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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... :)"
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add to this that about half the drives we've bought at the office have failed within 2 years ... sure, we got replacements from the manufacturers, but this doesn't obviate the need to restore everything on the replacement drive.
It's not the cost of the replacement drive - it's the inconvenience, etc ... But now, it's going to cost us, not them.
By reducing their warranty to 1 year, they're facing reality, and so should we - in a production environment, swap out your drives every year, before they crap out, and back up your shit as much as possible.
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
A couple of the points you try to make are completely nonsensical.
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.
Or businesses who employ developers to work on applications using Oracle databases, PL/SQL, Visual Basic, etc. Or graphic artists--.EPS files are not chump change, often weighing in as large as 10MB apiece. Last time I checked the sales specs, 40GB is pretty commonplace for a middle-of-the-line desktop PC.
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.
If you really think hard drive manufacturers will bring back three-year warranties because of digital rights management, I want what you're smoking.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
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.
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 :-)
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.
I'd much rather be a slave to a government I have elected than a slave to markets over which I have no powers whatsoever.
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
I have to agree and disagree with you. While the loss of the drive is inconvenience that is not the real problem. The cost of the drive itself is nothing, what is of real value is the data on the drive.
One thing for certain these manufactures rolling back the warrenty on there drives is going to affect the way I do backups. I'm going to do them more often and check them better. I would suggest that every one reading this do the same.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
"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....