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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... :)"
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.
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
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