Complaint - Use of Aged Hard Drive as Warranty Replacement for PowerEdge R740xd Server

Hi Dell Experts,

Hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season. Unfortunately, I’m unable to do the same due to a technical issue with my Dell server, so I appreciate your time looking into this.

Long story short, I purchased a R740xd 3 years ago from an authrorized dealer, and the end of the warranty was 27-Sep-2025. 

A faulty SAS HDD drive was found on 12-Sep-2025 and was reported to the dealer. The issue was handled immediately and HDD was replaced on 18-Sep-2025 which got the RAID array back to optimal after about half day, that was good, I admit. 

After less than 3 months, on 06-Dec-2025, the HDD in the same bay got a "predictive failure" again, which means it's the just-inserted-new drive. When collecting relevant information about this new drive, we discovered that the replacement provided under warranty over 2 months ago is SIGNIFICANTLY OLDER than the other drives in my server.

Here is the detail info about the 2 drives. 

----MY OLD FAULTY DRIVE (which was replaced and shipped back to dealer)----

Vendor:               SEAGATE
Product:              DL2400MM0159
Revision:             ST58
Rotation Rate:        10000 rpm
Form Factor:          2.5 inches
Serial number:        WBM6H71W
Local Time is:        Mon Sep 15 09:51:41 2025 CST

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: FAILURE PREDICTION THRESHOLD EXCEEDED: ascq=0x5 [asc=5d, ascq=5]

Total new blocks reassigned = 8192

Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 25275:22
Manufactured in week 12 of year 2022
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  10000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  15
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  300000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  1631
Elements in grown defect list: 8192

----THE "NEW" SPARE PART (from dealer to replace the faulty one, after 2+ months, light working load)----

Vendor:               SEAGATE
Product:              DL2400MM0159
Rotation Rate:        10000 rpm
Form Factor:          2.5 inches
Serial number:        WBM31MYG
Local Time is:        Wed Dec 24 16:52:57 2025 CST

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: DATA CHANNEL IMPENDING FAILURE GENERAL HARD DRIVE FAILURE [asc=5d, ascq=30]

Total new blocks reassigned = 8186

Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 45765:10
Manufactured in week 19 of year 2020
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  10000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  45
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  300000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  2083
Elements in grown defect list: 8190

Data listed above clearly shows, the replacement drive provided by the dealer was nearly 5 years old at the time of installation (September 2025), whereas my original faulty drive was only about 2.9 years old. The spare part MIGHT BE somehow "healthy" at that time, but no one told me it was a long time used one, or inform me to keep my eye on this - until the new iDRAC warning message came recently. 

Could you please clarify whether Dell permits the use of this kinda aged replacement parts in warranty services for professional PowerEdge servers (like the R740xd) worldwide? As a customer who bought 30+ dell stack servers, I value the reputation of this brand, and I guess you too. 

Again, have a nice holiday,

Fischer