Hard Drive Manufacturers Slash Warranty Periods

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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If you are planning on purchasing a hard drive in the near future from Seagate or Western Digital, do it real soon. The two HDD manufacturers will be dropping the warranty period on many of their drives to only one year as of the first of 2012.

In other words, Seagate is redirecting money previously spent on upholding longer warranties in order to invest in product development.
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Here's a better idea: invest the extra money in better build quality so the hard drives last longer in the first place! Lowering the warranty period is a great way to lose sales, so I don't see where the extra money will be coming from to invest in R&D.
 
d50man said:
SSD R&D budget needed a boost
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They all tried this shit before, it failed miserably after about 2 years they all
started touting how awesome they were for having 3 and 5 year warranties.

This is also what happens when you buy out your competition. Just keep that
in mind the next time someone says big company A buying big company b is
fine for the economy.

Regardless, first they all have to fix the problem of being waterlogged first.
 
I don't have a problem just buying a Samsung instead. It appears they do a 3-year warranty.
 
In other words, Seagate is redirecting money previously spent on upholding longer warranties in order to invest in product development.
Click to expand...

If the products were more reliable, upholding longer warranties shouldn't cost any more...
 
I always buy the warranty from the store I purchase the drive from anyway so I don't mind. It's easier to deal with the store versus the manufacturer especially when I work there.
 
So is this a side effect of the mergers and reduced competition, or are they worried about the drives coming out of the flooded factories?
 
Deal killer for me. Hopefully someone keeps a 3-5 year warranty drive going. Outside of that, I've already made up my own mind. I've got 3 TB total in 3 disk drives. I'm not buying any more till that space becomes viable on SSD.
 
So the two of the worst HDD companies ever now own the market, and do something crappy? Shocking! Though I am shocked seagate drives even come with a warranty...
 
JimmiG said:
If the products were more reliable, upholding longer warranties shouldn't cost any more...
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You must be forgetting the significant proportion of warranty claims due to user induced error
(too hot, too cold, shipping damage, handling damage)
No matter how reliable they make them they still have to deal with this stuff.
 
Samsung and Hitachi should jump on this opportunity to gain some ground on the leaders Seagate and WD buy upping their warranties. It really doesn't make a big difference to me. Over all the years I've been working with PC's, it seems hard disks fail within a 3-5 month span. If you get a drive that gets past that, it's likely to work for years and years without issues. I've bought from nearly every manufacture and have had a drives fail from each, but also have drives from each still running after many years. I got a old 60gig Maxtor in my server pool that's about 13 years old or so, still going.
 
DeathPrincess said:
So the two of the worst HDD companies ever now own the market, and do something crappy? Shocking! Though I am shocked seagate drives even come with a warranty...
Click to expand...

You really think WD is a bad HDD comapny?

I have never had a WD drive I bought new fail on me.

And to top it off, their warranty service is really good. I have had to send back a few drives that I either got used or were returns at the store I worked for back in 2000,2001.

You want to know bad HDD mfgs... the top two faulty drive mfgs I have had the displearsure of having to use their hardware in the past few years is Hitachi and Seagate.
 
Guess il buy Enterprise storage drives now.

I won't touch a seagate with a one year warranty that's for sure! WD I don't have problems with, but still would like the piece of mind.
 
Funny, my 1 TB Seagate drive just failed on me. Good thing I have warranty until September 2013. Wouldn't that suck to be me if I had a 1 year warranty?

Good to know I'll be avoiding Seagate and WD in my future hard drive purchases. Until they make better drives, that warranty is necessary.
 
It sucks now that Samsung is owned by seagate. The price of drives is rediculous now, and probably won't drop back down to a reasonable level until mid 2012. I would really like to pick up 10 or so 2tb Samsungs, but the most I would be willing to pay is 75 - 80$ per drive, I can't see them being available at that price any time soon, and by the time they are the bs warranty will be in place and they will be seagates anyway.
 
"Standard PC warranties are one year. Even so, WD will continue to maintain five-year warranties on its premium desktop/notebook products, including the WD Caviar Black, WD Scorpio Black and WD VelociRaptor products," a spokesperson wrote in an email reply.
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I was somewhat-concerned until I saw the above quotation in the article. WD Blacks are the only non-SSD drives I buy anyway.
 
lol @ Seagate. 1 year warranties, must be the sheer number of drives being RMAed for them.
 
Pringals said:
Samsung and Hitachi should jump on this opportunity to gain some ground on the leaders Seagate and WD buy upping their warranties. It really doesn't make a big difference to me. Over all the years I've been working with PC's, it seems hard disks fail within a 3-5 month span. If you get a drive that gets past that, it's likely to work for years and years without issues. I've bought from nearly every manufacture and have had a drives fail from each, but also have drives from each still running after many years. I got a old 60gig Maxtor in my server pool that's about 13 years old or so, still going.
Click to expand...

Hitachi sold their disk business to Eastern Analog.. err.. Western Digital.
 
I've seen plenty of drives fail from all different brands.

Lately, Seagate and WD both have had their issues even with the "enterprise" versions.
 
*Checks warranties on SSDs*

So SSDs from here on out for me. I would never buy a mobile drive with anything less than a 3 year warranty.
 
We went through this about 5 years ago, and it didn't last.

All it will take, like before, is one of them to go back to 5 years and thump their chest about it, and the rest will follow again.
 
Woah, woah... Western Digital is reducing warranty period? Didn't expected that from them as they've been generally reliable. Seagate however...
 
Never had a problem with Seagate drives. I prefer Seagate to Western Digital by far in my opinion its a lot better. Most of my seagates go beyond the 5yr+ Warranty anyways.
 
Does anyone else find it somewhat funny how an entire market tends to make such an announcement at the same time. Seems like they're both happy where they are at and will work together now to carve up the market (price fixing in the future?).
 
Most of the drives I have had that failed have failed wright out of the box because of the way Amazon or Newegg have shipped the drives. Just wrap the drive with a bit of tissue paper and let it bounce all over the inside of the box and hope that its good when I open it.
 
quick buy them fast while they are 2-3 times the price!
nice timing of this announcement.
 
Fuck I need to buy a whole lot of harddisk like 7 but wont have funds for 2 months.
 
now we need intel, OCZ, Gskill, Corsair, and all the other memory makers upping the SSD capacity and lowering the price. mechanical drives are a thing of the past.
 
this is a win win for them and the retail stores that sell extended warranties, I say fock everything about this!
 
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