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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... :)"
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.
I've replaced two WD drives in the past 10 years, or so. I've also witnessed several friends and family do the same, along with a huge amount while I was a teach. In every case, WD took the drive back, even after 3 years, usually with little explanation. I haven't noticed a higher failure rate, but I would buy based entirely on their support.
In most instances, the older drives were replaced with a larger drive and they were sent for free, before I sent mine, so I could return it in the same box. A couple years ago they even had a return postage sticker for the return trip.
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.
Nope It's SCSI that puts the I in RAID really.
;)
All mission critical RAID systems use some form of SCSI drive (UW, Fibrechannel etc).
This might be partially because of the higher performance with SCSI in general (yeah yeah I know ATA/133 is nice and fast but my 15000 rpm fibrechanel drives are faster
If I toddle down to our server room I find a huge number of RAIDed 18Gb (total 50-60 Tb) SCSI drives and no IDE ones.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
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.