WD increases warranty periods (including retail drives)

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DougLite

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Repost from Disk Storage, but WD retail kit rebate specials are fairly common here:
DougLite said:
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. Drives purchased after June 1, 2005 will have the new, longer warranty.
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This means that any WD retail drives you see, including rebate specials :) will now ship with a warranty of at least three years. This is a good thing, and definitely makes such drives more attractive. I would expect Maxtor to follow suit soon.
 
Very nice! Not that I worry about my WD drives, but it's still nice to have the piece of mind. Maybe Maxtor will follow suit.
 
Actually, WD used to have 3 years as standard at least on retail drives for the longest time. Good to see they're bringing it back as 1 year isn't that long at all compared to other companies.
 
I'm glad they finally pushed for the 3 year warranty on the retail drives. That 1 year warranty crap is stupid when retail drives are normally more expensive then OEM. Nothing is changeing with the OEM warranties though. They should make it 5 years like Seagate.
 
DougLite said:
I would expect Maxtor to follow suit soon.
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Maxtor is already ahead of WD on their Maxline 2 series hard drives which carry a standard 5 year warranty.

thats why I bought my 250GB Maxline 2 hard drive. well, that and because it was only $99 shipped. :D
 
About focking time. That 1 year on reatail drives was BS. I still prefer seagates 5 year warranty, but now if I see a dirt-cheap WD I won't be afraid to buy it.
 
too bad i had one die out after 14 months...

i have another WD that I bought recently, but before this period.... grrr...


-- alan jacyszyn
 
I'll stick with Seagate OEM. Decently priced, 5 year warranty, and performance to match the rest of them.
 
seagate rma is fast...
a drive is being rma ed... but I wrote the rma number on the outside of the box with a PEN!!!!
but I folded the rma paper and tapped it on the side... arggg never be cheap with sharpies
 
tiraides said:
:confused:

Then why did it take over a year for WD to follow suit?
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It took time for them to actually improve their drives quality to go beyond a year on a regular basis.

And yes, I got burned by WD. Two drives died, one at 13 months and the other at 14 months. Regardless of WD's warranty talk, they are permanently banned from any consideration of my future purchases.
 
Badger_sly said:
It took time for them to actually improve their drives quality to go beyond a year on a regular basis.
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Yeah, that makes sense...


Duckzilla said:
You can thank Seagate for this move:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2...,1627511,00.asp

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117040,00.asp

It's called competition.
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... but the real point of my earlier reply was that none of the HD manufacturers are/were obligated into extending their warranties. It's a good thing -- and I'll concede to Duckzilla that Seagate was largely reponsible for reversing the trend -- and I hope that we never go back to seeing one-year warranties on hard drives again.
 
Hitachi has indeed followed suit (actually, they may have done it first). From HGST's Global Warranty Statement:
Deskstar Products, 512K, 7K250, or 2MB cache buffer models sold on or after April 25, 2005 – 3 years
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The document is kind of confusing, but I think Hitachi is on three year pretty much across the board now. The only possible exception I can think of would be 2MB 7K80 drives. Still no word from Maxtor though.
 
Hitachi has had 3-year drives for awhile now. In fact, so has WD and Maxtor. It used to be that retail drives carried 3-year and OEM 1-year, but several years ago 3 of the 4 big drive makers (IBM/Hitachi, WD, Maxtor) reversed that. Retail got 1-year, OEM got 3-year. Bottom line is that all mfg's have had 3-year drives for awhile. And as someone else said, the Maxtor MaXLine II series is warranted for 5-years (I have two of them). Better manufacturing processes and reduced warranty claims have likely led to the marketing strategy of increasing warranties to 5 years now. In my experience, which covers building systems and installing drives for about 20 years now, a HD that is likely to prematurely fail will usually do so fairly early in its lifetime, like within the first 18 months or so. So the difference in claims between 3-year and 5-year warranties is probably statistically small, yet the marketing benefits of offerring longer warranties could be great. I think it's an economic and competitive decision more than anything else.
 
There are still quite a few older drives floating in the channel - we just picked up a 160GB rebate special that was assembled in October of 2004, and took a full nine months to be sold to an end user.
 
I can remember when all drive manufacturers offered 5 year warrnaties. I can also remember when IBM drives were the best! But my vote (as a lot of others here) is with Seagate: 5 year warranty, very quiet, and performance to match any drive in its class. I'll only go WD or Maxtor if the deal is unbelievable.

I think drive warranties were at their shortest period at the height of the 'dot-com' boom. Everybody expected drives to fail, but they had the $$$ to go out and buy more. The manufacturers knew they could get away with it. No big woop.

Good for WD to up their warranty. Maybe others will match it soon.
 
burningrave101 said:
Nothing is changeing with the OEM warranties though.
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Not true: OEM BB drives were 1-year default warranty, they now will be 3-year just like the JB model drives.
 
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