Warranty, repairs, downtime etc.

So, as I was twittering I had an issue with my mac mini at home and especially with its connected Raid in a Taurus case.

The internal hard disk of the mini seems to have died and the raid behaved strangely too. Ok, I got myself a new internal hard disk for the mini and restored it from a Time Machine backup. No really big deal (wasn't too easy, as the installer does not want to directly install from the backup when the data on the backup is more than the internal HD size and it does not let you ignore parts of the data).

But then I had to find out that (very probably) the power supply (one of those external bricks) is broken. When I put a volt meter on the 12V line, I see the voltage dropping to < 11V when the drives want to start, so the drives don't spin up.

I had bought the Taurus enclosure at a local dealer and went there last monday. They were not able to do anything about it, but to sent it to their central office. Today I was calling them about the status and the lady on the phone told me that the box was sent to the central office on wednesday (Tue was a bank holiday here in Stuttgart) and that they did not yet have it in the systems in the central office. She told me that they will probably take it into the system today and starting on it on monday.

If I extrapolate this, I will hopefully the box back monday in a week resulting in 2 weeks of downtime just from the dealer service side.

This is extremely annoying.

When I think back - if I did not go to the local dealer "competent, service, ..." but would have ordered somewhere on the internet, I would probably have saved money when buying and wouldn't have a longer downtime now.

How are your experiences? How do you handle this? I am a prosumer here - this is no way to order a 1 day pickup-return service. Also I can't really afford a several k€ raid array. Actually that raid is just an example of the underlying issue: buying from a local dealer in the hope of getting service - or buying just at the lowest cost (and possibly throwing the stuff away to buy new one).