"After 6 months, in most EU countries, you need to prove that the defect already existed on receipt of the goods - for example, by showing that it is due to the poor quality of the materials used."

If a hard drive breaks at random, good luck proving it's not built as designed.

If it's within 2-3 years you can take it for warranty, because the EU laws indicate that electronics have a minimum reasonable life time - 3 years for most products.

Hard drives is a bad example though, given how many hard drive manufacturers offer a 5 year factory warranty themselves (or this used to be the case anyway).

And if it's by design, that's a class action lawsuit.

In my experience with HDD warranty you get "refurbished", "recertified" drives that break again within a month.

In the UK, and I believe this is common in other EU countries as well, that doesn't matter. Durability is an implied term of the contract, and in most cases (buying a hard drive as new) it's hard to see how lasting 6 months would be sufficiently durable.

> The quality of goods is satisfactory if they meet the standard that a reasonable person would consider satisfactory [...] The quality of goods includes their state and condition; and the following aspects (among others) are in appropriate cases aspects of the quality of goods [...] durability.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/9/enacte...

My experience: Most brand tech companies (and Amazon EU) replace or fix the devices (hard drive, phone, etc) in cases like this within two years, no "proof" required.

Hard Drives that are included in the product are usually covered under normal warranty. Considering that modern harddrives include G-force sensors including logging drop events, it should be provable if a harddrive failed due to a drop or not (ie, read out G-force events and see if they line up with failed sensors).

Apple waived the cost of replacing the hard drive in my 4 year old iMac, just 2 weeks ago.

You probably encountered an accommodating tech, which is cool, but we shouldn't have to rely on that.