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... :)"

Comments

I blame the overclockers

[Hairy_Potter]

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.

Re:IBM still going

[Blkdeath]

that's because IBM isn't making HDD's anymore. they sold that part of the company to hitachi.

Maybe Big Blue actually learned a lesson from their DeathStar line of drives. I suppose there's a first time for everything, huh?

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 ...

Re:This is stupid

[tzanger]

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.