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Tom's Investigates Hard Drive Warranty Changes
Sherloqq writes "Tom's Hardware recently ran a story about major hard drive manufacturers drastically reducing their warranties on many of their products. Effective Oct 1, 2002, many IDE hard disks from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital will now come with just a 1-year warranty. This comes as a bit of a shock to me, as nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention). Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure, need to cut costs to remain competitive, advancements in technology used in manufacture of drives ("they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway") as well as warranty period mismatch with OEM computer manufacturers (std. 1-year). Good news in all this: there are no plans for warranty period reductions for SCSI drives. For now... :)"
Does anyone really have that many problems with IDE HD's that any more than a 1-year warranty is necessary? I've had most of my drives for 4 years now without a problem!
Seagate and Western Digital are both going to 1 yr warranties for the major potion of their product lines. WD will keep a 3yr on the Special Edition drives.
As of now....IBM is the only company to not announce a change in drive warranty...my guess is that will change once they introduce their new drives.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
If they really were more reliable, (and granted, I do think they are, at least segate), the companies wouldn't have to spend as much for warranty's so they wouldn't be loosing any money. This is truely sad, seems like every drive I get goes out before 3 years is up, and always last just over a year.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
This comes as a bit of a shock to me, as nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention).
You haven't been paying enough attention. This made big news a month ago.
If they reduce the warranty to 1 year, they have reduced their overhead, hence the cheaper cost to us to buy them.
Fae it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If this is such a big deal, and if people really care, then some other savvy manufacturer will continue or begin to offer longer warranties and charge a premium for it. If it's not a big deal then noone will move to supply this niche. My expectation is that people who are buying cheap IDE drives aren't likely going to pay a price premium for a longer warranty, and I'm sure this is what the drive companies believe as well.
Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that. Everyone knows that the extended warranties offered at e.g. Circuit City and Best Buy are near sucker deals for the seller of the warranty, so this would be a great way for companies to recoup the cost of warranteeing products for longer. But IDE drives cost so little these days I wonder whether the administrative costs of maintaing such a plan are worth the small premiums chargeable on a small dollar item.
Either way, if you want a longer warranty SOMEONE is going to have to pay for it, and (rightly, I believe) that someone is always going to be the consumer.
Would you want your 3 year old drive replaced and or fixed? Why should they stock these? Maybe if they just sent me the cheapest one currently made..
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
I've got quite a few 400MB-4GB drives I've collected over there years which still run great.
On the other hand, I've gone through so many 8GB-40GB drives...
Yet another reason to like compact apps, and OS's.
I've been told that in Europe, HDD manufacturers have to supply a 3 (or maybe 2, can't remember) year warrenty as standard.
-- Coops
zadok.org.uk
Is it really legal for three (!) makers to lower their warranties simultaneously? I thought it may fall under some anti-trust law.
You are right! I have already witnessed two HD failures. One from maxtor and one from quantum. We (the geeks and the pros) need reliability, not price...
B/c they don't want people with 20 GB drives to come back in two years and get a free upgrade to a 300 GB driver b/c they discontinued the 20 GB.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
The return of the 3-1/2" floppy, baby!
Let's face it, Joe Sixpack Computer User isn't going out and buying new hard drives and upgrading their Dell, most of them are too afraid to open their case, let alone disconnect IDE cables, power lines and swap drives in and out. So, Joe's drive sit in their case, with specially engineered airflow and ventilation to keep the drives cool enough to last until King Billy decides to launch a new version of Windows and make Joe and Jane upgrade. So, there's little chance of the hard drive failing within the MS-driven three year upgrade cycle.
The people going out and buying those new hard drives tend to be overclockers, film traders and other sketchy folks, who either are compensating for a lack of sexual experience or equipment by having more gigs than Joe Sixpack, or are filling up their hard drives with illegally downloaded movies. They take these new hard drives, stick them in an overcrowded case with inadequate cooling, and then act surprised when they die in a few years. (Professionals use SCSI, of course, and still get the long warranty).
It's simple thermodynamics folks. If your generic white box case is engineered with an airflow to remove 700 BTUs/hour, and you stick a P4 or Athlon in, extra RAM and more hard drives, you're trying to remove 1400 BTUs, twice as much as your case was designed for. The only way to get rid of those is an external, water cooled radiator. Most overclockers don't do this, and fry components.
There is a bright side to this, DRM. Once DRM is in place in hard drives and CPUs, overclocking and upgrading hard drives won't be as common, and we can get back to 3 year warranties.
One that transaltes marketing speak to relaity?
e.g.
Drives are so reliable that you don't need a long warrantee - Drives are so unreliable we can't afford to long warrentee.
We need to stay competitive - This will allow our board of directors to take a nice holiday.
They make basically two points, and both suck.
1. They need to do this to remain competitive.
Not likely. None of them gets an edge if they all do it. Whoever the "mover" on this idea was should have realized it.
2. Returns cost them a ton, and anyway their products are SO reliable it doesn't matter
These seem a bit contradictory. If products are SO reiable, then that would seem to mitigate the costs of returns, wouldn't it? And this doesn't help them on DOA at all - the warranty is still a year - only on long-term failure.
Basically what they are saying is long-term failures aren't their fault, or that they get a lot of non-defcetive returns. But I would think that the non-defective returns are from the guy who couldn't figure out how to use it - not the guy who used it for four years before it broke.
I think they've come to realize that all their engineering hasn't increased the half-life of hard drives, though perhaps it has reduced the DOA rate. So they maintain the part of the warranty that is probably the cheapest, and saying to hell with the rest of us.
THanks a lot guys.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Now that low-end drives are dirt-cheap pieces of junk (even more than before, that is), RAID becomes imperative.
Software mirroring (or RAID-5 or whatever) is just about a no-brainer on anything but the cheapest desktop now.
I know why they are dropping the warranty period to 1 year. Because they are all switching to the newer density products and re-tooling the assembly lines they do not want to stock the parts for the older drives (remember you are taxed at end of year on inventory. That includes replacement parts) this allows them to increase their profit margin in a disintegrating economy allow the board of directors to give them selves a higher pay increase so they don't have to cook the books to make big money! IT'S SO SIMPLE!
Please, if any economic decision in a company could be explained in one sentence I'd be impressed to the point of uttering blatherscyte.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention)
You weren't paying enough attention. There was a big fuss over this just over a month ago. See The Inquirer's article on this and their followup and assorted other coverage. There's more but I can't be bothered to dig it out of various site's archives.
*sigh*
There goes the farm. For some reason I was under the impression that if my current hard drive, some 30 gig jobbie from Western Digital, or Maxtor, or somewhere, were to die a mysterious death, it would be perpetually replaced by the next step in computing technology.
I guess most of us have been living a lie, believing the myth of the 'hard drive fairie' that takes our old 'broken' drives and replaces them with 'slightly used but fixed and larger' versions.
What next, no santa claus?
Good thing I don't let my kids read Slashdot, this hard drive thing would break their hearts.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Ironically I had a SCSI Quantum HDD that died after 1 year. I got it replaced (under warranty) and guess what? One year later the new one died.
My IBM 4.3GB drive has run great for 5 years now. But the newer 18GB drive I got (IBM also) died and had to be replaced. The new one is acting funny as well.
They don't make 'em like they used to.
This looks like collusion to me. Hopefully someone will investigate that.
Here are a couple of reasons why the reduced warranty:
1. Warranty costs money. By reducing the warranty time the cost of the HD can be lowered.
2. The drives are of poor quality. IBM recently had a line of bad HDs, for example (they are not in the HD business anymore, but now the company who bought the technology might have the same problems).
3. The storage capacity getting big all of the time , remember how 15 years ago 50MB disk was a lot? how it was "all you needed"?
4. This might be a ploy to get OEM manufacturers to lower their warranty time and then everything will come with 1 year top.
200 GB drives are less $400 (link on Tom's hardware site) in a year they will probably be less than $200, and in three years they will be obsolete . . . it's not that they will probably fail any faster, it's a question of whether you should warranty a product beyond it's reasonably replacable life . . . most electronics (dvds, vcrs, cd players, etc) come with a 90 day warranty anymore . . .
Check the Register for more info on drives (Hitachi, I think) dying by the thousands. Supposedly these duds only shipped in Europe, but I'm not sure.
It's funny - I've been having some Western Digital drives fail on me somewhat quickly, usually in their warranty period. Yet a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball I got in an Acer Aspire way back (~7 years ago) when I Didn't Know Any Better(TM) still works - I fired up Mandrake on it last week for kicks. Not that anything good would fit on it...
Schnapple
You being the typical ./ reader who would build his own. If you buy a system, then you'll be covered by that warranty, and if you're the typical buy at CompUSA and BestBuy you'll get the retail kit (while they all have variations, there's still a way to get the 3 year warranty).
.. manufacturer specific).
So the people who go online and shop the best price on a drive (and almost always get an OEM drive) will suffer a shorter warranty. If there's not enough demand, maybe the price on this will even go down (hey, I'm an optimist).
If the warranty is that big a deal, buy the retail kit (or the xtended warranty, or whatever
Story from news.com:
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959831.html
As the article points out (along with several posters above), the warranties on drives in PCs and other devices (the vast majority of HD sales) were already that of the device in which they came, which is generally one year or less anyway.
Honestly, at today's prices I view hard drives as twinkies--they're cheap and they'll probably last 3 years anyway. There's plenty of worse things to get upset about than only getting a 1 year warranty with a $79 80GB 7200 RPM hard drive.
--Len
In the EU we have a minimum warranty of minimum 2 years on all products.
This is a new european law issued 2 years ago and effective since 2002, I think.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Please tell me you're not the guy who actually buys the extended warranty that costs 1/3 as much as the actual product.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Poster hit it on the nose. Prices won't go down any. This was D-U-M dumb. They say it's to be more competitive, which is a lie - if everyone does it, there's no competitive advantage. All this allows them to do is pocket the money they'd otherwise squirrel away for replacements.
Yes, they make a little more per drive, but this is like that frickin Pizza Hut/Dominos price increase - a hidden price increase.
I think I'll be looking for a different manufacturer of drives (I've had 2 go bad in the past 3 years, none before that). I'm glad my mobo has a RAID controller in it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
aren't you? :)
The next time you read someone refering to "The Slashdot Effect," well, you'll know what they're talking about.
KFG
Kinda off topic but here goes...
I was wondering if anyone has any good pointers to price/megabyte/gigabyte trends for memory/HD/solid-state-disk/flash media?
It's not the producer who has to give a 2yr warranty, it's the retailer. Notice something strange here?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Really? How on earth can businesses operate in such a hostile environment where governments can dictate fundamentally business decisions like the length of the warranty?!
Besides the obvious method of saving money, it's possible that drive manufacturers reduced their warranties under pressure from resellers... it helps OEMs and channel sales companies sell THEIR OWN service plans which are big money.
Think of it in terms of Best Buy's attitude towards Apple/Macintosh computers. Apple used to have the best warranty in the computer business (3 years parts and labor, I believe). That meant that noone could sell an extended service plan (ESP) on a Mac. Because hardware margins are so low, Best Buy declined to carry Apples because they would never make any money on the ESPs.
-nd
So a Hyundai with a 10 year warranty is seen as more reliable than a BMW with a 3?
Logice and reason aren't marketing terms.
As GM recently stated, consumers see lengthy warranties as a sign of weakness in quality, not a sign of confidence.
I've had two drive failures in the last couple years on my home PC. Both were Maxtor drives. Both had 3-year warranties. Both failed in the last six months of the warranty. Both times, Maxtor replaced the drive with an identical unit. You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that. So I see this change (as a previous poster suggested) as primarily a way to reduce their stock of outdated drives. Why should they want to keep a stock of 10Gb drives around when all they make now are 40 and 80s?
One other consideration. WE are pushing THEM for bigger storage, smaller form factor, faster drives. To make this happen, they have to make design compromises. You can only fit so many bits so tightly together. Seems to me that over time, the failure rate will tend to increase for this reason alone, regardless of the quality of the units.
I believe the analysis above by another poster was correct - although it was marked "Funny" - it's the overclockers, or at least the hacker types - who probably experience the highest failure rates, as they push more and more hot equipment in to a small space. I had cooling issues with my drives and would not be surprised to find it was a contribution to the failures. Anyone with military or indudustrial experience in the Reliability field will tell you there's a direct correlation between heat and failure rates. Just a few degrees of temperature rise can double the component failure rate.
One last thought... as prices fall, maybe our response should be "RAID". Pay the same net price, get redundancy.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure
"they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"
Aren't those mutually exclusive?
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
Although I agree that a longer warranty seems to indicate the manufacturer's faith in a high quality product, one does not guarantee the other. Consider the case of automobiles for a moment; Hyundai offers a much more comprehensive warranty than Toyota. Which is more reliable? Put another way, would you rather have a warranty you need, or a warranty you don't?
Why not use the "belt AND suspenders" approach? Hard drives are incredibly cheap, $1 per gigabyte, or less. Buy two 100gb drives, back up one to the other, and quit worrying.
Don't just do something, stand there!
If drives are so good, people don't need a warranty, then why aren't they extending the warranty?
Question: Why do companies offer extended warranties on any item?
Answer: They make a profit on it.
Question: How do they make a profit on extended warranties?
Answer: They know what kind of failure rate to expect, and they know for the first few years any electrical item will not break.
They're only offering you the warranty because they make money on it. They only make money on it if the item does not break. If drive makers were that sure of their products, and their failure rate for, say, 2 years use, were incredibly low, then a 2 year warranty should hardly cost them anything. The more drives that fail, the higher their cost! So if their drives are so good they don't need a warranty, the drives are so good the company won't have to replace them and a longer warranty won't cost them diddly.
If this is really just a matter of cost as the drive manufacturers claim rather than a reduction in quality perhaps manufacturers could sell 2 flavors of the drive. Same hardware, but just tack on an extra warranty and charge more for the drive to cover their costs.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
yet another hd warranty article thats even staler this time than the last.
As far back as August, I've seen WD drives w/only 1yr warranties.
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Agreed, those are a complete waste of money. Most products they try to sell those on will be upgraded before they ever have a chance to break...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
So, let's see... They're having too many drives returned on their warranty plan, so the idea here is to shorten the warranty period and leave the customers with dead drives and no recourse.
That's definitely progress in American corporate culture. Maybe soon they can start charging extra for drives that will go into multi=processor machines.
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First all hard drive suck. They have all had bad runs. Conversley, they have all made good products as well.
/. crowd(I bet it is the under 30 bunch) for the bad run of deskstars. And they were bad drives. But dollar for dollar, I think over the years IBM has consistently made some of the most solid hard drives on the market. Warranty issues are the best in the industry. They fix and replace. And what did IBM do? They replaced all the bad ones. And still warrantied the new ones for three years. No change made. Hitachi will carry the ball, they have a good core of engineers.
Most people tend to generally think what they have/sell/install is the best.
IBM is getting some flack from the
Western Digital - They have always had a good middle of the road product. I have had good luck with them. Most of the problems I have had or early doas on new machines. And they always handled the warranty issues well. Nothing spectacular.
Maxtor - Maxtor is a good drive now. For a good two year run in the late nineties they were absolutley the noiseiest prone to fail things I have ever ever seen.
Seagate - Solid drive, great SCSI drive. They bought Connor out, which to me the Connor drive was the absolute worst in the market.
There are a slew of others. Samsung, fujitsu, lg, quantum. And they all make decent products.
The problem here is that most modders/hackers/enthusiasts buy the bargain drive with the most gimmees. So that barebone, oem, fell off the truck, pricewatch special has problems cause someone wanted to save a couple of extra bucks. As in the IBM bad run, they went cheap so we all bought them. Actually now is the time to grab some great IBM drives at a low price cause of the desktar issue, which has been fixed.
So look at all these new drives with a grain of salt. We have no data that they will last 3,5,10 years. They are all new and new technology. And I will give up seek time and gigaybytes for realibility. But we all love the bells and whistles, and with them come the problems.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway
Please! What do you think it is, a Hyundai?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
There's one change I made that has had a HUGE impact on my MTBF for my drives. It's not a hardware change at all.
When I used Windoze (98SE and 2k), I had to deal with crashed drives about once every month or two. Usually these crashes were repairable, but often there was data loss requiring me to restore backups or to re-install the OS and software.
Over a year ago I switched to Linux (Mandrake 8.0 since upgraded as upgrades came out), using ext2 (and I think ext3 on a few drives). Since my change over, the drive crashes just don't happen. It's hard for me to make sure I keep up with backups now, since I don't have crashes to remind me how important they are! (Yes, I still backup, I just don't have the fear prodding me to do it!)
Interesting point. I can't imagine anyone who could afford a decent Toyota actually buying a Hyundai by choice. I've seen 25 year old Toyotas on the road that still run like tops (paint's not in great shape though). I can't imagine the Hyundais that I've seen lasting THAT long.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Is there a user-filled database with hard disk reliability experiences?
If enough people contribute to such a thing, and do it right, it meight be a good statistics tool.
I would guess that temperature is probably a big factor - one of the manufacturers once showed me a graph of failures vs. case temp, and failures basically rose exponetially with case temp above 20C. But it isn't only overclockers who run hot - it is cheap PC builders who save a few dollars relative to the big boys by fitting small fans, or cheap fans which fail silently, leaving the disk to roast itself. Particularly the faster drives generate a lot of heat, and need help to get that out.
If you value your data, it is *much* more important to cool your disks than your CPU. If your CPU kills itself with overheat (and one thing you can say about the Pentiums is that they seem to slow themselves down nicely, unlike Athlons), it is a few tens of dollars, or the low hundreds if you went for the best, to replace. If you cook your drive, not only are you down roughly the same number of dollars to replace the drive, but you have the major hassle of recovering from backups - if you have backups.
I bet few people take image backups of a 40+ Gb drive every day or two: they only back up their crucial data regularly. So you are going to have to go back to your OS masters, clean install the OS. Then recover all the site-based configuration files which you backed up after you set up the system (you did, didn't you?). Then you are going to have to go to last night's backup of hot files and retrieve them. And I bet that, in between times, you installed something else which didn't get backed up, so you are going to have to dig out the install for that (if you remember where you put it). Thhe cost in hassle etc. and time is going to dwarf the cost of a new drive.
Damn - I am talking myself into a Raid very fast.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
What's the warranty on a Pontiac Gran Prix, one of only two cars to share the dubious distinction of simultaneously being on both the Top Ten Bestseller list and Top Ten Most Unreliable list? (The Ford Taurus is the other.) Just wondering.
Oh, and would this statement be from the same spokesman who said in the early 1970's "Americans will never want to drive Japanese cars..."? Ironic, considering how Toyota and Honda have wiped the floor with American car makers for nearly thirty years.
And while I'm asking all these questions, why do I have this sudden urge to go rent Roger And Me?
Certainly but perhaps not the the type of anti-trust you refer to. They act in unison and we don't trust them.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
This will hopefully push people to adopt a more serious approach to data backup.
Joe consumer doesn't complain so much that their hard drive fails as the fact that their precious book report is gone.
Physical data theft and physical damage to the computer itself are rarely causes for HD failure. HD failure usually happens to an stationary PC that hasn't been moved, the HD just fails...it does have moving parts after all.
Active backup techniques will never succeed, tape/DVD are all too inconvenient.
I think the low cost/per megabyte will lead to a widespread adoption of higher data fault tolerant consumer solutions...
Passive data fault tolerance is the way to go.
Think RAID-1 in every box...like one of the manufacturers says in the article, today you can buy double the storage for less money then a year ago. How long until people are putting dual 80 gig drives in consumer pcs with raid 1 config?
Most clone boards do it today, give it another 6-12 months and Dell/HP/Gateway/IBM will be playing that game too.
And no, wallet is not an effective way to fight back at companies like you freemarket zealots would like to believe.
I might have to start getting best buy's service agreements. HA. Just kidding. Does anyone actually get those? I think that they could only be good on certain things, but most of the time (and by that i mean all of the time) they are a waste of money. I have heard of people trying to redeem them, too, and they have a difficult time. Of course, best buy loves them :) money in the bank, man..
Companies try to reduce costs not just being freeing up the reserve funds allocated for covering repairs/relpacements (as several users have pointed out)...
But that they will reduce quality controls and the quality of parts so they fail at any point as long as it beyond the supported date...
I guess I can accept a life time of ~4 years on HDs, but 1-2 years would be insane.
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
If this really helps reduce IDE prices even further, the difference to SCSI will be so significant that SCSI drives will become a niche product for high end servers and that will be it.
Memory prices are dropping, there is a tendence to store more information in RAM only (for obvious bandwidth reasons), hard drive manufacturers need to drop IDE prices one way or the other. The arguments they gave are b***t. They are just cutting costs in commodity hardware. But hey, this is PR :-)
"Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure..."
Boycott the cheap bastards. I won't buy a disk with less than 3 years warrantee. My data is more valuable than any hardware.
Backups, sure, but why rub salt into the wound by having to buy a replacement? I want the manufacturer to _bet_ me that his hard disk won't fail (which is what a warranty is).
If they aren't prepared to put their money where hteir mouth is I'm not prepared to part with my money.
THL.
Keeping
People pointing out spelling and grammar errors on /. are about as observant as people who point out how many bugs/security flaws there are in windows.
You could select posts with spelling and/or grammatical errors with a dotted-line and get every other post.
Your time would be much better spent thinking of something useful to post.
Anyway, eveyone is going on about how hard drives are 'near disposable' nowadays... Perhaps the hardware itself is, but the data stored on the drives is quite often more valuable than the media it is stored on.
I really couldn't care if my sound card died, it's cheap to replace, and I can get a better one without any loss of personal data. Same for speakers, etc... Losing a hard drive can be quite distressing to average users, who don't have a backup system implemented.
I'm not an overclocker, or any kind of a hardware fiend. Do case manufacturers really publish data on the thermal properties of their products? If its just one or two manufacturers, can you give me links? Thanks.
You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that.
I don't expect Western Digital to give me a bigger drive. However, in two occassions with me, once with my brother, once with my father, and numerous times with past customers, that's exactly what they did. Sometimes, even past the warranty time. That alone, is the reason I have always paid a couple bucks more and bought the WD drives.
* That may seem like a large number of failed drives, but considering the volume of drives we've bought, it's around 10% and they all happened after 2+ years of constant use.
There is only one rule!
You must always, under all circumstances have all your data on backup! There are no exception to this rule, there are no excuses!
No matter how much (or little) warranty your drive has, you will never get your old data back (without paying loads of money).
When disks are getting as cheap as they are today I suggest using a RAID system to make it more likely that your files will survive.
Use a backup system to regulary backup your user area(s). CD writers are cheap, and so is webspace and bandwidth. I always mail myself my most important messages to have them on my ISP's server.
Really? How on earth can businesses operate in such a hostile environment where governments can dictate fundamentally business decisions like the length of the warranty?!
Quite well thank you. One might ask the same question about operating in the US with its mad personal litigation culture.
Same answer: they pass enough of the cost on to the end customer to make a profit. And if they can't someone else will.
Governments make the rules, businesses play to win. Same the world over.
...my philips 107s monitor barfed just one month after its 3 year warranty. which is really fscking horrid as i have 14" adi monitors that still go after 10 years!!
Can someone find a way to make such units (monitors and harddrives) fail *DELIBERATELY* , but seemingly *UNDELIBERATELY* so we can get new ones for free?
yeah, that's lame... but isn't having a $300 monitor die after 3 years isn't? And what's the deal with the 1 year warranty on some very expensive flat monitors?!
I do not know who said it first, but he was probably so right it hurts... A warranty guarantees the product will fail right after the warranty ends.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
We don't need this treasonous ideology within our society when we're at war with the most diabolical ideology since communism: Islam.
I suggest you email the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org (if you feel like it).
A significant portion of the drives that they all sell end up in grey market anyway, where the warranty is 1 year at max. Big OEM's will still be able to get up to 3 years warranty probably anyway. Besides which a 3 year warranty may look good to the end user but it has very little effect one way or the other on the soft money that actually drives the industry.
prisoner# msce18xxxxx. Currently planning my escape.
They don't. They almost always send you a refurb of the same product. As a matter of fact, I had an 8.4 GB Maxtor fail on me, and sure enough- they send the exact same drive, refurbished, and resealed in an ESD bag. And the drive was at least 4 years old. They aren't going to send you a newer product when they have boxes of refurbished drives that will still make you buy new products when they become too slow for modern software. Just try running a modern OS on an old ATA 33. It'll make you want to upgrade if you've ever had a taste of modern 7200 RPM IDE drives, or even faster SCSI drives.
What strikes me as suspicious is how all three manufacturers announced the same change at the same time. Isn't it against monopoly law (at least in the US) for competitors to coordinate a change like this?
Does this bother anyone else? They claim that warranty service is costing them too much money because their drives have too high of a failure rate, but then they claim that they're "so reliable" that we wouldn't need a warranty?
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Perhaps Slashdot Slashdoted itself?
Still, you managed to get in somehow, or I couldn't have replied to you, perhaps hightening my misunderstanding.
Ain't all this "technology" shit grand?
KFG
Any person having knowledge of meetings between executives of the companies involved in the months prior to this announcement should contact the FBI.
If everyone has to play under the same rules, than it's not really a hostile enviroment.
Besides, only the companies that produce sh*t would have to worry under such a regime. While it is a nice fantasy to assume that all consumers are rational and have perfect information, it simply isn't so.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If "they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway", why do the manufacturers need to reduce the warranty period to 1-year?
If it is 'so reliable' that it will last 5-years, and it is 'so cheap' that you would buy a new one rather than get it serviced, then what does it cost the manufacturer to offer a 5-year warranty instead of 1?
If the manufacturer needs to reduce costs, then IMHO, they have too many units failing between 1 and 5-years of it's life...
On that basis, I would rather spend a little bit more on a drive that does come with a 3 or 5 year warranty, as it is a bit more likely to last the 3 or 5 years (otherwise the manufacturer wouldn't be able to afford to do it).
No problem, get SCSI. 5-year warranty standard. Oh, and while you're at it, get a nice, roomy case that the drives will stay cool in, or maintain your room at a comfortable 65 degrees. That's what "the geeks and the pros" do.
- dave f.
Same annoncement (3 year to 1 year warranty), on same product (ATA IDE harddrive), on the same day (1 oct 2002). Ring the bell to anyone?
:)
In the normal way of thing, one would have changed is warranty and the 2 others after a couple of months would have realized it was a good idea and would had done the same, not the 3 on the same day!
Secondly if only one of them would have changed is warranty customers and OEMs would have boycut the manufacturer just like IBM a couple of months ago. But now the 3 biggest harddrive manufacturer have changed their policies so you have not a lot of other reliable harddrive manufacturers to choose from (so far less boycut possible).
Come on, go fill a "File a Complain Online" on the http://www.ftc.gov/ Federal Trade Commision you are only 2 click away.
Take 5 minutes to denonce this collusion between the 3 manufacturers (Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate), the problem is not that they drop the warranty but that they all agreed to reduce the choice and/or the price/quality ratio of the same products(ATA IDE hard-drives) thus reducing the customer in is fundamental right to choose the best product and to be in a fair trading country.
enough
I've got to believe that the rapid increase in storage capacity for ATA/IDE drives is going to create drives which have to undergo a great deal more stress in daily operation. Manipulating 120 GB of data using the same footprint (or an even smaller one) as drives with a tenth of the capacity just a few years ago will create the need for higher quality components and tighter quality control.
At the same time, however, the price per gig has come down quite a bit and the manufacturers are going to have to squeeze something out in order to maintain profit margins. What has gotten squeezed out or reduced? It seems that durability is suffering, which drives warranty liability costs up. SCSI drives have largely maintained their price points, so I would think the quality of their components has remained high and therefore the warranties can remain as they are.
I also wonder how much the reduced length of product cycles is playing into this. It's harder to replace a product with an identical one two years after original purchase when four or five updates have come since, taking space on the shelves and in catalogues.
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
It just occurred to me that people actually believe warranty costs are driven solely by failure rate and replacement drive costs. I guess I have to spell out other reasons that warranty costs could go up for a manufacturer:
1. Employee pay increases. Everyone from the technicians who test the drives to the janitors to the shipping clerks get paid. Sometimes job market conditions force employers to raise pay to attract and retain employees.
2. Employee benefit costs. If a company finds itself with unexpected increases in health insurance premiums, for example, their costs on warranty service rise.
3. Government regulations. OSHA and EPA rules and regulations (for example) might directly affect warranty costs.
4. Facilities costs. If the cost goes up for electricity, heat, water, building leases, fuel, etc., that affects warranty costs.
5. Shipping costs. When shipping costs increase, that directly affects warranty service costs.
Those are but a few of the things that can increase warranty costs even if failures stay constant.
As drives become cheaper and profit margins shrink, fixed warranty costs become disproportionate. It's no cheaper to ship an $89 drive than it is to ship a $300 drive of the same physical size -- and we've seen that kind of price drop. There was a time, not too long ago, when an inexpensive drive was $300. Drive manufacturers are now operating on razor-thin margins and downwards-spiralling prices. When you are making $1 profit on each drive, the shipping costs alone for a warranty replacement will eat up all of the profits for multiple drives.
A longer warranty does not imply a better or more reliable product. Just look at cars. Hyundai and Kia come with 10 year powertrain warranties while Lexus, the most reliable car according to studies/surveys, comes with a 6 year powertrain warranty. So how does Kia/Hyundai offer such a long warranty? They cut costs elsewhere.
I'm willing to sell Maxtor hard drives with five-year warranties if you're willing to pay me $300 for each 40GB hard drive. I'll just go down to CompUSA, buy the drives there, buy some spares, and sit the spares on a shelf. That won't make the drive you get any more reliable, but it will have a longer warranty.
Can someone clear something up for me? I was under the impression that by far the main causes of hard drive failure are mechanical (head crashes, motor failure, etc). Aren't corresponding IDE and SCSI drives mechanically identical, with different electronic interfaces (which could account for the cost difference)? If so, why are there such disparities between the warranties on IDE and SCSI disks?
So am I wrong in my assumption on causes of failure, or in the difference between IDE and SCSI drives? Or do SCSI drives get longer warranties because they are typically used more in the server environment, where admins actually care more about warranties than random end-users do?
Thanks.
-Puk
All three major Hard drive manufacturers are cutting back to a one year warranty at the same time. From here, that looks like collusion: a hard drive trust. There should be an anti-trust investigation of Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital. The only reason to cut back warranty is because the reliability of the product in question is taking a nosedive. Maybe this is by design. It looks like planned obsolescence. In the seventies, American car manufacturers wanted us to buy a new car every two years, so they designed cars that would fall apart after two years. When they didn't even last one, Toyota, Datsun, and Honda took over the market. Will Fujitsu now do that in hard drives?
How ya like dat?
I replece a lot of IDE drives from various manufacturers. I started to look at the econmics of the industry. As the economy struggles along manufacturers must find new ways in save money and boost the bottom line, to make Wall Street happy. Cutting manufacturing costs by using cheaper components is a start. If they cut back the waranties and increase the failure rate, they will sell more drives at the expense of customers. However if it's a fairly industry wide practice, it doesn't leave many options for the customer. You could migrate all your machines to SCSI, the drives are more relaible and expensive. This translates to more $$ for the manufacturers. It's a vicious circle.
There's probably no solution until the Box Builders who give 3-year support contracts start loosing money, and put pressure on drive manufacturers. Drive manufacturers might start building drives with 3-5 year waranties for more $$$. Anyway you cut it it seems to be an economic decision.
"I was writing a paper on the PC, and it was, like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and then, like, half of my paper was gone. And I was, like, huuuuuuuuuuuuuuh? It devoured my paper. It was a really good paper. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of... a bummer."
- Ellen Feiss, student
I once had a Seagate die on me for no reason whatsoever, boot sector got buggered, Windows was a pain to boot, and eventually, after replacing, it wasn't even usuable to just store things on. Sure, you could copy data to it, it was another thing if you wanted to copy that data back again, or open it.
/. RAID is not really a great option for backup.
there was also a computer in our office and one night, as we were getting ready to go, someone could smell burning. Upon investigation we discovered it was coming from the computer. We turned it off, left for the night and I examined it in the morning. I couldn't see the problem, but after removing the Hard Drive, a Quantum Fireball, and looking underneath I was shocked to see that one of the chips on the controller had, well, how do i put it, set on fire? There was a big scorch mark from the centre of the chip, and then a long line of burning across to the edge of the chip and then onto the pcb. I contacted Maxtor (they bought Qauntum, in case you're unaware) and they wouldn't do anything with it and they pointed me in the direction of a company who would rescue the data if I so wished. After finding out the price, I declined. If I remember correctly, Maxtor was aware of this problem with this drive and this disturbed me a little. If we'd left a little earlier, maybe that computer would have gone up in flames and taken the entire office with it.
I now own a Western Digital in my own computer, I'm happy with it but Hard Drives are probably the single most important part of a computer in terms of time, effort, work, etc. Hard Drive warranties should be 3 years minimum, these companies know damn well that they'll last 12 months fine (most times), it's when you get to the 2 year - 3 year period you're drive is likely to fail.
As Hard Drives get bigger, and now that the warranty is reduced, what options of backup are there that are simple and cost effective? I want to be able to put an identical drive in a machine and set it to mirror Drive A every night at a certain time. Can RAID do this? (Sorry, new to this whole RAID thing). From what I have read before on
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
Maybe this will encourage users to invest in backup devices/pracices and get new hardrives every year. :P
http://www.bookforce.net
That in Tom's article, there wasn't a question (answered anyway), by the manufacturers on how the failure rate changes between 1 year and 3 years.
Sure they gave low return numbers like 8 in 1000, but I'd really like to know how those numbers change toward the 3-year mark instead of just at the 1-year mark.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Here's a conspiracy theory for you. What if the companies are getting wise to the fact that users intentionally "crash" their drives every 2.5 years to get a new drive for "free". I've seen discussions of this type quite a bit. The other issue here is why aren't people backing up their data. I've never had the need for a data recovery service, because I make multiple backups at least once a day. Quit whining and use some common sense.
No you don't.
At least not on all products, many products simply can NOT last at least 2 years of use, or even storage.
Food products, some tape, paints, cleaners, batteries.
A helium balloon will leak out within a few days.
My point is that this law can't reasonably apply to all goods, not that there isn't a law that applies to some goods.
I really want to see this law, I'd love to keep returning the flowers I bought for my wife.
One dozen roses, lasts for 2 years, I like that idea.
According to Best Buy's statements, extended warranties are their MOST profitable product. (which anyone should have guessed from how much they push them)
;)
To get them to shut up about it, I usually ask "Well, if there really is such a high risk of failure that I need to spend $40 on a warranty for a $200 system, maybe I should rethink buying the (what must be crap) $200 system?" It's a funny look on their faces...
http://kered.org
How do you prove it was defective, not that it wore out.
Hard drive bearings fail, or the suface demagnetizes.
Is it a defect? Or was it a crappy design that wouldn't last all that long anyway?
But dollar for dollar, I think over the years IBM has consistently made some of the most solid hard drives on the market. Warranty issues are the best in the industry. They fix and replace. And what did IBM do? They replaced all the bad ones. And still warrantied the new ones for three years. No change made. Hitachi will carry the ball, they have a good core of engineers.
I recently RMA'd two 9.1G SCSI SCA drives. They failed within three months of each other in the same array. I sent them back in a Seagate box with the preformed foam and egg crate. After IBM received the drives, they sent them back, broken still and said that I had voided the warrenty because one of the sides of the foam casing wasn't two inches thick. It was an inch and a half plus. That is rediculous. I know have two worthless IBM drives with no warrenties and don't work. I don't see how that = the best with warrenty issues.
MR
I realize, after reading many comments, why many /.ers are having trouble digesting this. It's a simple matter of economics. Harddrives have become a commodity product. In the old days, you bought a harddrive and it was expensive and you needed a warranty to justify the expense. Fastforward, harddrives are cheap and you don't use a warranty as reason to make the purchase, because you know if this drive fails I will be able to buy a bigger harddrive later at an even lower price. The other driving factor here is that warranties are a liability and must be carried on the books as such. I think this will be the trend for all future hardware components.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Whatever man, I spelled it write!
the movie Tommy Boy: Tommy: Let's think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guarantee on a box? Hmm, very interesting. Ted: I'm listening. Tommy: Here's how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box 'cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside. Ted: Yeah, makes a man feel good. Tommy: 'Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter. Ted: What's your point? Tommy: The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer? "Building model airplanes" says the little fairy, but we're not buying it. Next thing you know, there's money missing off the dresser and your daughter's knocked up, I seen it a hundred times. Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box then? Tommy: Because they know all they solda ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality item from me. Ted: Hmm. Okay, I'll buy from you.
Back in the day I bought my first drive, an 80 Meg (yeah, MEG.) Quantum Prodrive, which was mounted on what was commonly refered to as a HardCard. Being out of the airflow it soon cooked the bearings. The drive still works, as it's on my old Amiga 2000, I haven't replaced it as of yet (though a WD 424 Meg drive is ready and waiting) I leave it out and have to give it a few quick twists on the vertical axis to loosen up the bearings in order for it to spin up. It's gotta be 13 years old by now and works ok aside from that. It does, and has always run very hot, which is another reason I leave it out. I'm not sure hotter is the case with newer drives, so much as tolerances, since densities are up to 180G (which you can buy right now) and more critical factors are in play to achieve such.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...that THG didn't just scan the old warranty and Photoshop a 1 over the 3 that used to be there, then write a misleading article on the subject?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Off topic but I believe it may spark some interests for those that might be in the market to buy a new drive (or maybe two, or four).
.684GB
.684GB/3min = .228GB/min
.684GB/4min = .171GB/min
Things you should consider when buying your new drive:
The capacity of your hard drive: the price of drives are so cheap now, that you can get a 80 or 100 GB drive for around $100.
The importance of your data: how important is the data that you are going to be keeping on that drive? If you are buying a drive, as secondary storage to add to your existing storage, how safe do you need that data to be while storing on this new drive?
Incoming Data Rate: how fast do you think it will take for you to fill up that drive? Are you a download king where you just download every waking moment?
Backup: Do you plan to backup the data that you will be storing on this newly purchased drive? Remember, you just bought a 80GB drive and also remember how fast you will be filling up. And don't forget, how are you going to backup 80GB of data? CDR? Variation of writeable DVD? Tape? Or are you going to have to get a second drive and setup some form of RAID?
Warranty: If the drive was to fail, how important is all those 80GB worth to you? If it failed the day after the warranty expired, do you think you have a good enough backup solution?
With all those things considered, by the time you have answered all those questions you might as well just run around in circles. As the drives get bigger, it would seem that the risks that go with having bigger drives seem to increase dramatically. Even if you an average user, who backup on a regular basis, let's do the math:
700MB with a 24x CDR would probablly take about 3min.
- 1024MB/700MB =
-
- account for user configuration of what goes on each CD (sloppy), putting in the CDR, labeling, storing, and misc things consider, we will just use 1 min. Thus putting the final CD at around
- 80GB * (1Minutes/.171GB) = ~468 Min = ~7.8 Hours
Well, considering that it will take you approximately 8 hours of straight solid work of backing up 80GB of data and most likely it will take longer since only 1 minute was taken into account of figuring out what will go onto each disc, and the assumption that each disc is fit to the max, the actual time to actually completely fill up an 80GB is really crazy just to imagine the tedious task it will go into it.
What does one do? Following the previous posts of several slashdotter's advice, the safest bet maybe is just to get another drive and set up some form of RAID. Or if you really have the cash, you can always strap yourself a nice Tape backup solution that backups 5GB/min.
Just something to consider...
That's what Tom's says. C'mon... Last week I bought a 40 gig 7200 RPM Western Digital drive for 59 bucks (at Circuit City no less). How can they be making any $$ selling drives at these prices? What frankly bothers me is the lousy quality I've seen from drives of late. In the past year I've had to RMA hard drives from every computer I own! This is a real pain in the ass, not so much for losing the drive itself, but for losing what's ON the drive. Though all my important things are stored on my mirrored server (or in two places on each computer on two different physical drives), I'm sure I don't have to tell you how long it takes to get a computer back to where it was before a crash! I guess the major drive manufacturers are making their products cheaply, selling them cheap and warranting them cheaply too. If you want better drives, you pay more for them. want to bet that at least one of them comes out with a 'premium' drive soon?
Well, I guess they've finally invented hard drives that last for exactly 366 days, and then self destruct.
Every drive I've had has outlasted the computer/OS into which it's installed, which becomes essentially unusable after 3 or 4 years. Since I work for one of those drive companies, I get the crappy pre-production "let's try this recipe" units.
It's tough to make a profit in this biz. Zero to 20% profit margins and a 9 month product life would send most Harvard buusiness school grads screaming to join a monastary. HP gave up. IBM gave up. We have endless meetings about using a $0.41 part vs. a $0.40 part. We sometimes have to sell drives at a loss to keep from writing off a warehouse of ok-last-week/obsolete-this-week products.
How many major drive companies have you seen startup in the last 20 years? And how many have gone belly up??? Disk drives are toasters -- a commodity product sold at Walmart next to the cheese-whiz and britney spears posters.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I work for a largish school district, and we have about 2-3 new WD hard drives crap out every day. Since they have a one year warranty we can get them replaced through a local distibutor very quickly and without hassle.
This is also tells you how crappy western digital hard drives are becoming....
-Tolerate my intolerance
As GM recently stated, consumers see lengthy warranties as a sign of weakness in quality, not a sign of confidence.
My Arse.
My new car (a 2001 Alero) came with a 3 year/60,000KM warranty.
My dealer told me that after 60k, stuff slowly starts to fail, which is why it cuts off there, except on Diesels.
I would imagine myself that longer warrantees are a sign of pride in a job well done rather than pessimism.
Seagate
Western Digital
Maxtor
Quantum
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The big unasked question was "How will this save you money?". The drive manufacturers all said that the vast majority of drive returns happen within 1 year. If that's true how can they save a significant amount of money by changing the warranty period?
The most reasonable conclusion for the motivation for changing the warranty period is that it cuts an economically significant number of people off from getting a replacement for a failed drive. Perhaps there is another explanation, its not obvious to me what that is. Tom's didn't ask a direct question on this point and nothing else in the article provides good evidence for any other conclusion.
If you live nearby the Seagate HD factory, like I used to, you'd know many people who worked in the plant, like I do.
And talking with people from the plant, you'd hear many "stories". Mainly about QC, or rather, the lack of.
For quite sometime now, I've quitely been waiting for this "cut the warranty period" bomb to drop, for I know that it's suicidal for _anyone_ to provide a 5 Year warranty for products that are SO LOUSILY MADE.
The return rate for all those dead drives must've been really high, and costly, or the HD firms won't do such a stunt which must've cost them tons of BAD PUBLICITY.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Another zinger: I feel like I'm reading that useless marketing crap on the insert in the packaging that no one reads. I find it kind of sad that Toms makes no mention of this doubletalk.
AccountKiller
linux offers excellent software raid technology at no cost
while most raid controllers/mobo-chips allow only raid 0/1, linux allows for 0,1,5,0+1 in all standard distributions.
I would recommend raid 5 for all personal uses, as its efficiency is considerably higher than mirroring. (and 100% secure for one failed drive, though)
I did that last month, got myself a cheap mobo with integrated ide-raid (for the purpose of 2 additional IDE-channels, so that one failed drive won't stop the system & better performance through 3 different udma-100 connections) - and then 3 identical drives, together with an intermediate cheap duron. (~1GHz). while the desktop pc stays untouched and free from 3 additional heat sources (and on your OS of choice) while the important data is safe on the raid server, accessible over the lan. of course there is a tradeoff between transfer speed (100mbit is not much) and security, but in a personal environment, the typical bulk data is videos, mp3's and backup data, those can be handled with ease when using 100mbit ethernet. - one can even start his programs from there, half-life as an example takes longer to load on an 500MHz athlon with local drive than on an xp1800+ from the network share, but for performance sake, its no real alternative to local storage.
but after all, you get a backup solution for less than 300$/, that can store a lot of music/video data, with comfortable interface and you'll never have to worry about backup anymore. if a drive fails: shutdown the server, whine a bit, replace the drive, power up again and move on to work/fun, while the raid-subsystem resyncs the new drive (data stays accesible throughout that process, just with a performance decrease for ~2 hours till the drive is fully synced).
for more speed or capacity, take larger disks instead of the proposed 80gb (but that were the most cost/capicity-efficient models at the moment) or use gigabit ethernet.
and for the paranoid or criminal users: add an usb-keychain disc containing a 10mb keyfile for encryption of the disc array. if police/MIB/"they" come to seize the property, take away the small usb-plug and hide it...
Drives fail, yes. But when a company has known manufacturing defects, lie about it for months, and still insists on endless RMAs with *more defective drives* instead of working products refunds then I'll never do business with them again.
I ordered 4 drives, only 1 of which lived beyond 10 days (and still runs) and each time I RMAed them, I kept having to send at least 1 drive back because it too was defective. Different machines, so the o'erclocking flame doesn't apply.
Drives fail, that's life. You RMA, replace, restore data, and move on. But IBM - in my opinion - defrauded me and a whole bunch of other people. They can rot in hell; I'll never buy from them again.
Not that I believe it'll do any good (being a Canadian that's lost what little faith I had in America's "democracy" (guffaw)), but if you USians sit on your butts and take it nothing will change.
I'm doing software mirroring on my server now, gotta start saving up for a RAID controller...
Worse, THG's "conclusion" just parroted the company line and thus I read the same thing 4 times. :-(
The "mystery" of this is simple: there's a cartel in the hard drive industry.
The three companies got together and want to drive up their profits and to cut back on warranties. Large corporations don't really care about customers. Customers only come into play if their anger negatively impacts gross sales, marketshare, and/or profits.
There's a very simple solution to this problem that I have been following for several years.
Return every item a week before the warranty period is over and claim it is broken. Nobody ever checks. It costs more money for them to hook it up and look at it than it does to send you a new one.
I'm of the opinion that they EXPECT it. What they're really telling us is, "Rejoice, brothers for we have been so sad that you only contact us once every three years. We now constitute a plan that guarantees you speak to us once a year instead!"
In the past I've had hard drives last 4+ years without any problem whatsoever. However, I've had TWO hard drive failures (on drives from two different manufacturers) this year, both on drives under 3 years old. When I bought these drives, I did not try to go for the "cheapest" by any means.
It is quite obvious that these drives are being manufactured cheaper than ever, and are more prone to failure than ever. Why else would this warranty be reduced. If you ask me, consumer grade drives are likely being manufactured to fail earlier so that people go out and buy new drives with more space on them than they need.
This is even better for the companies like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc. who many customers who will just buy whole new computers.
As many others have said, I'd rather see the manufacturers focus on consumer grade drives that are of higher quality rather than trying to push the size envelope. I certainly don't need a 120 GB hard drive. I had a hard time figuring out how I would fill my 60 GB drive. I usually burn large files that I don't need to CD-R after a while.
Joe User, who doesn't use his drive for anything other than storing word documents, certainly doesn't need larger drives. He also doesn't need to have his drive fail on him every 2 years.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I haven't seen mentioned the fact that manufacturers often end up upgrading the customer in the event that a drive fails. If you've got a 6 GB drive under a 3 yr warranty and it fails. You can pretty much bet you're going to receive at least a 20GB as a replacement.
That's gotta have cost implications for the manufacturer.
I didn't know Oracle was getting into the hard drive business.
This comes as a bit of a shock to me, as nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention).
Visitors to StorageReview.com have been aware of this for over a month (but then, SR is all about that type of thing)
Many SCSI drive manufacturers are considering reducing warranties to 3 years as well.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I've never used the warranty on a hard drive. I mean I've had drives crash, but strangely (and I'm sure it's just by chance) that they all happened to be western digital drives. I've got an IBM drive now that works, but is slightly defective. But most of my drives are seagate, and I've never had a problem with a seagate drive ever. I've never even seen one crash, except for a really really old one that was 1 gigabyte. But then again I've got a 20 MB Seaget SCSI drive that still works.
So in the end this means I can get drives cheaper because I'm not paying for a warranty I wont use. Good, it's time I bought a new computer anyway. Seagate Barracuda here I come.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
"Honestly, at today's prices I view hard drives as twinkies--they're cheap and they'll probably last 3 years anyway.
;-)
"There's plenty of worse things to get upset about than only getting a 1 year warranty with a $79 80GB 7200 RPM hard drive"
That's fine until you lose all of the porn that you've spent months collecting
I'd normally agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that there's no really good cheap way to back up 80GBs worth of data other than to buy another drive for a RAID 1 (unless you want to spend over a grand on a good tape backup system), and even mirroring doesn't help if your data gets corrupted - the corruption would just get copied over to the other drive. Even backing it up to DVD would amount to about 18 discs.
The fact that they've cut the warranty down to one year really sucks - I'm going to try avoid purchasing one year warranty drives as long as I can.
As someone has already said if the drive quality was increasing they would increase the length of the warranty. This decrease in length of warranty is obviously a sign of decreasing drive quality.
I guess as the price of hard drives has fallen so much and so have the profit margins that now they feel the need to cut back on quality. Its greed, pure and simple.
Anyway... Simple solution: I'll never buy an IDE disk from any of these manufacturers ever again and I suggest you don't either. There really is no reason for us to put up with this kind of thing. Just give them the cold shoulder.
Thanks.
Drive cooling is wonderful. IF you like noise. I bought one of the half-height drive cover fan units - three small fans side by side that blow over the drive. Sounded really neat at the store. Sounded like a leaf blower when I installed it.
I leave my PC on full-time. I set the drives to sleep after a half hour or so. So they tend to cool down to ambient when I'm away from the machine. I didn't see any reason to cool a cool drive, and have to listen to it full time.
So I built a temperature sensitive circuit to try and limit the noise. I figured that as the drive heated up, I could spool up the fans accordingly, and keep it quiet longer. There were two problems, one fixable, the other not. The fixable problem was that I pulled the supply voltage from the drive power connectors, but my circuit was not voltage regulated - so as the processor load increased (yep, cpu cycle load), the fan speed changed. I could tell how busy the CPU was by listening to the fan pitch. A simple voltage regulator might fix that, although I'm surprised the voltage changes that much. The unfixable problem was that the drive heats up so rapidly (maybe one minute from idle/cool to spinning/hot) that essentially as soon as I sat down and got the modem dialed up it was howling away.
So I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of air-cooled drives. Maybe a high-volume low speed fan for the entire case, vented near the drive, would work better. But the simplest solution is probably to stop mounting the drive at the TOP of the case, where the heat accumulates, and instead put it at the bottom.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
"they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"
If they're so reliable, the manufacturers have little to loose by giving a 3 year warranty, right?
I guess they have done their sums, figured out how much they will save by dropping 2 years off the warranty and like what they see. Plus they might be trying to give themselves a boost after the enconomy slump.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
in case you haven't heard, even though hard drive platters are getting more and more dense, they're also getting a hell of a lot cheaper... I bet the cost of manufacturing hard drives is laughable.. I would be more worried about platter manufacturers going out of business.
:)
Seems odd that so many major manufacturers make the same move simultaneously.
Although, a Maxtor or a WD drive with 1 year warranty is still better than a JTS (or similar) drive that you'd have to replace every few months
--- sig moved for great justice.
> Yet another reason to like compact apps, and OS's. ...like Windows. Which comes on just one CD and installs to a couple of hundred megs. As opposed to Redhat Linux 8 (Bloatware edition) which now comes on 5 (five) CDs and won't even fit on my Linux box anymore with a standard install. It now runs Windows until I can be bothered to get bigger hard disk.
Slahdot shame shame shame for posting that evil leach Tom's website on here. What a sell out!.
I don't want long warranties. I won't want fast RMA turn around times. I want a drive that isn't going to fail on me. That's all. I'll pay a few bucks extra for this.
That said; a 3-5 year warranty proves the manufacturer has faith in their line of drives, and again would be worth a few extra dollars. But if I need to RMA a drive while it's under a 1 or 2 year warrenty, there's a problem!
just my two cents...and that's probably all it's worth...
"they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"
Well if they're so convinced about the drives being reliable, why not act in that faith and lengthen the warranty? This doesn't do their credibility any good IMHO..
It is now possible using the modern controllers to make yourself a 3.75TB IDE RAID array. (Use the 3ware 7500 or 8500 controller and 12 x 320GB Maxtor disks).
IDE RAID is seriously cheap. While the decent controllers still run about the same as a SCSI one, the disks can be up to a tenth the costs of a comparable SCSI. I am not going to get into the whole SCSI performance vs IDE or the benefits of either system, other than the cost of IDE.
IDE drives are not designed to be 'working' all the time. Put them into a RAID-5 config and they are going to be working harder than if they were running as a standalone.
I think this is a reaction from the manufacturers who are seeing a possible mass switch from SCSI to IDE due to the huge cost reductions. This is their pre-emptive strike.
That marketing line is complete B.S. though. Stand behind the products you are so confident about!
IDE's on average do die sooner. In many RAID configurations they die sooner still. RAID is becoming more and more popular and now appears on many motherboards.
For me though (who is going to build the 3.75TB arrangement mentioned), the cost savings are so huge using IDE that one can afford to buy extra disks for when the failures happen and still save a ton of money over the similar SCSI arrangement.
DVD jukebox here I come....
That statement is incorrect. Anybody that puts together a solid business model would have warrenty costs built into the product's original cost.
It may be true that they are only making $1 one each drive at this moment, but now they will make $2 on each drive because they will have to build in less warrenty cost into the product's price.
Also consider this. They have reduced the warrenty period from 3 years to 1 year
Now, they will make it so the drives only last 2 years (1 year less than their previous warrenty required and one more year than the current one requires). Any one that can't see the basic business behind this decision needs to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)
I wish I was the V.P. that got credit for this lesser warrenty idea
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Didn't they sell their line (or give it over) to Fujitsu? And they will still make them untill the handover date (about 2.5 years from now)
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
A company has to put $XX in the bank and not touch it to cover their warranty costs. If they reduce the warranty, they can use the $$ on other things, such as R&D to make more reliable drives. They probabally aren't spending much on R&D or they would have fixed heat problems already.
They aren't making much on the drives now, as they have to pay IBM or whomever owns the patent on MR heads, which cuts into the botom line. If they can squeeze a few more cents out of the drive, the company's books will look better. If they don't fix reliability issues, the companies name will go up in smoke, so they have to get the R&D money from somewhere.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Drives that die every year or so are not a problem provided that replacements are cheap (which they are), and RAID is cheap and easy for home and small business.
Simple controller based hardware RAID is not ideal, because all drives must be the same size. When one drive fails, you have to replace all of them. This is because the 40G drives you initially built the RAID with are no longer available, and your only choice is to buy a new set of 160G drives.
RAID subsystems are way too expensive for home and small business.
I use Linux software RAID (mirroring), and AIX software RAID (mirroring). AIX divides all drives into a set of drives (volume group) into equal sized extents called physical partitions. The LVM for Linux does a similar thing. Each logical volume (what you build a filesystem on) is built from multiple logical partitions the same size as physical partitions. The LVM for Linux does the same. This lets your logical volumes cover multiple drives, and lets you expand and shrink logical volumes without reorganizing the disk, rebooting, or stopping any running processes. AIX even supports expanding a filesystem while it is mounted and running. (There are Linux products to do this also - but they are not widely supported.)
AIX goes further and stores each logical partition on up to 3 physical partitions. This provides mirroring that easily handles disk expansion. The 3rd copy makes it easy to migrate logical volumes to different physical drives (make a 3rd copy in the new location, then delete one of the other copies).
For instance, our inhouse AIX system started with 2 512M drives. We expanded with an additional 1G. We migrated all volumes on 1 512M drive to the 1G (with the system running applications). Thereafter, all volume allocation and expansion was automatically mirrored. Next, we added a 1.2G, then a 2G, then a 4G, and we removed the 512M drives which were slow. New drives are simply added to the volume group. All migrations are done with the system running applications. When all logical volumes have been migrated elsewhere, old drives are simply removed from the volume group.
The Linux software RAID can accomplish similar results if you use 2 layers of the md driver. One layer mirrors identically sized partitions. The other layer glues multiple partitions together into one logical drive. (Or you can use Linux LVM for the second layer.)
However, it is not clear when/whether partitions can be safely allocated and removed with Linux running applications. There are no simple commands like
(make md5 a raid level 1 mirror from paritions hd5a and hd6b, report errors such as md5 already exists, hd5a already used for another md or filesystem, etc.) Instead, everything is done by editing config files, and you're never sure when your changes take efect, or whether adding a new md to the config will affect operations on existing mds. (Does the driver stop servicing active mds while it loads the new config?) The Linux LVM does not support integrated mirroring. (You can run LVM on top of md mirrors.)The point of all this is that cheap 1 year drives are not a big problem if RedHat and other distros supported AIX style or better software RAID out of the box.
I usually ask "Well, if there really is such a high risk of failure that I need to spend $40 on a warranty for a $200 system, maybe I should rethink buying the (what must be crap) $200 system?
Surprisingly this is the reaction people had when some auto companies in the 60s started putting in Seat Belts. Why would I want to buy a car that has seat belts? It must not be as safe as the ones that don't!
Maxtor and WD do both offer lines of drives that will retain their 3-year warranty. Luckily for me, the high end line is where I buy my drives.
That said, while this is no more than anecdotal evidence, I've never had more problems with my hard drives until recently. About two years ago, I bought a Maxtor 7200rpm 40 gig drive. About a year later, it had gotten so loud (a high pitched whine) that it was starting to give me headaches. So I called Maxtor, got it replaced, and sure enough about a year later, the replacement was doing the same exact thing. So I called again, got another replacement. Installed it, partitioned it, and when it reached the end of the format, I hear *kachunk, kachunk, kachunk*. Dead. So I call again, get _another_ replacement. This one's held up so far, but time will tell how long that lasts.
Similarly, I decided to buy a WD 120gig 7200 rpm drive back in May. I buy it, take it home, use it for 3 days, and then my motherboard can no longer find the drive during boot. So I return it. Still needing space, I find a sale on the 1200JBs a few weeks later, so I buy one of those. It's been running ok, but just a few days ago, I noticed it's starting to make the same high-pitched whine the Maxtors did. Hopefully WD's support is as hassle-free as Maxtors (I haven't called them yet). I thankfully haven't lost any data yet, but I'm getting really fed up with having to replace my drives all the time.
heh, I got a 11-year old SPARCstation 2 and two 1993 SCSI hard drives and they still work
Most drives will withstand a lot of force when not powered up - do a google search:
For example (google: hard drive impact rating) gives you this:
<quote>The IBM Travelstar 10GT offers industry-leading capacity (10 gigabytes) and an industry-leading shock rating of 600 G/2 ms (nonoperating) and 125 G/2 ms (operating)</quote>
Mind you, I still freak out at (read: give shit to) people who actually try to move their desktop PC while it's powered up, so they can plug something in.
The HD manufacturers are making contradictory statements here.
On the one hand, they claim this warranty reduction is necessary to save costs; i.e. by reducing the warranty they won't have to pay to fix as many drives.
On the other hand, they're saying that most people won't be affected by this change because the drives hardly ever fail.
Both of these statements can't be true: If it's true that the drives hardyly ever fail, then reducing the warranty period isn't going to reduce costs. If it's true that reducing the warranty saves costs, then there must be a significant number of drives that fail between 1 and 3 years from purchase.
At least one of these statements must be a lie. I'm pretty sure I know which one...
I have a large installation, and of the recent large
disk installs (~80GB IDE, at least 20 disks each) I have replaced between 15-30%. This disks are from seagate, wd, and ibm and have been bought in the last 3 years, and all had some failures fairly quickly, without there being a real
noticeable quality difference between the three.
After the 1st year, we still are getting a few
failures, not as many, but still a amazingly high
number, mostly with blocks going bad.
The quality is no where near the scsi reliability, either in the long term or
the short term.
Those of you who defend IBM do so wrongly. During the 'bad run' if IDE GXP based drives, which I believe from what I have read invloved GXP 60 and 75 ranges, IBM behaved irresponsibly, and should have come clean and advised customers as soon as it knew it had problems.
After a considerable amount of time, they issued new doctrines, such as 'drives must not be used for more than 11 hours per day'.
In addition, they did not handle warranty coverage correctly, nor customer advice correctly.
Users who shipped bad drives got either the same drive back after IBM had used their utility on the drive, or a replacement.
The joke was if you were a customer they advised you to wipe, using their downloadable tool, and by common account within 3 weeks the grinding noises and data loss returned.
Many people got returned drives, and then lost data again when the new drives failed.
Sending out bad batches is one thing. Sending out bad families of drives is a new scale altogether. Add to that the warranty handling, the multiple returns, the failure to make public the actual issues. The failure to withdraw a faulty product they knew damn well was loosing customers data. Resupplying the customer with said same drives with pretty clear knowledge the drive was a likely failure. Lastly the issue of new guidelines making the problem the customers (ie, daily no more use than 11 hours).
I had 5 of these drives. 3 were replaced. Out of a total of 8 drives 7, that is 7, died, made grinding noises, lost data, etc etc.
The bottom line is now this. I do NOT know if I can trust IBM disk again. I am neutral when it comes to brand. But given that IBM have not publicly accepted the problems, or given the true reasons for failure, OR SAID , on our new family of drives we cured the problem by X,Y,Z, that means until I know for an absolute FACT that IBM make IDE harddisk that are utterly bombproof, I doubt I or anyone I advise will buy an IBM IDE 3.5" harddisk in the future.
I just do not dare to put my data on their drive, and that is the bottom line.
It is a shame as they, looking at www.scan.co.uk come at a good price, good (speed) performance, and one huge gigantic stone round their neck care of the GXP issue in the past.
AdmV
We`re all equal
Come on slashdot this is old news. the 'investigation' is new but the news of the reducing warranty is not.
;) and this time i can offer timestamp for anyone asking it ;)
They apparently need to reduce their costs, besides never harddrives aren't as good as old one. Except perhaps for Western Digital, i had two of those, first bought 96 and second 97, both were 1.6gb and both blew sametime with no apparent reason, and this isn't the only occasion i've heard Western Digital's hd's go out like that.
New IBM HDs then? Well many have said their ibm hd just broke down pretty soon, this was as about sametime as IBM started to lower their HD prices. I trusted before for IBM making very good HDs, now i'm not sure. (/me is hoping not to hold a dead IBM hd anytime soon on his hands...;)
Good news is that SCSI drive warranties will be kept up and also some IDE drives like Maxtor MaXLine serie hds.
And for modder fun: i had this one reported on my site 1st day of October
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
You are aware that the last 2 cd's are just source, aren't you? I have a RedHat 8.0 install that occupies a mere 1.1 GB of space.
I had to trim a bunch of stuff out.. like KDE, but that's okay because Gnome2 is pretty awesome.
Granted, windows 98 only takes up ~250 megs, but the damn thing doesn't even ship with a zip extractor.
you must be a fucking idiot. I'm sure you can choose components to install with RH, and I doubt all 5 cds are for the install, im sure most are source and extra cds.
;)
My slack set is 4 cds. Only one is install.. You can choose to install just a few hundred meg...or 100MB exactly w/ Zipslack. Or 2 gig.
Your statement should be:
It now runs Windows until I can get off my ass and actually learn a thing or two about OS installation.
Christ, even if you need to switch distros, do it. Saying Linux is bloated compared to Windows is retarded. Sure, you have no control over your windows install...and maybe even RH, but there are plenty of distros with total control(or roll your own). Obviouslly you have no real use for running linux and I bet your reason for choosing windows isn't its compactness...it's its idiotproofness
Let me see now, the 3 of the 4 remaining major hard drive manufacturers (IBM being the other) all announce that their warranty periods will be reduced to THE SAME 1 YEAR, EFFECTIVE THE SAME DATE. There's nothing suspicious about that, is there?
Conference call :
Chuck: "Profits are down. How do we save money? Jack, any suggestions?"
Jack: "Well Chuck, we could all reduce our warranty periods. Viola - more bucks for us. What do you think Bill?"
Bill: "I'm in, I'm in. More money - yeah! Besides, after we finish buying the other two of you, we won't have to harmonize that policy!"
Jack: "OK, what else can we do to get the profits up? We need to have a reason to all start raising prices now. They're too low per meg and until Gatesy gets that Palladium thing out, or the RIAA gets its head out of its butt, people are gonna start asking why they need bigger drives. Look what's happening over at Intel - they've had to put millions into seeding compute intensive applications so they can sell the high-end processors that really make the money."
Chuck: "Hey... do you think we could create a world-wide shortage of, I don't know..."
Bill: "Iron oxide?"
Chuck: "Bill, you're a freaking genius!"
Sigs are bad for your health.
Seems fishy that three of the major hard drive companies reduce their warranties at the same time...
"A company has to put $XX in the bank and not touch it to cover their warranty costs. If they reduce the warranty, they can use the $$ on other things, such as R&D to make more reliable drives."
Not true. A company does NOT have to accumulate & set aside cash to cover future warranty claims. A company must accrue the expected future warranty expenses, record that amount as liability, and book the increase in the total accrued warranty liability as an expense (or to income, if total warranty liability decreased).
Future warranty claims have no effect on curent cash, just on current income. Big difference.
For WD, IBM, Seagate and the like, this is an easy wasy to increase their current net income & EPS. It will have an effect on future cash to the extent that the company has to use otherwise-revenue producing drives to service warranty claims. It has no effect on current cash. It DOES have an effect on current and future net income.
If they were truly more reliable, then the drives wouldn't break, meaning that a longer warranty would not cost the manufacturers anything, and in fact would be a selling point. The change actually is a sure indication of exactly the opposite: the drives are failing more often, and they don't want to pay for it.
Xesdeeni
Actually, if you really value your data you'll make backups or at least use a RAID array. 3Ware makes really nice RAID arrays that use IDE drives, and present themselves to the OS as a SCSI drive. You can find these on ebay frequently for under $100.
It doesn't matter what the warranty is. Even the best warranty in the world isn't going to bring back your data.
Motion and friction are great for sex, but terrible for data storage and retrieval.
....
Hard drive crash? Hell, I'm old enough to remember when cassette tapes crashed
What we really need: RAM drives the size of a Monolith.
Stop spinning and start grinning!
-kgj
For what it's worth, Slashdot also picked this up in the beginning of September, though in typical Slashdot style they seem to have only mentioned Maxtor. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/05/204724 9
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
They shouldn't have to.
The only reason people should have to back up their data is to guard against unavoidable physical damage -- theft, flood, whatever. The probability of a hard drive failing should be so damned low that it's not even on the scale.
Hard drive manufacturers shouldn't have to cut warranties because their drives will only last for one year. People depend on these things; they should last effectively forever under normal circumstances. If they don't, the manufacturers shouldn't be selling them, or should be making clear which drives are lower-spec and reliable, and which have go-faster stripes but will fail in six months and need replacing.
IMNSHO, providing a verified statement of the expected lifetime of a drive based on testing, and a warranty to match (which pays for everything, including compensation for downtime) should be a legal requirement. This is necessary to protect the vast majority of the computer-using population, who wouldn't even conceive of the fact that the box they're spending a four-figure sum on will break in less than a year. The hard drive manufacturers all know damn well how to meet this criteria, it's just that their greed and spec sheets have overtaken their willingness to produce a quality product.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
These guys seem to have forgotten what business they are in. They are in the business of providing persistant data storage, not data storage for 1 year.
I understand that storage is a competitive market with low margins. This move is probably intended to reinforce the distinction between SCSI and IDE drives, a distiction that has been lost over the years, but it is the wrong way to do it.
If they tell me that warrantys longer than 1 year are costing them too much money, then they are telling me that a significant number of drives are failing from 2-3 years out. That doesn't make me feel good, even with my home user hat on.
I keep a system for a couple of years. The prospect of data loss in that time frame. Using drive failure (and data loss) as incentive to upgrade is a bad idea.
I work for a smal IT Firm and we sell hardware from many vendors. My company was notified by one of its suppliers in late August/early Sept. of the warranty change. I find it odd that everyone is finding out NOW...
But alas.. I got myself a 120GB WD 8mb cache before the warranty drop kicked in.
My thought on the warranty drop is somthing like this,
the last hard drive I could to RMA for my personal use was a old Maxtor 1.3gb drive. It died within a few months of its warranty. And I have seen a few drives die close to the end of the warranty. When I got my drive back it was a new 2.1GB.
So i na year or so when everyone is making terrabyte drives, you send in your 20GB and get back a 1TB drive cuz thats the cheapest and smallet drive they make.
Just get the plan (called a PSP product service plan) and then make sure that your item doesn't work near the end of the warranty.
I had a MiniDisc player that was grossly out of touch with modern features, but I had the $29.99 PSP. After an unfortunate fall out of my (moving) car, I now have a brand-spankin' new MiniDisc player with all the new bells and whistles.
You can still get the PSP and *not* make it the most profitable item they sell. Tell the masses!!!
I have been going over this entire discussion, and one thing seems to irk me. How is it that so many of you end up with drive failures? Let me elucidate...
I live in New Delhi, India. Anyone who has ever been to India knows how bloody hot it can get here. It is common for the ambient temperature to be around 40C during summers. Winters are much better, but then it is usually the heat that kills electronics, not the lack of it.
So.. my first computer was a 286. Complete with a a 20 GB hard drive, 1 MB RAM (out of which half was extended) etc. This computer lasted me about 7 years. Most of its life, it was kept in a poorly ventilated room which was air-conditioned, but had little else to keep the computer happy. Still it worked flawlessly till I finally convinced my dad to get me a new one.
Next computer was a Celeron 366, 64 MB RAM, 8 GB HDD etc. This computer had it even worse. Another thing about living in India is that you have to cope with LOTS of dust. Leave anything unattended, and it'll end up with a thin coat of dust within 48 hours. By the time this computer arrived, I was actively hacking hardware - pulling out and putting new stuff in. For convenience I never put the top of the case back on, and the computer was fully exposed to the elements. 'Elements', btw, also included direct sunlight a couple of hours a day. As you can probably gather, even that system worked fine for its entire life - about 4 years.
I love my current system. About 2 years old, its a Athlon 900 MHz, GeForce2 MX-400, 384 MB RAM, 80 GB Maxtor + 40 GB Seagate Barracuda ATAIV. Not the latest and the greatest, but it serves my needs rather well. This computer is kept in my room that doesn't have an AC (I'm super sensitive to them). In the last 6 months, the max temp has often gone above 45C. My CPU would usually run at around 60C, with its stock heatsink and fan. The two hard drives are stacked one on top of the other because of lack of space in the cabinet, so they keep each other quite warm as well. This system is never switched off, and serves as a gateway for another computer in the house as well. That is an Ahtlon XP 1700. Want to guess that CPU's usual running temperature? Around 70C. Has a Samsung 40 GB HDD, which has worked flawlessly for about 6 months now.
If you've gotten so far, I'm sure you've got my point. How is it that you people living in clean cities with temperate weather manage to end up with FUBAR'd components? A few days back I pulled off my Athlon's heatsink, and you wouldn't believe the amount of crud that came off it. Must've been blocking a lot of air flow.
All that said, I must admit I've been thinking of RAIDing my drives as well. I have quite a lot of data on these drives that I don't want to lose, and I'm afraid my lack of bad experiences is making me callous. I write reviews for a magazine in India called PCQuest, and have personally seen three IBM DeskStars die while I was working with them. Would hate it if something like that happened to my desktop.
Ok thats it. Mindless rambling mode - off.
Given the fast pace of development on hard drives, the HD manufacturers are making a choice not to support any drives older than 1 year. This is an important point - as having to support these drives means having to have a stock of refurb drives in the same size range, or larger, to replace bad drives that come in years 2 and 3 of the old warranty period.
Consider if someone with a 10gb drive from 3 years ago had that drive crap out today, and got a replacement from Maxtor for the price of shipping it to them. I know I did - my sister's iMac died, and since the internal drive was from maxtor, I took advantage of the 3 yr warranty to get the drive replaced for $8. The time I spent with the phone operator, the time the warehouse had to use to find, package, and ship the replacement, and the space the replacement took up while it sat on the shelf... that's all overhead folks.
What are the chances that your $140 120gb drive will be worth anything close to half what you paid for it in 3 years?
With that said, I wish Maxtor would take a cue from WD and allow consumers to purchase "insurance" on their drives, to extend the warranty up to 3 years. I'd like to use those 5400 rpm fluid bearing drives for production use (quiet, and should run cooler, and thus last longer), but I don't know if I can trust those drives if nobody is willing to stand behind them for more than a year... Yes, I'd buy the more expensive drives - if they made one running at 5400 rpm or slower!!!
Ever since I heard this announcement back in September I wasn't at all surprised. I noticed that only the IDE hard drives were getting their warranty cut, while the SCSI remained the same. All these companies will be pushing out Serial ATA drives soon (if they aren't already) and I'm betting they'll have a 3 year warranty. It makes sense because if a person is faced with buying new parts and the Serial ATA option comes with a longer warranty they are more likely to go that route. In the meantime they cut their costs by lowering the warranty on IDE hard drives and they also caused a lot of suppliers to buy a large number of drives before October 1st to get the drives that still would have an honoured 3 year warranty. Around the end of September whenever the company I worked for would try to order a 60 or 80 gig 7200 or other larger faster drives we'd find constantly that our suppliers were out of stock. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just seems to all fit to me.
CompUSA in Latham NY (Near Albany) always (4 for 4) had someone screaming about how the warranty was not being honored properly. Sure you may have a warranty, but if you can't get it enforced, it may not mean anything. Are you really going to court for a $200 or less component?
That's because you're thinking with your head instead of listening to what the marketing department tells you.
But GM sees it as "Hyundai = bad quality; Hyundai has 10 year warranty; BMW = good quality; BMW has 3 year warranty; therefore, shorter warranties mean higher quality *perception*"
Keep in mind, it's perception, not fact, that sells. Sometimes they are both the same.
Yeah, but Windows works after it's installed. When I installed Redhat I had to compile a custom kernel before it would even think about seeing half my hardware/disk partitions, change about 9 configuration files (including having to tell XWindows that resolutions my monitor can run at and what GFX card I have - even though they're both PnP) recompile Netscape and ask about 4 people for help. *OR* I could install Windows and everything will be working in about 20 minutes.
You can look at this 2 ways...
1: I'm a fucking idiot and I need idiotproofness.
2. I have work to do and/or a life - so I don't want to spend ages getting an operating system working.
That's just me - some people might find a broken (new) installation a really fun exciting challenge that they can fix. I don't.
I haven't tried a large Linux distribution recently, so I'll give it another go before complaining again, but I'm pretty sure I still won't want to use it as my main OS (yet).
Ever noticed how only Linux users complain about Windows' instability? I've never seen a BSOD in my life (apart from machines with fscking ATI cards/drivers on them) - and I've been using Windows nearly every day since Windows 95 RC1. Win2K seems pretty stable out of the box - and my XP machine hasn't crashed yet *at all* (4 months of daily usage).
The only reason IBM does not change their warranty because they have been giving just one year of warranty all the time on their harddisks. And that's ONLY on the 'original IBM' ones, that have a FRU-partnr on them and are mounted in original IBM systems. If you buy an 'IBM' harddisk in a shop, 99 out of 100 times you will get an 'oem'-harddisk that looks like IBM, has an IBM label on it, was made by IBM, performs like IBM, crashes in a few months like IBM but is NOT warranted by IBM because it is a so-called 'bulk' harddisk that IBM makes for third parties. Warranty for those drives are the responsibility of the guy you bought it from, and if they choose not to give warranty, you can't go to IBM. IBM only grants one year warranty to IBM drives with a FRU partnumber on them, and the IBM drives you buy at the computershop are simply missing this number and are not warranted by IBM.
I happen to work in an IBM service shop in Europe, and I have to turn down lots of warranty requests for these oem drives.
Personally I think this stinks, but then, who am I??
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
This scares me a bit, as in the past year I've had five (yes, 5) HD failures.
Maxtor 30GB fails.. 6 months later. Maxtor 40GB fail. Send back. Receive new one.. new one fails after 3 months. SAME DAY, IBM DeskStar in another computer fails. Both of those are fine, but now I have another IBM that seems to be on its last leg.
I know what you're thinking.. why would you buy these if they were failing? It was too late, I had purchased them all at the same time. I've had Quantums fail.. Seagates fail.. (we used to call them Seacrates 8 years ago).. a WD fail.. These have all been IDE drives. Only SCSI drive I've ever had fail was a Micropolis 1.2gb about 7 years ago.
Oddly enough, the only drives I have that HAVEN'T failed are my odd-and-end 2gb Samsung and Fujitsu drives.
Which brings me to some serious questions.. are there any reviewers out there submitting these drives to long term abuse in extreme conditions (heat or poor power)? If so, are they keeping scores in a place that I can see?
Frankly, I'm a little paranoid about the state of HDs these days. I would like to be able to have reasonable confidence that a HD will last for 5+ years.. I just don't know where to find it.
From: Disc.PreSales.Email.Support@seagate.com
To: Neil
Hello Neil,
As noted below in the article from PCWorld, 85% of the hard drives in the world are sold through these three companies. All have dropped down on their warranties. If we want to stay in business, we have had to follow suit. This only affects desktop ATA drives, not the three and five year warranties offered on our SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. If PC makers offered the same warranties as the hard drive makers had for years, and if the prices of drives were not so low, as customers have wanted and repeatedly asked for, maintaining three year warranties on our lowest priced drives would still be feasible.
Hard Drive Vendors Shrink Warranties
Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital cite business realities for dropping consumer drive warranties to one year.
PCWorld.com, September 30, 2002http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105491,
Frank Thorsberg
The three-year warranty on PC disk drives that has been standard for more than a decade is going the way of the dodo bird on October 1. All three top manufacturers are switching to a one-year warranty for most consumer models.
Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate, which share more than 85 percent of the consumer market, call the move a business decision that brings their warranty policies into line with those for the other major components inside a PC.
Nobody is pulling products with three-year warranties off the shelves, but new stock sold after October 1 will have only a 12-month warranty. All existing three-year warranties will be honored through the end of the
policy's period. And even after the new policies take effect, you may be able to get an extended warranty. Some manufacturers may offer the additional coverage for an added fee or in their premium product lines. More commonly, extra coverage could be available from resellers that provide extended servicecontracts for other consumer technology products.
Strictly BusinessAnalyst John Monroe of Gartner/Dataquest applauds the change and says that the impact on quality-conscious consumers will be minimal.
"No way is this reflective of any degradation in quality of the disk drives themselves," Monroe says. "It's strictly a business move. In fact, drives are a lot more reliable than they were ten years ago when they went to the three-year warranty."
Monroe points to the steady drop in prices for disk drives and the move to standard one-year warranties from all the major PC makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Those were the major factors behind the disk drive manufacturers' decision, he says.
"It is a long-overdue business decision for an industry that has delivered the best and most compelling cost and performance and capacity benefits of the whole IT marketplace," he said.
New Policy DetailsMaxtor announced its plans first, saying its Fireball, DiamondMax, and DiamondMax Plus ATA drives will have a one-year warranty. The MaxLine premium drives will retain a three-year warranty.
However, Maxtor will not directly offer warranty extensions, leaving that option to its resellers, who may choose to provide the extra service.
Its two biggest competitors have quickly followed suit with similar announcements. Seagate says the company will back all its consumer ATA drives with a one-year warranty.
Western Digital announced a one-year plan for its Protégé and Caviar Advanced brands. It will retain a three-year warranty on its high-powered Caviar special edition model, commonly used in servers.
Western Digital is directly offering an extended warranty option, charging $20 to lengthen the soon-standard one-year warranty to three years. The extension is not available through Western Digital resellers. The company will not provide a warranty longer than three years for a drive, and owners of existing drives (with current three-year warranties) may not extend their drives' warranty, according to the company.
Quality CountsDisk Drive quality will be unaffected by the move to a 12-month warranty for consumer equipment, the vendors say.
"I understand people say that [a three-year warranty] is part of the value and provides some peace of mind two and a half years from now," says John Paulsen, Seagate's manager of product communications. "Ultimately, some consumers will feel that way, but [the policy change] doesn't reflect on the quality of the product."
The decision is strictly a business issue, say the trio.
The administrative cost of maintaining a standard three-year warranty program is immense and no longer makes good business sense for drive manufacturers, says Rich Rutledge, Western Digital's vice president of marketing.
"When we moved to a three-year warranty, the expense of doing that was phone calls, repair rates, return rates, refurbishments. None of that has really changed," Rutledge says. "What has changed is the average selling price. Back then, the average price was $175. Today, our average selling price is $65 to $75."
All three companies will maintain longer warranties on their enterprise-level drives.
Here is another article from CNET News you may be interested in:
Hard-drive makers weaken warranties
CNET News.com, September 27, 2002
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959831.html
By Richard Shim
Three of the major hard-drive makers will cut down the length of warranties on some of their drives, starting Oct. 1, to streamline costs in the low-margin desktop disk storage business. Read more about hard-drive makers
PC makers have been pulling back the warranties on their computers in an effort to reduce costs, and hard-drive makers Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital are about to follow suit. The three drive companies, which combined have about 85 percent of the drive market, will alter their warranties from three years to one year. The changes will only be for drives sold for desktop PCs and some consumer-electronics products, which traditionally have one-year warranties or less, according to representatives from all three companies.
"We're following the trend in desktop PCs, where they've all switched to one-year warranties," said Stephen DiFranco, vice president of marketing at Maxtor. "This should have no effect on consumers because we hardly ever get returns in the second or third year and it frees up cash that we have to reserve to cover the warranties."
The companies will maintain three- to five-year warranties for drives used in large businesses such as banks and companies that keep track of financial transactions. Western Digital will offer extended warranties directly to customers, while Maxtor and Seagate expect retailers to have extended warranty programs for consumers.
The move should have little effect on consumers, according to Dave Reinsel, an analyst with research firm IDC. However, the move emphasizes how hard drives are becoming more and more of a commodity as margins become smaller and smaller.
"Back when ASPs (average selling prices) were around $175 and margins were around 15 (percent) to 20 percent, those warranties were justified," said Richard Rutledge, vice president of marketing at Western Digital. "But now, with ASPs around $65 to $75 and margins around 12 (percent) to 15 percent, we're no longer able to afford to provide that as a standard feature."
It may not even matter to consumers that warranties are shorter; it would simply make more of component warranties on par with one another, Reinsel said.
"More than 50 percent of failures occur in the first 90 days of a product's use and even then that rate is less than 0.8 percent," Reinsel said. "This move is yet another lever (for manufacturers) to improve their bottom line...there is no degradation in quality; if anything, reliability keeps going up as the manufacturing process matures."
The only consumers who may be affected are those who buy drives in retail or after they buy a PC. Those consumers will have a shorter warranty period, but Reinsel estimates that market is comparatively small to drives sold with PCs.
More than 37.5 million desktop drives were sold in the second quarter and about 1 million were in the retail category.
The warranty changes come as hard drives are finding their way into a broader range of devices, such as digital video recorders and game consoles. However, consumer-electronics devices are expected to account for less than 10 percent of worldwide hard drive shipments in 2002, according to market researcher IDC.
Changing the warranty was something all the manufacturers wanted to do, but no one wanted to be first, Rutledge said.
"We were all basically playing chicken to see who went first," Rutledge said. "Maxtor took a leadership position...and we're supporting it."
The desktop hard-drive business is one where profits are lean, if present at all, and some, such as Fujitsu, have jumped out of the space opting to concentrate on server or notebook hard drives, where margins are better. Seagate went back to being a private company after it was bought by Veritas Software and an investment group for a $20 billion deal in 2000.
At the time, slim margins and intense competition had decimated profits for Seagate. The highly competitive desktop hard drive industry has not changed much.
"Prices continue to go down and this change in warranties is a response to the competitive nature of the market," Maxtor's DiFranco said.
"We were giving customers something we couldn't afford," Rutledge said.
To put it into perspective, if car makers had followed suit with Disc Drive makers, cars would now get 1,000 miles per gallon and cost 10% as much as they did 10 years ago.
We are not saying we don't understand your feelings, as we do. We wish we could afford to offer the same warranties as we have for years, but with prices what they are, we simply would not be in business any longer. We appreciate your past business and interest in our products, and don't want to lose a valued customer, but we have to do what is necessary to stay in business in this depressed economy. Thank you, Neil!
Thad S.Disc Presales
Thank you for your interest in Seagate products. If we can be of further assistance please don't hesitate to ask.
Seagate Disc Presales now has a web presence. Please see the webpage below:
http://www.seagate.com/contact/sales/presales/ind
UNIX/Linux Consulting
There are costs and then there are costs. The problem with longer warranties that go unused is that the company must keep a certain amount of funds in the warranty account to cover the potential expense represented by the current set of drives currently covered by warranty. Thus, reducing the warranty period reduces costs to the company by freeing more of their cash on hand for other uses. It does not take drives failing in the second and third years for them to save money with shorter warranty periods.
There are numerous postings observing that warranty periods are being reduced to save money. This is absolutely correct as far as it goes, but there is a key piece missing.
/. readers appear to have missed it.
It is not necessary to have drives fail for companies to have expense associated with warranties. Specifically, a company must account a certain amount for every potential liability represented by a drive sold and within its warranty period. For companies with high volume low margin businesses, such as the desktop disk drive market, this can represent a significant percentage of their cash on hand. This then has very significant impact on the other financial activity of the company, such as investing in R&D, or even paying salaries. Thus, reducing warranty period reduces the potential expense that must be budgeted independent of whether there are drive failures during that time.
I should note that I believe this WAS described in the original article, but many
They're admitting, bluntly, that their products are shit. It doesn't take much thought to realize that if the drives were "so reliable", the warranties to keep them up wouldn't be so expensive.
I think I'll take my patronage for drives elsewhere... if there ARE any other drive manufacturers these days...
I'm not sure of the numbers for hard drives, but for many products the MTTF is cut in half for each 8 degrees C of increased temperature. Most PC's provide basically no cooling for the hard drive. Often the drives run quite hot.
For the last 15 years, I've put multiple fans on all my drives. For some of them, this resulted in a temperature reduction of about 20 degrees C. I've had no failures since I started doing this; previously I had two drive failures. Not a very scientific study, but the way I look at it, it can't hurt and the cost is minimal.
Note that the cost of a drive failing is NOT just the cost of the drive; it's the cost of the drive plus the cost of the lost data. If you have a good backup system, the cost of lost data can be minimized. If you have a RAID, it can be all but elminated.
Just to provide more data points, I've only replaced a dozen or so drives under warranty in the last couple of years, but I'd say a good quarter or more of those were replaced with an ugrade. I've never gotten a drive older than a couple of years.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Considering both my 400mb drives, the 1.6gb drive and the 3.8gb drive have died, but all after long and faithful service. Every disk from 9gb+ except my Deathstar is still working, but I don't suppose forever.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
an interesting thing to note, i saw a graph of the failure rate of hds against time period - though i cannot discuss where. it starts off with a high failure rate just after purchase, then drops down to a very low level and maintains stable for a long period of time, before increasing again sharply.
:) dont be so cheap! or buy a commercial grade hd that has the 3yr warranty!
interestingly they did not put a scale on the failure rate or the time period, but from what was discussed the initial high failure rate is in the first few months, and the leveling out where there is a very low failure rate, is a considerable time of about 3 years) initially the failure rate is high, because manufacturor testing is only soo limited, it may take 2 months of use before the hd will actually fail, after the initial time period where the bad hds have been weeded out, the failure rate is very low. then by the time it starts to raise sharply - its after about 3-4 years which would have easily made that hd outdated and unuseable to the general market. (sure theres still gonna be people using 120mb hds 10 years after they came out - if they bitch and whinge about them dying, they have an unreasonable expectation for the life of a hd - its like driving a car for 10 years and not expecting it to break down because its worn out)
basically the manufacturors beleive 3yr warranty is not neccessary any more, a 1 year warranty is acceptable as it will cover 95% of warranty claims, and they are trying to reduce the cost of hd's for the 95% of people by not making them pay for the replacements of the 5% that try and claim them 3 years later, when their 4GB hd has to be replaced with a 40gb hd since there are no more 4gbs floating round. sure im happy with the reasoning, but then only aiming to keep 95% of their customers happy is a bit poor, they should still aim for 99.99% because hd's are so vital for the customer.
the other thing to note, is that the smaller warranty period should reduce the price of hds - but hell, i havent seen any considerable drop in price at all since the 1st october! some have actually risen a small amount here in NZ. i thought about it long and hard and realised it can be attributed to a couple of points, - the fluctuating nz dollar (which means ram, hds, cpus) change price every couple of days, and that could it be that the failure rate of hd's is so low, that any price savings from reduced warranty period is negligible and customers would prefere to pay it rather than risk losing data? let me throw some figures about:
say a 80GB hd can be manufactured for $200NZ approx, say the rate of failure for hds is 6% first year, 1% for the next two years following, and 6% for the 4th year and increases (but warranty was only for 3 years so it wont be used in the calculation), and the hd manufacturor wants $20NZ profit after all warranty claims.
these figures are rough, and do not take into compounded failure rates as i cant be bothered calculating all that since it is pitiful and would only complecate what im trying to point out.
$200 + (cost of failures) + profit = selling price
cost of failures = $12 (6% of $200) + $2 (1%of $200 etc) + $2 = $16
So:
$200 + $16 + $20 = $236 retail
now since the cost to have a warranty in the second two years - $4, is so small, the savings that will be passed to customers is pitiful, and thats why there has been little, if any, price drop of hd's in NZ - whats it like overseas?
now say only half that savings of $4 is passed onto the customer, that leaves $2 that the hd manufacturor can pocket themselves. and thats reasonable to suggest, seeing as that mid range and budget hds are a commodity now - the hd manufacturors are making slim margins.
being a computer wholesaler and dealer, selling a hd alone to customers results in very little profit and I rely on selling volumes to actually make a living. mid range ram is also heading that way, and so are mid range cpus....
i thought id just point all this out, and get you guys thinking...
ps. if your bitching about the warranty drop, you should have brought a hd in september, or go find some september stock still covered by 3yr warranty on sale now - search hard though they are round but not for long - ive just sold out the 3yr warranty stock i stockpiled. plus if your still going to be using your 40gb hd in 3-4 years, get real
They can reduce the warranty to 1 year,
:)
but in Germany (and most of Europe) it is
law that any company selling electronic
parts or equipment must give customers
a warranty of 2 Years!!!
Luck we are
I stick extra case fans and drive bay coolers in all my tower cases and have never lost a HD yet (both SCSI and IDE drives) from my non-laptop machines.
However, my old laptop has eaten 2 drives, which makes me think heat is an issue. Since I never use my laptop when it is transit (I use it to take code to/from my ma's house during the holidaze), I'm probably gonna hack up the case and force fit some additional cooling on the drive bay and see if that fixes the problem.
right?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I want my solid state storage dammit!
"they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"
Reliable and cheap products are perfect to offer warranties on. If they are reliable, they're not likely to break down, so the warranty won't be invoked. If they are cheap, you're faced with a low upper limit on the cost if they do break down.
Because of this, long warranties aren't a huge expense. But they make customers a lot happier. So a company should be able to offer the long warranty for minimal cost. After all, if you have the choice between two products, with say a $5 difference, but one has a one year warranty and the other a three- or five-year warranty, which would you pick?
When warranties start dropping, the usual reason is that quality has dropped (or will soon drop) and the manufacturers want to avoid the bill.
Well here's the oppertunity to pitch an idea and as an AC with a 10 post limit no less :) I originally put in a "/." poll. LCDR(liquid cooling done right)Patent pending. Imagine your average tower case with an integrated LCDR on the right side. Inside the case the MB is a litte different. The HHPC(High heat producing chips), are mounted on the backside facing the LCDR. The HHPC's are connected to the LCDR via short heat pipes. The PSU is bypassed into the LCDR to allow the LCDR to come up to an operationl state, before powering up main systems. The HDDs can be mounted onto a chill plate if you will which is parallel with the LCDR unit. The only snag I see is add-on boards and how to cool them. maybe a short length of hose and cooling block for the video card? All the advantages of a LCing setup without the worry of liquid leaking were it's not wanted. So what do you all think?
Ive noticed for a while now how new drives dont last worth a damn.
Dropping warranty length, that just proves my point.
Make crap, weasle out of being responsbile.. and make your consumers buy more often.
Too bad we dont have a choice like we do with software..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I found that a lot of people out there don't take advantage of the warrenty to replace their damaged goods. I've melted a couple AMD CPUs and I always got no-question full replacement every time, within warrenty period, even though we both know deep down it's my fault. :)
:)
That's one thing I love AMD. However, when I talk to other geeks in IRC, to my surpirse I found majority of them would just let the broken hardware, be that cpu, harddrive or rams, sitting in their garage and them blaming their luck, without even think of sending them back to vendor within warrenty period.
I think those vendors shouldn't be worrying too much. The majority of geeks simply don't know/care.
If the drives come down in price enough that RAID becomes just a tad cheaper, we have nothing to worry about, regardless of what the individual drives' MTBF are. A big mirrored array. Piece of cake. Plus you can often get much faster disk accesses too..!
Modern production engineering can produce items to last a specifc time. Car compaines have done this for years. You get the right mix of plastics so they start breaking down in N years and as N gets smaller, the price gets better. If you can save $.02 on a million window lock knobs its only $20,000 but if you do it to all the plastic bits on a car, it will add up to a massive amount of cash.
That old sun equipment runs forever. I've got an old 4 GB (6 disk) Sun storage box doubles as a wind tunnel but has been running for 10 years. I also have two IBM 36 GB 15kRPM disks that have died on me after less than one year. Yet none of the Maxtor or WD iDE drives I've purchased in the same time period have even hiccuped. For now, I'll go with big 5400 RPM IDE drives at great prices, even if the waranty is shorter.
But back to the subject of the post. There's an inconcistency that seems extremely obvious to me. One of the spokesmen contradicted themselves in a single sentence ("they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"). If they're so damn cheap and reliable, why not extend the warranty?
These people walk in with some idea that they never questioned ... just accepted. When they have to justify it, they have no idea what to say! They don't even think about it before they open their mouth. If they can't defend it properly, then maybe they shouldn't be for it.
Mark
Until about a year ago, Western Digital always sent a brand new drive on warranty replacements. NOW they send refurbs (just as Maxtor and IBM have done since forever).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Regardless of actual reliability, if Hyndai is willing to fix my car for 10 years then I can have the confidence that in those 10 years I won't have to wory about the cost of major repairs and possibly be forced to get a new car. It makes perfect sense to me.
GM just doesn't want to warranty vehicles for longer than they currently do. If someone else does not raise the bar on quality, you can be sure that GM (or any manufacturer for that matter) won't make large strides.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
I recently had the misfortune of having to replace a WD 80g. I found learned something I didn't know during the process. The warranty on WD drives run form the date of manufacture and not the date of purchase. I had the drive for a little over 8 weeks before it failed. It was manufactured in June of 2001, WD informed me that I only had 2 years left on the warranty. I know three people that have bought WD 80g drives and all 3 have failed in the first 6 months. I checked the policy at the Maxtor site, 1 year for date of transaction. No more WD for me.
Yeah, right. Right. Remember the WD 6GB? Remember the fact that IBM sold most of this hard drive manufacturing to Hitachi because of lawsuits because of failing drives. Right. Try, IDE is not high quality. Period. And Apple fucked you zealots over hard when they jumped the shark and went IDE.
I laugh at you, and piss on your stupidity.
"http://www.ccmagazine.com/gossip.asp?offset=2
It seems that data-storage business now became the most complex, but rather unprofitable. IBM sold their HDD subsidiary, Quantum was acquired by Maxtor and Fujitsu simply dropped the business without explaining the reasons. Well, now it seems that not only IBM had loads of problems with their hard disk drives.
Everyone in tune with the biz knows IBM hard drives have bad problems. Some techie you are. idiot.
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