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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... :)"
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.
Just a moment, I've been booted for more than 11 hours - I'll have to elaborate tomorrow when I can turn my computer on again ...
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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!
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?
Whatever man, I spelled it write!
One time where I used to work, our supplier accidentally shipped us a whole box of them (About 20 drives). We decided to keep them and sell them for profit. About two months later (After we had built and sold about 10 machines with those drives), they quickly started to come back to the shop. So with the 10 we had left, we replaced them all.
I think that's called Karma. You ripped off your supplier, and actually took a hit on profit because of these drives.
I was running one until last weekend, then the hard drive died on the server...
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!"
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
:-)
What do you mean, shocked??? You just said yourself it was a Quantum Fireball, sounds to me like it lived up to it's name!
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.