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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 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.
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? ]=-
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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...
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