Lifetime Warranty?

[t0mmyr]

Is there such a thing on hard drives? does one exist? and do they have a 600GB version?

[defakto]

God no, 5 years is the longest you'll find. That's considered a lifetime for a harddrive. You won't find them mainly for the same reasons you won't find lifetime warranties on your car. It's mechanical, mechanical things will fail.

[Ockie]

I wish! Man that would be nice. I think in the rare cases drives have exceeded the 5 year warranty but as for consumer drive there isn't anything higher than 5 years.


Imagine buying a 120gb drive with lifetime warranty now and returning it 10 years down the road... instant upgrade :p We might see lifetime warranties when the solid state storage units come out.

[upriverpaddler]

Last time I shopped for drives (12 months ago) Seagate was the only manufacturer that offered a 5 year warranty. Everyone else offered 3.

[protias]

western digital and maxtor both have the 5 year warrenties as well. not sure about hitachi or any other manufacturer

[unhappy_mage]

If you buy nearline drives (Seagate's NL35s, Maxtor's Maxlines, Western Digital's RE, or pretty much anyone's SCSI drives) they have 5 year warranties. Otherwise 3 years is the standard. 1 year on retail drives, though, since B&M's often have "handling problems".

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/150072.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&tm=33&id=150072)http://www.hardfolding.com/utag.php/mem/1392.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=36&id=1392)

[m1abram]

I would like to see the accountant that justifies a lifetime warrenty on ANYTHING that publishes a MTBF rating! (that is not greater than 10 years)

In case you do not know MTBF - Mean Time Between Failure, most harddrives publish this stat.

[general]

You really wouldn't want to keep 5 year old drives around anyways. Even if they were warrantied, they would be prone to failure and slow. While hard drive tech has lagged in the last few years (my 4 WD200JB is still fast and big comparatively), a drive 5.5 years from now is going to be lower performing vs. newer drives. Manufacturers could extend the warranty, but realistically, why would you pay that much now to protect against failure of something that will be worth next to nothing in that period of time. Make sure your data is raided and either replace the drive (sell the old used and buy new) when the warranty is about to be up or simply wait for it to fail and replace it.

[protias]

general, u can go right ahead and sell your drives. me, i'll destroy mine long before i give them to someone so they can search for my private information on them. ;)

[general]

There are programs out there that will do DoD quality wiping of the drives. You can guarantee if its good enough for them, it's good enough for my banking/taxes/misc material. At least doing that will let you bring the drives to somewhere that will dispose of them properly.