Seems pretty dear to me…
I’d be annoyed and rather let down.
This sort of thing is very frustrating and I remember being pretty unamused when a hasselblad lens stopped working with flash 20 years ago. £250 to replace a £10 part within the lens. The lens itself cost £1600 and fortunately I could write it off on the business.
Might be better to ditch it out of principle and get an innuos.New with warranty for 2 years and easy to backup to an external plug in usb drive.
Personnal point of view, I think if you need such engineer and not a good standard technician for that kind of repair, then there were serious flaws in the engineering design to begin with. 
Which I doubt is the case.
It seems to me the price is base on old days when these technologies were less common knowledge maybe. But since I don’t really know all that is being done for such repair, I’ll restrain myself from judging. 
I sympathise, and while I can see arguments from both sides, it seems crazy that you have to scrap a functional device that’s served you well due to a hardware component failure which is easily replacable.
It seems odd to me that Naim could simply not supply a pre-imaged replacement drive for installation with the OEM software pre-activated based on your HDX’s serial number and tied to that.
Perhaps some legacy design/licensing issues are at play but the price seems to attract a hefty premium for what you actually get considering suitable parts are still available - in some instances they aren’t but in this case from your information they are.
Naim have always been regarded as a brand which supports products far older than their current product line but this seems over the top cost wise to me.
Na mate, its a rogering right an proper. 50 quid harddrive. The case takes about 2 minutes to remove, the drive a further five. I am sure naims engineers are great but I am willing to bet they arn’t paying them 250 quid an hour.
When someone charges 1000 to replace an hard drive is strangely ripping someone, any brand that charges 1000 euros for 1 or 2 terabyte an hard drive replacement is not honest.
Mechanic hard drives fail after some time, so the brand must know will have to deal with it sooner or later, for less than 1000 euros you can buy a 18 terabyte drive, a 1 terabyte is 50 euros, so charging 950 euros extra makes no sense to me.
Greed of a dealer or a brand on the user bad luck is not acceptable, but it has becoming every year more and more a common practice unfortunately.
A satisfied customer is a loyal one and will grow with the brand for life, a unsatisfied one will go another way. Support is as or more important than the brand we choose to love, because when we have to deal with it, it will define the future of the sales to that customer flor the dealer or brand.
Hi @tobas
From reading this thread @Richard.Dane has clarified the Naim service position.
On a technical front there, these products are in practice a Windows XPE solution, but running a lot of custom software and has custom PCB’s with more processors on that make the overall product work.
Hence why it really needs to go into the authorised service centre, who not only do the above but also check over everything else. On these old servers the capacitors on the VIA motherboard are starting to dry out which can be the next area of failure. With some of the server repairs, Naim end up replacing a lot of parts to get the servers back to a good working standard again. This is not latest spec PC parts (hence $100 for a hard drive etc), but rather computing tech from 15years ago that we need to source and its not cheap.
To summarise, Naim are there to support these aging products as best we can, but it ultimately comes at a cost.
With regards
Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.
OP:
See if you can get it updated to SSD. I don’t know if NAIM HQ are still doing this but some distributors are. Then most of the wearand tear is on the NAS holding the music.
Naim said that they could no longer replace the SSDs a couple of years ago, so unless the situation has changed the HDD is the only option.
I had an SSD version sent to me directly from Naim earlier this year…
That’s good to know, I guess they must have found another supply. Presumably it was supplied with the OS pre-loaded?
Yes, the “discontinued” this a while back due to the lack of availability of SLC SSDs. However, I understand that some distributors may be updating with MLC SSDs now.
By no stretch of the imagination is that a reasonable cost to swap out a hard drive
There is a conversation elsewhere today where a user is complaining that the 1tb hard drive in his innuos zenmini has failed and innuos have quoted him £54 to replace it. I didn’t bother to comment. To be fair he also had a problem with the main board so his total cost was a bit higher I guess.
Have you seen the explanation by Steve yet, a few posts up? It’s obviously a bit more complicated
I did but it doesn’t change the fact that if a hard drive fails, and they do, the cost to replace it is prohibitive because of the way the device is designed. If anything it makes it worse, I wouldnt buy a server if I knew that a part as simple as a hard drive played such a big part in the management of that device because obviously replacing a cheap hard drive would result in obscene repair costs
Ok, if you saw it then I don’t know why you keep writing about the cost of a current hard drive, when the repair cost for the HD is obviously not driven by that, as clearly stated by Steve.
When the Zenmini is so old that Innous can’t simply buy a hard drive for it anymore, but has to source outdated models through special channels, they won’t be quoting £54 for it, either, if they even repair it at all by then.
Apart from that, clearly Naim made some questionable decisions with the HDX depending on Windows XP Embedded and whatnot. This is not news, but it happened more than 15 years ago and nothing can be done about it now.
Well the last two have been in response to you. From a consumers’ point of view a hard drive has failed and the cost to fix it is excessive. You are right rhough, the reasons why are what they are and one of the reasons I like Naim is that they are able and willing to service and fix items they produced and sold often many years ago which is a usp. I doubt very much if Innuos would support or fix an item all those years later at all.
Sure, but I wrote my response because of your 2 posts about hard drive costs before my response
All in all, I agree that it’s unfortunate for consumers, and maybe a better HDX design could have alleviated at least some of these issues. But it’s nevertheless a 15 years old unit and at some point it’s the customers choice to bear the high repair costs or forget about the HDX. At least they have this choice, which is not something that’s guaranteed anywhere else, and I don’t see people complain that, e.g., Dell doesn’t have cheap spare parts for 15 year old laptops lying around.
I have said it before and I will say it again, servers are best left to computer manufacturers not hifi manufacturers. Hifi manufacturers should concentrate on dacs imo. This is a massive hole in naims line up.
Personally I don’t buy Naim’s argument that only a hard drive from 15 years ago would work as a replacement. And even if it did, should not cost 1000. Very disappointing for the consumer.