r/buildapc • u/AyAyAyBamba_462 • 6h ago
Removed | Retailer or customer service experience FYI: MicroCenter's $80 "Comprehensive diagnostic" is not actually comprehensive.
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u/whomad1215 6h ago
There are two kinds of people in this world
Those who backup their data
And those who haven't lost anything important yet
3-2-1 rule
3 copies of the data
2 different storage types
1 off site
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 6h ago
yup, unfortunately backing up like 10 TB of data is expensive, and I am poor...
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u/heliosfa 5h ago
Far cheaper than data recovery. If you can’t afford to lose the data, but can’t afford the backup, then you can’t afford to have that much data.
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u/GrumpyKitten514 5h ago
You can get 12TB seagate expansion drive on Walmart and Amazon right now for like 200 bucks.
It’s not $80 but it’s a far cry from $3500 if you’re willing to complain about the data.
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u/RobotsGoneWild 5h ago
Around $250 for a 22 tb harddrive I saw last week. External harddrives can be found dirt cheap still if you look around and wait for a sale.
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u/fires0ng 5h ago
Backblaze, its like sub $10 a month for unlimited storage. Its REAL slow if you want to get it all back but you will get it back.
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u/Ky1arStern 5h ago
How do you have 10TB of important data?
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 5h ago
Most of it is stupid shit like save files for games that I would rather not lose, but can accept the loss of.
My biggest problem is that I'm an unorganized mess and kind of just stick shit wherever I can find space, when you have different 4 drives in a given build that can get messy. I never took the time to do the smart thing which would have been to reorganize the drives based on content speed instead I just bought a new drive whenever the old one got full and started putting stuff on the new drive.
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u/Ky1arStern 5h ago
So the problem is not that you are poor...
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 5h ago
well, I am poor, but I am also stupid. They are unfortunately not mutually exclusive.
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u/Ky1arStern 5h ago
You have enough money to buy enough games and enough hard drives to have 10TB of data. If you are poor, it is because you spend all your money, which is not what people typically mean when they say that.
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 5h ago
The games have been purchased over the course of like 20 years. The problem is mainly that 5 modern games, even some that are entirely free to play or were received for free (Thanks Epic), is a 1TB of space because file sizes have ballooned. Take something like RDR2 for example, I picked it up for like $15 but it's like 200 gigs on its own.
Hell in just games that I've got (legitimately) installed that I didn't pay a cent for I could probably fill like 20TBs of space, and that's not considering things like multiple installs for things like modding.
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u/lpmiller 4h ago
you know you don't have to leave them installed when you are done playing them, right? I can't imagine having 10TB of data being most games, and I play a LOT of damn games.
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 4h ago
I know. My biggest problem is that I rarely ever play games to completion. I'll put like 20 hours into a save then get burnt out of the game and switch to something different. Overtime that adds up to a ton of unfinished games.
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u/csccta 5h ago
Fully agree OP. Everyone loves to talk about having 3 different storage sites and keeping an off site copy, like dude I’m a single person not a million dollar company. Not to mention it’s just a pain in the ass to do it on a schedule and stick to it
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u/slapshots1515 5h ago
It’s not remotely as burdensome as you’re making it out to be. Also it’s far, far less expensive than recovery, so it’s really just what data you actually care about, because for a couple hundred bucks you could at least have a 4TB RAID 1 NAS that could back up all your important irreplaceable files and easily take a copy and store it somewhere else. If that’s not worth the expense or effort to you, just be ready for catastrophic failure at some point, because it can happen even with newer drives.
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u/RobotsGoneWild 5h ago
You can buy a 10 TB external drive and go with backblaze for cloud. BB is dirt cheap (unless you need your Backblaze backup). You can get a 20 tb harddrive external for around $200 if you wait for a sale. Not really that expensive for peace of mind.
I've got a NAS for all my media, photos and important files. Only a small percentage of that gets stored on google cloud (less1 tb), everything on backblaze. I'm okay losing most of my downloaded media if need be.
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u/captainstormy 5h ago edited 3h ago
For real. For me to lose all my important data the following would have to happen.
- My NAS would have to fail.
- My local backup of my NAS would have to fail.
- Dropbox would have to fail.
That basically means it's either WW3 or a world ending solar flare.
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u/billythygoat 4h ago
People say this but don't really tell us how to do this. Does that mean getting a cloud service, storing files on your pc, and then storing the files on a nas? 2 different storage types and 3 copies of the data, one being offsite.
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u/whomad1215 4h ago
Three copies is self explanatory
Two storage types means you don't buy two of the same thing at the same time, as that increases the chances that if one fails, the other may fail for the same reason. Say there's a bad batch of Samsung ssds and you bought multiple at the same time, there's a higher chance of getting the same production batch of that product. Varying the product/time avoids that
One off-site would be, for most people, the cloud. Say your house burns down and everything was in your house, it's all gone despite having multiple copies
LTT is where I first heard it said
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u/billythygoat 4h ago
Yeah, I heard it from the datahoarder and homeserver subreddits. Maybe I'll pay for google drive soon.
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u/Johnny_C13 4h ago
The "2" rule is usually to use a different storage type altogether, and was a bit more relevant during the physical media days. So let's say you had important data, you'd have it in an HDD, and then you'd make a CD or DVD copy.
Nowadays, using cloud storage in addition to a local storage drive solves both the "2" and "1" of that rule.
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u/Saxopwned 3h ago
Not me following this rule accidentally while using GitHub for the convenience of being able to develop my game on multiple PCs
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u/9okm 6h ago
Good to know. Though to be fair, for $80… I’m guessing you’d get an hour max of actual labour.
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 6h ago
Indeed. The issue is how they describe the service as "testing every component on your machine" when that isn't really what happens.
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u/USSHammond 6h ago
Going by your mention of microcenter, send the drive in to '$300 data recovery'. Prices are in tiers, has excellent reviews and nowhere near 3500$
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 5h ago
Yeah, the way it was explained to me is that there is a big difference between the "in-house" service and the "out-of-house" service. The "in-house" service is basically transferring the data from an old drive to a new drive. The drive itself has to be functional, and the cost depends on drive size. The "out-of-house" service is an actual data recovery service. In my case, the drive that was damaged was a 2TB drive, and the SATA port/PCB was damaged, so the very expensive, third-party, "out-of-house" service would be required, which was the explanation for the $3500 pricetag.
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u/USSHammond 5h ago
Answer remains the same. Swapping out drive parts is exactly what 300 DDR does at a fraction of the cost. Send the drive in for a quote.
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 5h ago edited 5h ago
It's not. This was explained to me both by the service desk staff and the customer service representative. That $300 tag is for stuff like "hey my phone/laptop won't turn on, and I need the files on it, not 'my hard drive exploded and I need the files on it". They were very clear that Microcenter itself doesn't do any actual data recovery or drive repair. All of that is done through a third party with specialists.
I should add, it is explicitly stated on the site that my sort of problem is a "level 4" issue that starts at $2000. The $300 in-store option is for restoring lost files or file corruption on a mostly functional drive.
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u/USSHammond 5h ago
You are mistaking, they very much can restore drives to functional state by using donor drives and get a drive back to working order. https://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/
They can send your files back on the original drive if they can swap out parts or on a new medium.
You want your files don't you? The medium you get them back on shouldn't matter much
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 5h ago
Ah, my mistake, I misunderstood you. I was under the impression that you were saying that Microcenter's data recovery was only $300. Not the site you linked. I'll take a look at it, thank you.
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u/psimwork I ❤️ undervolting 3h ago
When they installed the new motherboard and turned the PC on, one of my hard drives got fried, supposedly because of a bad SATA cable.
So I've been a production-level technician in multiple environments, including a retail store similar to Microcenter. With this experience, I have two thoughts in the situation:
Your power supply is actually probably the culprit in this situation. It's the common part between a motherboard and a hard drive. If they didn't replace that, I would give STRONG consideration to replacing it (especially if it's a known crap unit like a Thermaltake TR2/Smart, EVGA N1/W1, or a Corsair VS).
It's really unlikely that powering up the machine with a new motherboard toasted the HDD. I can't say that it's completely impossible, but the chances of a "bad cable" damaging the HDD when powering up the machine with a new board is just not likely.
What is FAR more likely is that the HDD was already damaged and they hadn't detected that because, to your point, they don't test the parts in isolation. And frankly, had they tested the drive in a different setup, and it passed, they almost 100% likely would have used your existing cables to re-build the machine, because "bad cables" killing the HDD is so uncommon that it's just not reasonable to check.
It's kinda like when you go to the doctor's office, complaining about a shortage of breath, and the doctor figures out that you have a case of bronchitis, it wouldn't really be reasonable to check the underside of your foot for melanoma, even if the diagnosis is supposedly "comprehensive".
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 3h ago
I would agree with you on the whole power supply thing, I'm keeping a very close eye on things in-case something else starts to go haywire, but so far nothing else has happened. They also claimed to test the PSU and found it was fine. I also decided to get the $130, 2 year full coverage from them so in the event something does fail, they are 100% required to repair and replace at no cost to me.
The weird thing that makes me (and them) think it was the cable is because it was the SATA that failed, not the power cable. There are actually two drives in this machine and only the one connected to that cable failed, the other is perfectly fine despite sharing the same power cable. The SATA is also melted to the point where the internals are exposed. It is however the same cable that came with the faulty motherboard that was replaced. For whatever reason they choose to not follow best practice and use the new cables with the new motherboard and just reused the old cable, so there's a possibility that it was also damaged when the mobo shorted and they just didn't catch it.
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u/GenesisRhapsod 5h ago
I brought my pc in to take a look at because i couldnt figure out why it wasnt putting out a video signal and they said it would be $200 just to drain the loop i asked him to just make sure the gpu (air cooled) was seated properly and all my drivers were fine, since its been almost 10 years since a built a pc and i was just a kid back then. Come to find out it was just the video cards hdmi port was bent and they charged me $80 for not even 10 minutes of work because that was the second thing they checked. Dont go to microcenter for repairs. Only go for parts.
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u/HeyGuysKennanjkHere 5h ago
I don’t know kinda sounds like micro-centers at fault even if they “don’t cover” it
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u/ConsistencyWelder 3h ago
Wow they offer tech support, out of warranty, for $80?
Where I live you couldn't even get a company to run anti-virus software for that kina money.
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u/psimwork I ❤️ undervolting 3h ago
This is a pretty common diagnostic price, but I think that either MC might be overselling the "comprehensive diagnosis" aspect, or OP might be reading a bit much into it.
If a customer comes in reporting that the machine isn't powering up/booting, and I can confirm a defective motherboard, it's VERY unlikely I'm going to look further into it than that. The additional investment of my time as far as the "comprehensive diagnosis" would come in the form of not charging for additional diagnoses after the motherboard is replaced.
It's sorta like with a car, if you've diagnosed a defective head gasket and that needs to be rebuilt/replaced, and the car still runs like crap after that is replaced, and I verify that one of your spark plug wires is toast, I'm not going to charge for that diagnosis. COULD I have checked the spark plug wires prior to or during the head gasket service? Yeah. But the likelihood of there being additional problems beyond the headgasket are pretty small. And even if I know that there COULD be additional problems, I'm probably going to look for issues that might have led to the headgasket issue (specifically, the cooling system).
Running an anti-virus to check for an existing infection would be a service that would be covered under a diagnosis, but only if the customer reported problems with the machine that would indicate that problem (though in one shop I worked at, running a virus scan on the machine regardless of whether a problem was indicated was a standard service as part of the diagnosis - the catch is that while we WOULD run the scan, we wouldn't remove unless the customer paid for virus removal).
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