Will Best Buy or Maxtor Read What's on my Returned HD?

[HGC]

My new Maxtor just died a noisy death. Now I cannot run it to remove all my personal financial data, etc. Is it safe to exchange the drive at Best Buy? Or will some Best Buy or Maxtor tech be tempted at some point with my credit card numbers and so forth? Opinions please...

 

[Ausm]

Best buy wouldn't have a clue on how to extract the information...Maxtor would tho but I think it would bring up legal issue's but possibly since you are returning this drive you might have relinquished some of your rights. I definately know it would be illegal for them to use your CC info

Ausm

 

[GrumpyMan]

You could take it to an auto wrecking and salvage yard and have them pick it up with one of those giant magnets they have. That should kill it I would think?

 

[Pariah]

There is no chance at all Best Buy is going to look at your hard drive, I doubt they test them at all. With the volume of returned drives Maxtor has to deal with, I find it highly unlikely they really care what is on your drive, nor do they have the time to try and extract the data. They probably just run it through some diagnostics to figure out what exactly is wrong with the drive and see if it can be refurbed.

 

[dlaw]

Well, they are able to see what's in the drive.....but I think they have so many bad drives coming back everyday, they probably won't spend that much time figuring out what you have. 🙂

 

[daweasel]

as a company no, as some person working there - who knows.

 

[Pauli]

Be careful. I just bought an 80GB Seagate from Fry's (L.A. area) and when I got home and looked at it, it was obviously already used (there was a small amount of heatsink paste on it). The drive was already formatted and contained some version of Windows on it at least. I didn't really look at what was on there and I just repartitioned and formatted and it works Ok. I am alarmed that they would re-sell it like that.

 

[HGC]

Thanks for the input guys. I think I will go with my paranoia and eat the cost of the drive 🙁

Maybe later if I find a powerful magnet somewhere, I will RMA it to Maxtor.

 

[Valhalla1]

i wondered about that too.. at the datacenter we work at we have a degausing machine we use to wipe backup tapes... its basically a conveyor belt that pulls the tape over a big strong magnet.. i run my dead hard drives over it a few times before rma'ing 😀

 

[grant2]

<Banging on front door>
FBI: Open up! We found the warez on your defective hard drive!
HGC: Err pirating is wrong!! that's why i returned it as defective, there were all these illegal programs already on it!