but I had to ask several times for my old drive back after they put the new one in
Here, when a customer is upgrading to a larger drive, we don't give it back unless they ask for it. If they request the old drive, we also suggest they get an enclosure for it, but we certainly don't hassle them over it.
Same goes for RAM, we usually toss it in the used memory box. Which we really should be considering ebaying off quicker, that stuff turns worthless so fast. We have quite a pile of 256mb sodimms from macbook upgrades. I've only seen a person request their old memory back a couple times, it's quite rare.
Somewhat OT, Apple charges quite a premium on larger hard drives and more memory when you CTO, our customers are usually much better off getting the low end and having us upgrade their ram/hdd with something else. (imac hard drive upgrade labor being the exception) But there are a few that insist on genuine Apple OEM and are willing to pay for it.
Drives that are not requested back get used as service drives usually, or sometimes sold very cheaply as used hard drives for the cash-strapped students we get in. We keep close to a dozen drives here with bootable diagnostics and installers around here, and often can do free software installations for customers because of how quickly installations from hard drive can be run.
In-warranty replacements of course require us to send back the failed hard drive to apple, not that anyone would want a flakey/bad hard drive anyway. I've discussed this policy with several others in the past, that were saying we should always just hand it to them when they check out. But for the 95% of people that don't ask for it, if we gave it to them, they'd almost certainly take it home, toss it in a drawer, and there it would rot, providing them with no benefit. At least we're putting otherwise wasted gear to use. If they want it back they can ask anytime.
We have the same policy on dead hard drives. We just hang onto them unless they request them back. They're tagged and filed away. Occasionally we get customers, as much as 6 months out, coming back and asking if we still have their old drive, and we do. That's a drive that may have otherwise been lost or damaged by the customer in that time before they decided to pay for recovery, so that's actually a free service we provide them. A much larger percentage of customers ask for their old drive when it's being replaced due to failure, closer to 10-15%.
