WD's moving and shaking (400GB and increased warranty)

[DougLite]

First up, the Caviar SE16 line (WDxxxxKy SKUs) is being upgunned in capacity, with four 100GB platters, as seen in WD3000, for a flagship capacity of 400GB. Info here (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=159). WD has not had a drive with more than three platters in some time.

Also, WD is standardizing with a five year warranty on 10,000RPM and 7,200RPM Enterprise drives (GD, SD, and SB SKUs), and three year warranties on desktop/mobile drives (all other WD SKUs). - Press release here (http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release={264FE90B-5808-489E-9DEC-05106E24AD79}). Drives purchased after June 1, 2005 will have the new, longer warranty.

I would expect Maxtor and possibly Hitachi to follow suit soon. Samsung and especially Seagate can smugly say "So?" :)

Some consequences of this move:
- Probably a dramatic reduction in the number and value of rebates.
- Caviar SE will be excised from the "not recommended" section of the Buyer's Guide. My impact is negligible, but I will still reward makers that take action to improve customer satisfaction.

[uzor]

Wow....good for them. Let's hope they have the reliability to back it up. I never had much luck with WD drives myself.

http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_125984 (http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?u=125984)

[TheSpook]

Wow....good for them. Let's hope they have the reliability to back it up. I never had much luck with WD drives myself.

http://www.mentallyretired.com/h3/index.cfm/u_125984 (http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?u=125984)

I've had about an equal number of WDs and Maxtors die on me. Never had a Seagate die (but I've been using the other two brands for a longer amount of time), never had a Hitachi or an IBM drive die (although I've only had two of each). Seems to be like it's just luck of the draw if WD or Maxtor comes out ahead of the other in reliability.

[doormat]

I think the interesting thing is that on WDs page, they have a place to buy the WD 400GB SE16 drive, and it says its in stock now. This is quite a change from the norm of paper launching a large drive and it not showing up for 4-6 months. And the price isnt too bad, only $279 (PW other 400GB SATA drives show about $250 from a reputable vendor).WD is definately the maverick of HDD manufacturers, and this time its sort of a good thing.

Noticed one other thing on their page, the description at the top says 150MB/s, whereas the material below (talking about the buffer size) says 300MB/s.

[burningrave101]

I was looking over the warranty policy on Western Digital's site and it looks like to me that the retail drives still only carry a 1 year warranty with the option to extend to 3 years for $15. I thought they were going to extend the retail line to 3 years as well? Why would they announce extending the warranty on bulk drives to 3 years when it has always been 3 years for OEMs?

[DougLite]

OEM BB (2MB buffer drives) were one year for quite some time. Hitachi has a similar policy with 2MB drives being one year and 8MB drives being 3 year. However, as I review WD's policy (http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp), it appears that retail kits for both Caviar and Scorpio are still one year warranty, with the option to extend Caviar kits to three year :( No mention of that in the Press Release :mad: