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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... :)"
Does anyone really have that many problems with IDE HD's that any more than a 1-year warranty is necessary? I've had most of my drives for 4 years now without a problem!
If this is such a big deal, and if people really care, then some other savvy manufacturer will continue or begin to offer longer warranties and charge a premium for it. If it's not a big deal then noone will move to supply this niche. My expectation is that people who are buying cheap IDE drives aren't likely going to pay a price premium for a longer warranty, and I'm sure this is what the drive companies believe as well.
Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that. Everyone knows that the extended warranties offered at e.g. Circuit City and Best Buy are near sucker deals for the seller of the warranty, so this would be a great way for companies to recoup the cost of warranteeing products for longer. But IDE drives cost so little these days I wonder whether the administrative costs of maintaing such a plan are worth the small premiums chargeable on a small dollar item.
Either way, if you want a longer warranty SOMEONE is going to have to pay for it, and (rightly, I believe) that someone is always going to be the consumer.
I've got quite a few 400MB-4GB drives I've collected over there years which still run great.
On the other hand, I've gone through so many 8GB-40GB drives...
Yet another reason to like compact apps, and OS's.
Is it really legal for three (!) makers to lower their warranties simultaneously? I thought it may fall under some anti-trust law.
If they reduce the warranty to 1 year, they have reduced their overhead, hence the cheaper cost to us to buy them.
I don't think we'll see a reduction in cost at all, they are just trying to recover from the economic recession.
I know why they are dropping the warranty period to 1 year. Because they are all switching to the newer density products and re-tooling the assembly lines they do not want to stock the parts for the older drives (remember you are taxed at end of year on inventory. That includes replacement parts) this allows them to increase their profit margin in a disintegrating economy allow the board of directors to give them selves a higher pay increase so they don't have to cook the books to make big money! IT'S SO SIMPLE!
Please, if any economic decision in a company could be explained in one sentence I'd be impressed to the point of uttering blatherscyte.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Fa(c)e it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.
Exactly...for now. Quality vs. quantity demand is cyclical along with the economy. When times are good, we'll pay whatever the cost for a quality product. Conversly, we want bargains when the economy is uncertain. Like now.
Wait a year or so after things pick up and you'll see these same manufactures offering "premium" models with longer warranties and a much smaller offering of low-end product.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
From what I've heard, Samsung drives are the most reliable ones around (.01% RMA rate, I've been told). They also don't seem to plan to reduce their warranty, which is currently three years.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.
It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?" Let's see - the thing that all components of your entire computer, inside and out connects to, and you want it to be the CHEAPEST component? {SIGH!}
That settles it. No warranties offered for stupidity.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
It's not the producer who has to give a 2yr warranty, it's the retailer. Notice something strange here?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
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.
I don't know how many people I speak for, but I know I speak for my friends. I don't "want it cheap, and now", I want it inexpensive and when it's reliable. I'm the kind of person who would spend a few bucks more and buy the Apple computer, the Sony TV and compact fluorescent light bulbs for my home.
Obviously, I'm not in the majority, but I don't particularly care for the heat of SCSI hard drives in lore, and all my current equipment has IDE (with longer warranties). I want a high end "prosumer" IDE hard drive with a 5 year warranty. It may or may not be in use the whole 5 years, but I certainly want it to be my choice. If that means I don't get terrabytes of storage, that's okay. I don't honestly have much of a use beyond 10GB anyway. If I wanted terrabytes of storage, I'd get a tape drive. If I wanted high speed, I'd get a SCSI drive and adapter. Cheap, low power, modest speeds and high reliability are what make IDE worthwhile. Isn't it IDE that puts the I in the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?
Yes that's right. Germany only recently (1.1.2002) passed a law, that mandates a minimum warranty of 2 years for every product sold here. This was done to be more in line with EU-laws, so I guess the manufacturers can't pull this in countries of the European Union.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I've had two drive failures in the last couple years on my home PC. Both were Maxtor drives. Both had 3-year warranties. Both failed in the last six months of the warranty. Both times, Maxtor replaced the drive with an identical unit. You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that. So I see this change (as a previous poster suggested) as primarily a way to reduce their stock of outdated drives. Why should they want to keep a stock of 10Gb drives around when all they make now are 40 and 80s?
One other consideration. WE are pushing THEM for bigger storage, smaller form factor, faster drives. To make this happen, they have to make design compromises. You can only fit so many bits so tightly together. Seems to me that over time, the failure rate will tend to increase for this reason alone, regardless of the quality of the units.
I believe the analysis above by another poster was correct - although it was marked "Funny" - it's the overclockers, or at least the hacker types - who probably experience the highest failure rates, as they push more and more hot equipment in to a small space. I had cooling issues with my drives and would not be surprised to find it was a contribution to the failures. Anyone with military or indudustrial experience in the Reliability field will tell you there's a direct correlation between heat and failure rates. Just a few degrees of temperature rise can double the component failure rate.
One last thought... as prices fall, maybe our response should be "RAID". Pay the same net price, get redundancy.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
If drives are so good, people don't need a warranty, then why aren't they extending the warranty?
Question: Why do companies offer extended warranties on any item?
Answer: They make a profit on it.
Question: How do they make a profit on extended warranties?
Answer: They know what kind of failure rate to expect, and they know for the first few years any electrical item will not break.
They're only offering you the warranty because they make money on it. They only make money on it if the item does not break. If drive makers were that sure of their products, and their failure rate for, say, 2 years use, were incredibly low, then a 2 year warranty should hardly cost them anything. The more drives that fail, the higher their cost! So if their drives are so good they don't need a warranty, the drives are so good the company won't have to replace them and a longer warranty won't cost them diddly.
Is there a user-filled database with hard disk reliability experiences?
If enough people contribute to such a thing, and do it right, it meight be a good statistics tool.
Yes and no. The two-year-warranty minimum is required by consumer protection laws in Europe, so this applies only when selling to end users. I'm not sure if there's a Europe-wide minimum warranty that applies when selling to business customers. In Germany it's one year, I think.
So what this means is that PC builders will purchse drives at a one-year-warranty from the manufacturer, then have to sell the whole system with a two-year-warranty to the end users. If anything breaks after the first year, the PC builder will have to pay for the new hard drive since they will not get a replacement from the manufacturer.
In other words, the warranty costs will be added to the price by the retailers, not by the manufacturers. And hard drives will (probably) become less reliable, since the manufacturer no longer has any economic benefits from making them more reliable. The one who loses is the consumer, especially those who don't make regular backups (i.e. just about everyone).
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that.
I don't expect Western Digital to give me a bigger drive. However, in two occassions with me, once with my brother, once with my father, and numerous times with past customers, that's exactly what they did. Sometimes, even past the warranty time. That alone, is the reason I have always paid a couple bucks more and bought the WD drives.
* That may seem like a large number of failed drives, but considering the volume of drives we've bought, it's around 10% and they all happened after 2+ years of constant use.
The Deathstars have a flawed manufacturing process and use broken platters. You can't argue around that, despite the circumstantial "evidence" that you have provided.
All three major Hard drive manufacturers are cutting back to a one year warranty at the same time. From here, that looks like collusion: a hard drive trust. There should be an anti-trust investigation of Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital. The only reason to cut back warranty is because the reliability of the product in question is taking a nosedive. Maybe this is by design. It looks like planned obsolescence. In the seventies, American car manufacturers wanted us to buy a new car every two years, so they designed cars that would fall apart after two years. When they didn't even last one, Toyota, Datsun, and Honda took over the market. Will Fujitsu now do that in hard drives?
How ya like dat?
Consumers buy a new computer. They expect it to 'work'. They don't want to have to be back every two months with another problem, and they certainly don't expect to lose the resumees they've typed and recipes they've collected. I mean, who would?
So we're quoting out a new system. We throw in a CD-RW and a handful of CD-RW discs. They ask why. What do we tell them? "You should back up your data so that you're prepared for your hard drive failing miserably."?!? Sure, we could make up an excuse about power surges, water damage, etc. but they still pry, and they tend to determine that we're trying to sell them a lemon and then put them to work for it.
We had one customer, a business owner, who experienced a bad hard drive (Western Digital 80GB ATA100 7200RPM). So I sold him a few CD-RWs to use in his 32x12x40 CD-RW drive to back up his important data. Some four months later he was in for a copy of his invoice for his insurance company because his computer was stolen. "Did they steal the CD-RWs?" I asked. Timidly, he informed me that he hadn't gotten around to backing up.
See, even after catastrophic failure people can't be convinced that they have to back up their important files daily or weekly.
Ideally, we'd sell atleast one computer to all of our business clients with a 20/40GB Travan drive in it, they'd allow us to configure a nightly backup routine, and we convince the receptionist to swap labelled tapes every night on her way out the door. But hey, that would make sense. Of course, customers see a potential $2k bill for such a setup and they balk.
I'd love tell them "I told you so!", but that would lose us a client, rather than teach them a lesson. They'd just wind up spending money at another store and not backing up their data.
At home I have a backup regimen that includes a 4AM cronjob, weekly, that archives all my variable data (home directories, mail spools, etc directories, my hosted websites, etc.), and I back all of these files up on to two CD-RW discs; one labelled "Current Week" and one labelled "Previous Week". When I get a chance, I'll be utilizing the Rsync incremental backup solution and archiving the current weekly snapshot, and saving the previous week's burned snapshot, like I'm doing now but better. {smile}
With a quick'n'dirty script and some discipline (store your files only in designated places, not all over your drive) and a weekly half-hour routine, anybody can keep their file loss to a minimum.
We're starting to offer in-home tutoring to customers, perhaps this will be a special promotion. "How to mitigate data loss 101".
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I once had a Seagate die on me for no reason whatsoever, boot sector got buggered, Windows was a pain to boot, and eventually, after replacing, it wasn't even usuable to just store things on. Sure, you could copy data to it, it was another thing if you wanted to copy that data back again, or open it.
/. RAID is not really a great option for backup.
there was also a computer in our office and one night, as we were getting ready to go, someone could smell burning. Upon investigation we discovered it was coming from the computer. We turned it off, left for the night and I examined it in the morning. I couldn't see the problem, but 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? There was a big scorch mark from the centre of the chip, and then a long line of burning across to the edge of the chip and then onto the pcb. I contacted Maxtor (they bought Qauntum, in case you're unaware) and they wouldn't do anything with it and they pointed me in the direction of a company who would rescue the data if I so wished. After finding out the price, I declined. If I remember correctly, Maxtor was aware of this problem with this drive and this disturbed me a little. If we'd left a little earlier, maybe that computer would have gone up in flames and taken the entire office with it.
I now own a Western Digital in my own computer, I'm happy with it but Hard Drives are probably the single most important part of a computer in terms of time, effort, work, etc. Hard Drive warranties should be 3 years minimum, these companies know damn well that they'll last 12 months fine (most times), it's when you get to the 2 year - 3 year period you're drive is likely to fail.
As Hard Drives get bigger, and now that the warranty is reduced, what options of backup are there that are simple and cost effective? I want to be able to put an identical drive in a machine and set it to mirror Drive A every night at a certain time. Can RAID do this? (Sorry, new to this whole RAID thing). From what I have read before on
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
That in Tom's article, there wasn't a question (answered anyway), by the manufacturers on how the failure rate changes between 1 year and 3 years.
Sure they gave low return numbers like 8 in 1000, but I'd really like to know how those numbers change toward the 3-year mark instead of just at the 1-year mark.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Here's a conspiracy theory for you. What if the companies are getting wise to the fact that users intentionally "crash" their drives every 2.5 years to get a new drive for "free". I've seen discussions of this type quite a bit. The other issue here is why aren't people backing up their data. I've never had the need for a data recovery service, because I make multiple backups at least once a day. Quit whining and use some common sense.
No- what is sad is that the EU has no faith in a market economy, so they go running in there setting all kinds of unnatural limitations. If you take a beginning econ class, you will see that ridiculous things like a mandatory 2-year warranty on all products are what harm the economy the most. Let the markets sort things like this out by themselves.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
I think it is time that RAID arrays become standard on all PCs since HDs are so cheap and the data that's on them so hard to recover from a crashed disk.
Back in the day I bought my first drive, an 80 Meg (yeah, MEG.) Quantum Prodrive, which was mounted on what was commonly refered to as a HardCard. Being out of the airflow it soon cooked the bearings. The drive still works, as it's on my old Amiga 2000, I haven't replaced it as of yet (though a WD 424 Meg drive is ready and waiting) I leave it out and have to give it a few quick twists on the vertical axis to loosen up the bearings in order for it to spin up. It's gotta be 13 years old by now and works ok aside from that. It does, and has always run very hot, which is another reason I leave it out. I'm not sure hotter is the case with newer drives, so much as tolerances, since densities are up to 180G (which you can buy right now) and more critical factors are in play to achieve such.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
BTW the 40 GB special edition drive is only $8.00 (US-wholesale) over the regular edition 7200 rpm drive with 2 MB cache. I wouldn't put a drive in one of my clients computers that didn't come with a 3 year warranty. I was ready to switch to a different manufacturer until I saw the lower price difference on the mid-sized drives.
I do, however totally agree with you here. There are places to cut corners, but....
Old7
Every drive I've had has outlasted the computer/OS into which it's installed, which becomes essentially unusable after 3 or 4 years. Since I work for one of those drive companies, I get the crappy pre-production "let's try this recipe" units.
It's tough to make a profit in this biz. Zero to 20% profit margins and a 9 month product life would send most Harvard buusiness school grads screaming to join a monastary. HP gave up. IBM gave up. We have endless meetings about using a $0.41 part vs. a $0.40 part. We sometimes have to sell drives at a loss to keep from writing off a warehouse of ok-last-week/obsolete-this-week products.
How many major drive companies have you seen startup in the last 20 years? And how many have gone belly up??? Disk drives are toasters -- a commodity product sold at Walmart next to the cheese-whiz and britney spears posters.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I had this WD hard drive that kept failing. It was installed as hdb, and I was using it as my Linux drive. It kept failing with corrupt file system after fsck was run. I was about to decide that it was totally hopeless, when I happened to reformat my system so that /boot was on hda. Since then it hasn't failed once.
Now several things changed at that same time (new version of Linux, etc.), so I don't know exactly where the problem was. But it clearly wasn't the drive. So no matter how reliable the drive was, there would have been RMA expenses associated with it. (As it happened, I wasn't seriously thinking of returning it, as I got it at a bargain price.) But this is one case where a reliable drive wouldn't mean that a longer warranty period would be without expense.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you live nearby the Seagate HD factory, like I used to, you'd know many people who worked in the plant, like I do.
And talking with people from the plant, you'd hear many "stories". Mainly about QC, or rather, the lack of.
For quite sometime now, I've quitely been waiting for this "cut the warranty period" bomb to drop, for I know that it's suicidal for _anyone_ to provide a 5 Year warranty for products that are SO LOUSILY MADE.
The return rate for all those dead drives must've been really high, and costly, or the HD firms won't do such a stunt which must've cost them tons of BAD PUBLICITY.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Another zinger: I feel like I'm reading that useless marketing crap on the insert in the packaging that no one reads. I find it kind of sad that Toms makes no mention of this doubletalk.
AccountKiller
NewEgg has an ASUS NForce 220-based motherboard (Asus A7N266-VM) for $72.99, shipping inclusive. It's a mATX, not full-size ATX, so it has only 3 PCI slots next to the AGP slot. But considering that unless you are a hideously hardcore gamer, the onboard video, audio and LAN are quite usable indeed, you might not need much expandability.
A killer board for less it costs for a PC Chips POS? If you do a little shopping around you'll find it. http://www.pricewatch.com/ is your friend. The board still shows as available at NewEgg. Just a heads-up...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Motion and friction are great for sex, but terrible for data storage and retrieval.
....
Hard drive crash? Hell, I'm old enough to remember when cassette tapes crashed
What we really need: RAM drives the size of a Monolith.
Stop spinning and start grinning!
-kgj
They shouldn't have to.
The only reason people should have to back up their data is to guard against unavoidable physical damage -- theft, flood, whatever. The probability of a hard drive failing should be so damned low that it's not even on the scale.
Hard drive manufacturers shouldn't have to cut warranties because their drives will only last for one year. People depend on these things; they should last effectively forever under normal circumstances. If they don't, the manufacturers shouldn't be selling them, or should be making clear which drives are lower-spec and reliable, and which have go-faster stripes but will fail in six months and need replacing.
IMNSHO, providing a verified statement of the expected lifetime of a drive based on testing, and a warranty to match (which pays for everything, including compensation for downtime) should be a legal requirement. This is necessary to protect the vast majority of the computer-using population, who wouldn't even conceive of the fact that the box they're spending a four-figure sum on will break in less than a year. The hard drive manufacturers all know damn well how to meet this criteria, it's just that their greed and spec sheets have overtaken their willingness to produce a quality product.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.