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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/sgircys on 2024-03-27 15:20:29.

Finally, I’m back to report with one last update on this situation. As a lot of you have seen, this story had gotten a lot of attention and was covered by Louis Rossmann, LTT, Tom’s Hardware, TechLinked and most recently Gamers Nexus. I appreciate everyone taking the time to give their support, words of advice and reassurance as well as bringing attention to this.

I need to specifically say thank you to Steve from Gamers Nexus as he personally reached out to EVGA to find out what was going on here. I assume partly from a journalism perspective of hearing their side and getting the facts straight from them, but this may have been what prompted EVGA to get back in touch with me. Or it may have been pure coincidence – I can’t say for sure. But I’ve been in contact back and forth with Steve regarding this matter and there is a reason he a reputation in this community, and I can say that he is nothing but a class act.

On Monday, I got a phone call from a manager at EVGA who was very apologetic and understanding about the situation. He assured me that they did want to make sure that I was taken care of and that they took the blame for what happened. They acknowledged that this was not user error in any way, but a slip up on their end that should not have happened. He confirmed that there was a pin layout change at some point in production, but that they have a process in place to make sure that any warrantied units are either replaced with the same layout that the user originally had, or if they replaced it with an updated version, new cables and clear documentation would be sent along with it. Obviously, the power supply I sent for warranty fell through the cracks and the proper procedures were not followed, and they’re looking into how this could have happened and how to prevent it from happening again. This also doesn’t excuse the fact that the pin layout change happened in the first place. That’s something between them and their factory, but in the end, is their responsibility to handle.

Additionally, I was told that the first technician who I was dealing with did not handle the situation properly. I was originally told that the case was being escalated to management and that their advice was to go through the hard drive manufacturer for warranty. On the phone yesterday with the actual manager, I was told that the case was not escalated (or escalated properly) and the technician was giving this advice themselves. The manager assured me that they were correcting this with the technician and making sure it doesn’t happen again.

Unfortunately, the hard drives were not able to be saved by the data recovery company. They swapped in new controller boards for both drives, transferred the ROM data to the new boards and did everything they could to try and save the drives but it just wasn’t possible. I’d like to give a shout out to Outsource Data Recovery for their efforts and their fantastic communication during the process. After all of the work and parts they put in to trying to fix the drives, they didn’t charge me a dime. If there is one single takeaway from the entire story, it should be that offsite backups are worth their weight in gold and there is no excuse to not have them. Once I get the new drives, I’ll begin the process of downloading 22TB of data from the cloud.

**So finally, the solution from EVGA.* They are reimbursing me for the cost of the drives, and offered to pay for the data recovery costs, but there weren’t any to speak of. On top of the cost of the drives, they also reimbursed me for my lost time and my headache of dealing with this. Not any sort of payday or anything like that, but a bit of extra compensation on top of the cost of the drives. Additionally, they’re replacing the power supply with a new unit. Whether I use it or not, that remains to be seen.