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.
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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.
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So Steve lied and you know better than the explanation that was given? OK
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Are you the type that always believe everything you hear?
We are here because we like Naim products. And when Naim delivers a good product we applaud them. But when Naim appears to be overcharging a simple hardware swap and in the process loses a customer then they should be called out.
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From what Steve said above, it’s not so simple. Also, the headline figure of $1000 in the thread title seems excessive - it should be considerably less, but of course does depend on the full extent of what may be found to be wrong with the unit.
Having dealt with Naim service before and seen that they will go to lengths to help and even find low cost solutions for problems and even dig thorough an old parts bin for me in the past, I am very confident that they have not decided to selectively gouge the customer.
On top of that, I have worked in service organisations where the replacement of $5 parts does really cost four digits for a variety for a variety of reasons. I worked with one vendor who charged $1500 to replace a tiny 150GiB HDD. There were several factors at play - doubtless Naim have their own. Sometimes these things are as simple as economics. Like, “for X to be worth doing at all to justify keeping a stock of parts and maintaining know how for an increasingly small number of requests, regardless of the material cost, the price needs to be Y or we’re better not offering it all.”
It’s easy to gripe from your armchair. It’s another to deal with the business realities.
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No, I am the type that tries to understand if the explanation given makes sense, and how reliable the source is, then choose to believe it or not based on these criteria, instead of inventing conspiracy theories based on nothing but my imagination
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That’s what I thought too, but OP then posted the price he got quoted is very close to $1000
Fine if you think it makes sense. I didn’t.
Well, I can only vouch for what Naim would charge, not an unauthorised tech.
I’m happy to accept a factual contradiction of the specific points made by Steve, other than “this can’t be”/“I don’t believe it”
Putting aside the dubious claim that the HDX wont work with newer hard drives (why?), Steve states that “ 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.”
Fact is, according to OP, the HDD in question is a Seagate ST2000VM003 - which is still for sale for round $60 retail (and presumably much less for wholesale). Does Steve not know this?
Further, given mechanical HDDs are known for failures after 3-5 years of continuous use, in keeping with Naim’s practice of offering long term service to their products, wouldn’t it be good practice to have some of these HDDs in inventory vs the stated need to having to buy these drives each time when there is a faulty unit in for service?
Lastly, others in this post have noted competition is able to do a similar service for a comparable product for around $60 - why is Naim charging 15x for essentially a similar process.
Final roll call for members of the deceased equine flagellation society.
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The response of Steve, which you tend not to believe :
« * The init sequence to get these servers operational is not as easy as just put a new hard drive in. The Digifi software stack that makes it an audio server needs specialist knowledge & process to get it configured properly when starting from a clean drive (the drive needs correctly binding to the main motherboard board in the Digifi SQL database). There is one chance to do the sequence right and if messed up, the drive needs re-cloning again.«
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At least you have an explanation about the process, in other areas and in the last month, I have experienced -
A scanner about 4 years old, bought specifically for its photography related capability will not work, the only change since last used was the PC “upgraded” to Win 11. Turns out that the software is not Win 11 compatible. I managed to speak to a real person, two options, download an app the will allow scanning of documents only or buy a new scanner.
A camera that suddenly started flashing a red error message, image stabsliser failure, online information suggests continuing use will brick the camera, maker offers a repair, with no guarantee for twice the cost of the camera.
A friend manages to pull the inside drivers door handle off. The cost, a complete replacement door panel £995, plus fitting, plus VAT. The enterprising garage chap re-fixes the old one with penny washers, two bolts and T-nuts for £25.
I was asked to produce a shot of Janet Jackson and dug out the negative from the loft.
I sold my nikon cool scan but borrowed one from a friend. I took it home and couldn’t get nikon coolscan software that worked with modern macs
Went back to the friend who still had a pc on vista and we managed to get a scan
- all this for one image!
Other options which might help were to buy vuescan or silverfast software - compatible for many scanners . Not cheap but better than bricking the scanner?
Vuescan offers a trial (fiddly to access) which will do a scan which has type all over it
Good luck
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Hi guys,
Purely to ensure this thread stays factual. The Seagate hard drives had the EOL notice raised in Dec 2019. See doc below from Seagate confirming this.
We can’t buy parts of dubious origins from EBay etc. - on official repairs we have to use parts that we can trust where they have come from and haven’t been used etc already.
As mentioned before, we do support these servers and they are a very old design - one of my first projects back in 2006 when we did Naimnet
if a DIY fix is wanted, then one way forward is to clone the drive off another HDX server. The default device name won’t be right as won’t be paired to the motherboard correctly, but it will operate assuming no other faults on the product.
Best regards
Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.
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Thanks for the response Steve, but honestly I don’t know what this is meant to show. Of course, happy to keep this discussion factual.
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you can still buy the drive in question from authorised dealers that is not ebay at around $50. The document that you posted is the last shipment date from Seagate to authorised dealers. The document doesn’t show there is no stock of the drive in the market place.
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Seagate replaced ST2000VM003 with a newer product - why would this newer drive not work as you claim? HDD technology is mature but still improving, with new drivers generally offering superior performance and reliability vs older tech.
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in any event, this document you posted doesn’t explain the eye watering cost of your repair. unless you could show - as you claimed, that because the drive is no longer in production, your sourcing cost is now much higher.
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as others have mentioned your competition is able to do a similar swap for much cheaper. Why not Naim?
@frenchrooster - I never said I didn’t believe the steps Steve outlined in swapping the drives in the HDX. To me, in very simple terms, the steps are installing the pre-existing and standard software on a new drive, and then plugging the drive into the HDX chassis (which is in effect a small PC running windows). I don’t think this is very complicated.