Novel interpretation of "Lifetime Warranty"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Jonathan B Spira" <jspira () basex com>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 11:58:36 -0500
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: Novel interpretation of "Lifetime Warranty"


from a client of ours....

... I feel like taking the opportunity to slam Exabyte's warranty support
for their Mammoth-2 media.

We've been ordering all of our new servers at work with Mammoth-2 based tape
drives or autoloaders.  We started this just about one year ago.  We use a
simple two-week rotation for our backups, so a single tape will be used 26
times/year under normal circumstances.  Their web site claims that the media
is rated for 20,000 passes.  We use ONLY Exabyte AME w/SmartClean media
(their recommended media for the drives).

We have had at least 15 tapes fail (Windows 2000 reports bad blocks, and
does so consistently on more than one drive) with anywhere from one year to
two months of twice/week usage.  Although the tape boxes claim a limited
lifetime warranty, so far, Exabyte's position on warranty replacement has
been "Since you successfully made a backup on the tape at least once, there
were no flaws in materials or construction.  Since the tape is now failing,
its lifetime is over, and therefor we won't replace it".

/s/ Jonathan 

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