result,so I call John who was soon at my office and discovers the same none working issues as I did,this is after less than 24 hours of my ownership,I ask john to take it back and get a new one,and also to ask the suplliers to extract my data and put it in the new external hard drive.

John contacts me the next day,the suppliers agree to replace the faulty external hardrive but refuse to extract the data for free,I complain and suggest John asks them again,this is again refused and I am told they sent him a quote to extract the data at around R3000,which about U$375!! By now John has taken the faulty unit to his own workshops and downloaded about 3 gigs of data he tells me,what this will cost me I have yet to learn but please let me warn you,a three year warrenty is not what we think,it only covers the hard ware,not the extraction of what you have stored in it,I advise potential buyers to always ask about this side of any warrenty and make their own judgement as to buying?