India gets first third party HDD repair center

Sharad Srivastava, formerly working with Western Digital and Seagate, has started its new venture in the hard disk space. Srivastava has decided to bridge the gap of service issues, including repair of hard disk drive and data back up service attached to hard disks. He has opened India's first largest hard disk repair center ReStor in Spaze i-Tech Park Gurgaon, for the same.

ReStor (a unit of dStor Technologies) specializes in product restoring its original condition after breakage. Its services are centered on data storage.

Explaining the need of opening this center, Srivastava, commented, "Till now there is no proper third party HDD repair center in India, apart from Seagate, SeaCare and Western Digital WD Express service support, who can cater to the need of corporates and end customers. Presently, most in-warranty faulty drives are exported out of the country for test and repair. Even, HDD manufacturers have lowered the warranty period to 2 years on desktop and mobile drives, in the past, they used to offer 5 years warranty on these drives. So the Average Unit Price (AUP) has more than doubled in last 2 years - customers will look for cheaper alternatives to get product repaired. Our new center will be playing a major role to address the need of faulty hard drives."

As per another industry estimate, currently every month, there are 80,000 drives reported faulty, in warranty. With reduced warranty period, a larger number of out-of-warranty expected every month. Moreover, repairing and re-using these drives will reduce e-waste.

Elaborating on his plans for the new initiative, Srivastava added, "Our first test and repair facility in the NCR has just gone on stream. We expect to be servicing about 10,000 drives per month within the next 9 to 12 months at this facility, after which we will take the lab to other key metros."

The facility incorporates a completely sterile clean room type environment with electro-static discharge (ESD) safe set-up, a combination of indigenously developed testing bays/racks and imported diagnostics jigs, and is backed by a highly trained, experienced technical team

To begin with, this 24X7 facility will be working closely with consumer electronics OEMs/Set-top Box manufacturers, PC and HDDs manufactures, in-warranty and out-of-warranty drives, i.e. complete RMA management or even complete HDD life cycle management, Consumers/End-user Market Segment, customers are looking for options to service the HDD beyond manufacturers' warranty period.

"There is a need for local test and repair center (TRC) by manufacturers to reduce the buffer inventory required in India to service its customers. Even though there are some screening of NFT happening by some HDD manufacturers, faulty drives are still exported out for repair. Hence our Test & Repair center can also reduce the cost of support in India for HDD manufacturers," Srivastava said.

"We see huge potential as customers are willing to pay for getting their out-of-warranty drives serviced as buying new drives is much more costly now. Also, data is important for some consumers - hence a requirement for data recovery services are more important", he added

The company capabilities of services include repair and testing of Hard Disk Drives ( HDD)
Solid State Drives (SSD), Data Recovery, Customized support for all field return drives, RMA management, In-Warranty replacement from manufacturers, Repair and ReStoration of post warranty drives, Packaging best suit for transportation within India, Shipping drives to any location in India, - Support guidelines on drive handling and Scrapping of the defective drives.

The company claims to offer 6-7 working days to repair the faulty hard drives. IT can of HDD & SSD of any brand and any form-factor including(1 inch, 1.8 inch, 2.5 inch, 3.5 inch , 5.25 inch and of any interface like IDE and SATA, soon in next month it will provide service for SCSI & SAS (by next month). The company carry a 90-day warranty on ReStored drives. The repair of faulty drives services will be 40% cheaper than the cost of new hard drives.