I have to be honest, quite a bit of this seems reasonable in Dell's part -- I would expect a like for like swap, and to have to give back the broken part, else the possibility for fraud is too high.
I've never returned a disk under warranty after hardware failure. At most, I've removed the top plate from the drive (rendering it unusable) and mailed that in, then destroyed the drive through the usual methods.
Well, logitech is very different in this case. Couple years ago my trackball got broken and i was a fan of trackballs, but they started to disappear from shops. Then i just emailed them that my device broken and they immediately send me a replacement, they even didn't ask about check or any warranty proof.
MSI sent me 5 out of warranty mobo's during the 'great capacitor plague'[0]. Never before or since have I had anything that close to painless doing warranty work.
Exactly. I've had this happen with Dell. Twice, same computer. They ask for the defective drives back, which is fair. I informed them that as they contained company confidential information they would be put beyond use and they were fine with that--though I'm not 100% sure the phone drone understood the implications.
Cue a pneumatic drill and a circular saw. Modern drives are surprisingly hard to drill, btw, what with being so dense.
After the second replacement failed too after a couple of weeks, I just went and bought a disc from the local shop down the road. It's probably still going, twelve years latter. We never bought Dell again.