Slashdot Mirror
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!
Seagate and Western Digital are both going to 1 yr warranties for the major potion of their product lines. WD will keep a 3yr on the Special Edition drives.
As of now....IBM is the only company to not announce a change in drive warranty...my guess is that will change once they introduce their new drives.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
One that transaltes marketing speak to relaity?
e.g.
Drives are so reliable that you don't need a long warrantee - Drives are so unreliable we can't afford to long warrentee.
We need to stay competitive - This will allow our board of directors to take a nice holiday.
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.
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? ]=-
Check the Register for more info on drives (Hitachi, I think) dying by the thousands. Supposedly these duds only shipped in Europe, but I'm not sure.
It's funny - I've been having some Western Digital drives fail on me somewhat quickly, usually in their warranty period. Yet a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball I got in an Acer Aspire way back (~7 years ago) when I Didn't Know Any Better(TM) still works - I fired up Mandrake on it last week for kicks. Not that anything good would fit on it...
Schnapple
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.
Poster hit it on the nose. Prices won't go down any. This was D-U-M dumb. They say it's to be more competitive, which is a lie - if everyone does it, there's no competitive advantage. All this allows them to do is pocket the money they'd otherwise squirrel away for replacements.
Yes, they make a little more per drive, but this is like that frickin Pizza Hut/Dominos price increase - a hidden price increase.
I think I'll be looking for a different manufacturer of drives (I've had 2 go bad in the past 3 years, none before that). I'm glad my mobo has a RAID controller in it.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
aren't you? :)
The next time you read someone refering to "The Slashdot Effect," well, you'll know what they're talking about.
KFG
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.
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.
You have a two year dealer warranty in the EU, mandated by law.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, let's see... They're having too many drives returned on their warranty plan, so the idea here is to shorten the warranty period and leave the customers with dead drives and no recourse.
That's definitely progress in American corporate culture. Maybe soon they can start charging extra for drives that will go into multi=processor machines.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway
Please! What do you think it is, a Hyundai?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
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.
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.
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 :-)
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)
People pointing out spelling and grammar errors on /. are about as observant as people who point out how many bugs/security flaws there are in windows.
You could select posts with spelling and/or grammatical errors with a dotted-line and get every other post.
Your time would be much better spent thinking of something useful to post.
Anyway, eveyone is going on about how hard drives are 'near disposable' nowadays... Perhaps the hardware itself is, but the data stored on the drives is quite often more valuable than the media it is stored on.
I really couldn't care if my sound card died, it's cheap to replace, and I can get a better one without any loss of personal data. Same for speakers, etc... Losing a hard drive can be quite distressing to average users, who don't have a backup system implemented.
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.
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.
...my philips 107s monitor barfed just one month after its 3 year warranty. which is really fscking horrid as i have 14" adi monitors that still go after 10 years!!
Can someone find a way to make such units (monitors and harddrives) fail *DELIBERATELY* , but seemingly *UNDELIBERATELY* so we can get new ones for free?
yeah, that's lame... but isn't having a $300 monitor die after 3 years isn't? And what's the deal with the 1 year warranty on some very expensive flat monitors?!
I do not know who said it first, but he was probably so right it hurts... A warranty guarantees the product will fail right after the warranty ends.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
They don't. They almost always send you a refurb of the same product. As a matter of fact, I had an 8.4 GB Maxtor fail on me, and sure enough- they send the exact same drive, refurbished, and resealed in an ESD bag. And the drive was at least 4 years old. They aren't going to send you a newer product when they have boxes of refurbished drives that will still make you buy new products when they become too slow for modern software. Just try running a modern OS on an old ATA 33. It'll make you want to upgrade if you've ever had a taste of modern 7200 RPM IDE drives, or even faster SCSI drives.
I normally never buy those types of extended warranties. It's been my experience that (with electronics), the part either works and lasts forever or it's broken out of the box.
One exception -- I received an iPod for my birthday. It's the 20GB model and my wife purchased it at CompUSA. The extended warranty they sell you for the iPod is the same warranty they sell you for a regular 20 GB hard drive. So, for $20 it's really not a bad deal for an extra year of coverage.
As below, so above and beyond, I imagine drawn beyond the lines of reason. Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
Any person having knowledge of meetings between executives of the companies involved in the months prior to this announcement should contact the FBI.
If everyone has to play under the same rules, than it's not really a hostile enviroment.
Besides, only the companies that produce sh*t would have to worry under such a regime. While it is a nice fantasy to assume that all consumers are rational and have perfect information, it simply isn't so.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Same annoncement (3 year to 1 year warranty), on same product (ATA IDE harddrive), on the same day (1 oct 2002). Ring the bell to anyone?
:)
In the normal way of thing, one would have changed is warranty and the 2 others after a couple of months would have realized it was a good idea and would had done the same, not the 3 on the same day!
Secondly if only one of them would have changed is warranty customers and OEMs would have boycut the manufacturer just like IBM a couple of months ago. But now the 3 biggest harddrive manufacturer have changed their policies so you have not a lot of other reliable harddrive manufacturers to choose from (so far less boycut possible).
Come on, go fill a "File a Complain Online" on the http://www.ftc.gov/ Federal Trade Commision you are only 2 click away.
Take 5 minutes to denonce this collusion between the 3 manufacturers (Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate), the problem is not that they drop the warranty but that they all agreed to reduce the choice and/or the price/quality ratio of the same products(ATA IDE hard-drives) thus reducing the customer in is fundamental right to choose the best product and to be in a fair trading country.
enough
I've got to believe that the rapid increase in storage capacity for ATA/IDE drives is going to create drives which have to undergo a great deal more stress in daily operation. Manipulating 120 GB of data using the same footprint (or an even smaller one) as drives with a tenth of the capacity just a few years ago will create the need for higher quality components and tighter quality control.
At the same time, however, the price per gig has come down quite a bit and the manufacturers are going to have to squeeze something out in order to maintain profit margins. What has gotten squeezed out or reduced? It seems that durability is suffering, which drives warranty liability costs up. SCSI drives have largely maintained their price points, so I would think the quality of their components has remained high and therefore the warranties can remain as they are.
I also wonder how much the reduced length of product cycles is playing into this. It's harder to replace a product with an identical one two years after original purchase when four or five updates have come since, taking space on the shelves and in catalogues.
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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.
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
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?
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 you don't.
At least not on all products, many products simply can NOT last at least 2 years of use, or even storage.
Food products, some tape, paints, cleaners, batteries.
A helium balloon will leak out within a few days.
My point is that this law can't reasonably apply to all goods, not that there isn't a law that applies to some goods.
I really want to see this law, I'd love to keep returning the flowers I bought for my wife.
One dozen roses, lasts for 2 years, I like that idea.
According to Best Buy's statements, extended warranties are their MOST profitable product. (which anyone should have guessed from how much they push them)
;)
To get them to shut up about it, I usually ask "Well, if there really is such a high risk of failure that I need to spend $40 on a warranty for a $200 system, maybe I should rethink buying the (what must be crap) $200 system?" It's a funny look on their faces...
http://kered.org
How do you prove it was defective, not that it wore out.
Hard drive bearings fail, or the suface demagnetizes.
Is it a defect? Or was it a crappy design that wouldn't last all that long anyway?
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.
I recently RMA'd two 9.1G SCSI SCA drives. They failed within three months of each other in the same array. I sent them back in a Seagate box with the preformed foam and egg crate. After IBM received the drives, they sent them back, broken still and said that I had voided the warrenty because one of the sides of the foam casing wasn't two inches thick. It was an inch and a half plus. That is rediculous. I know have two worthless IBM drives with no warrenties and don't work. I don't see how that = the best with warrenty issues.
MR
Whatever man, I spelled it write!
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
...that THG didn't just scan the old warranty and Photoshop a 1 over the 3 that used to be there, then write a misleading article on the subject?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
That's what Tom's says. C'mon... Last week I bought a 40 gig 7200 RPM Western Digital drive for 59 bucks (at Circuit City no less). How can they be making any $$ selling drives at these prices? What frankly bothers me is the lousy quality I've seen from drives of late. In the past year I've had to RMA hard drives from every computer I own! This is a real pain in the ass, not so much for losing the drive itself, but for losing what's ON the drive. Though all my important things are stored on my mirrored server (or in two places on each computer on two different physical drives), I'm sure I don't have to tell you how long it takes to get a computer back to where it was before a crash! I guess the major drive manufacturers are making their products cheaply, selling them cheap and warranting them cheaply too. If you want better drives, you pay more for them. want to bet that at least one of them comes out with a 'premium' drive soon?
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 work for a largish school district, and we have about 2-3 new WD hard drives crap out every day. Since they have a one year warranty we can get them replaced through a local distibutor very quickly and without hassle.
This is also tells you how crappy western digital hard drives are becoming....
-Tolerate my intolerance
Seagate
Western Digital
Maxtor
Quantum
UNIX/Linux Consulting
The big unasked question was "How will this save you money?". The drive manufacturers all said that the vast majority of drive returns happen within 1 year. If that's true how can they save a significant amount of money by changing the warranty period?
The most reasonable conclusion for the motivation for changing the warranty period is that it cuts an economically significant number of people off from getting a replacement for a failed drive. Perhaps there is another explanation, its not obvious to me what that is. Tom's didn't ask a direct question on this point and nothing else in the article provides good evidence for any other conclusion.
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
Drives fail, yes. But when a company has known manufacturing defects, lie about it for months, and still insists on endless RMAs with *more defective drives* instead of working products refunds then I'll never do business with them again.
I ordered 4 drives, only 1 of which lived beyond 10 days (and still runs) and each time I RMAed them, I kept having to send at least 1 drive back because it too was defective. Different machines, so the o'erclocking flame doesn't apply.
Drives fail, that's life. You RMA, replace, restore data, and move on. But IBM - in my opinion - defrauded me and a whole bunch of other people. They can rot in hell; I'll never buy from them again.
In the past I've had hard drives last 4+ years without any problem whatsoever. However, I've had TWO hard drive failures (on drives from two different manufacturers) this year, both on drives under 3 years old. When I bought these drives, I did not try to go for the "cheapest" by any means.
It is quite obvious that these drives are being manufactured cheaper than ever, and are more prone to failure than ever. Why else would this warranty be reduced. If you ask me, consumer grade drives are likely being manufactured to fail earlier so that people go out and buy new drives with more space on them than they need.
This is even better for the companies like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc. who many customers who will just buy whole new computers.
As many others have said, I'd rather see the manufacturers focus on consumer grade drives that are of higher quality rather than trying to push the size envelope. I certainly don't need a 120 GB hard drive. I had a hard time figuring out how I would fill my 60 GB drive. I usually burn large files that I don't need to CD-R after a while.
Joe User, who doesn't use his drive for anything other than storing word documents, certainly doesn't need larger drives. He also doesn't need to have his drive fail on him every 2 years.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I didn't know Oracle was getting into the hard drive business.
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).
Visitors to StorageReview.com have been aware of this for over a month (but then, SR is all about that type of thing)
Many SCSI drive manufacturers are considering reducing warranties to 3 years as well.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Drive cooling is wonderful. IF you like noise. I bought one of the half-height drive cover fan units - three small fans side by side that blow over the drive. Sounded really neat at the store. Sounded like a leaf blower when I installed it.
I leave my PC on full-time. I set the drives to sleep after a half hour or so. So they tend to cool down to ambient when I'm away from the machine. I didn't see any reason to cool a cool drive, and have to listen to it full time.
So I built a temperature sensitive circuit to try and limit the noise. I figured that as the drive heated up, I could spool up the fans accordingly, and keep it quiet longer. There were two problems, one fixable, the other not. The fixable problem was that I pulled the supply voltage from the drive power connectors, but my circuit was not voltage regulated - so as the processor load increased (yep, cpu cycle load), the fan speed changed. I could tell how busy the CPU was by listening to the fan pitch. A simple voltage regulator might fix that, although I'm surprised the voltage changes that much. The unfixable problem was that the drive heats up so rapidly (maybe one minute from idle/cool to spinning/hot) that essentially as soon as I sat down and got the modem dialed up it was howling away.
So I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of air-cooled drives. Maybe a high-volume low speed fan for the entire case, vented near the drive, would work better. But the simplest solution is probably to stop mounting the drive at the TOP of the case, where the heat accumulates, and instead put it at the bottom.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
"they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"
If they're so reliable, the manufacturers have little to loose by giving a 3 year warranty, right?
I guess they have done their sums, figured out how much they will save by dropping 2 years off the warranty and like what they see. Plus they might be trying to give themselves a boost after the enconomy slump.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
in case you haven't heard, even though hard drive platters are getting more and more dense, they're also getting a hell of a lot cheaper... I bet the cost of manufacturing hard drives is laughable.. I would be more worried about platter manufacturers going out of business.
:)
Seems odd that so many major manufacturers make the same move simultaneously.
Although, a Maxtor or a WD drive with 1 year warranty is still better than a JTS (or similar) drive that you'd have to replace every few months
--- sig moved for great justice.
That statement is incorrect. Anybody that puts together a solid business model would have warrenty costs built into the product's original cost.
It may be true that they are only making $1 one each drive at this moment, but now they will make $2 on each drive because they will have to build in less warrenty cost into the product's price.
Also consider this. They have reduced the warrenty period from 3 years to 1 year
Now, they will make it so the drives only last 2 years (1 year less than their previous warrenty required and one more year than the current one requires). Any one that can't see the basic business behind this decision needs to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)
I wish I was the V.P. that got credit for this lesser warrenty idea
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
A company has to put $XX in the bank and not touch it to cover their warranty costs. If they reduce the warranty, they can use the $$ on other things, such as R&D to make more reliable drives. They probabally aren't spending much on R&D or they would have fixed heat problems already.
They aren't making much on the drives now, as they have to pay IBM or whomever owns the patent on MR heads, which cuts into the botom line. If they can squeeze a few more cents out of the drive, the company's books will look better. If they don't fix reliability issues, the companies name will go up in smoke, so they have to get the R&D money from somewhere.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Maxtor and WD do both offer lines of drives that will retain their 3-year warranty. Luckily for me, the high end line is where I buy my drives.
That said, while this is no more than anecdotal evidence, I've never had more problems with my hard drives until recently. About two years ago, I bought a Maxtor 7200rpm 40 gig drive. About a year later, it had gotten so loud (a high pitched whine) that it was starting to give me headaches. So I called Maxtor, got it replaced, and sure enough about a year later, the replacement was doing the same exact thing. So I called again, got another replacement. Installed it, partitioned it, and when it reached the end of the format, I hear *kachunk, kachunk, kachunk*. Dead. So I call again, get _another_ replacement. This one's held up so far, but time will tell how long that lasts.
Similarly, I decided to buy a WD 120gig 7200 rpm drive back in May. I buy it, take it home, use it for 3 days, and then my motherboard can no longer find the drive during boot. So I return it. Still needing space, I find a sale on the 1200JBs a few weeks later, so I buy one of those. It's been running ok, but just a few days ago, I noticed it's starting to make the same high-pitched whine the Maxtors did. Hopefully WD's support is as hassle-free as Maxtors (I haven't called them yet). I thankfully haven't lost any data yet, but I'm getting really fed up with having to replace my drives all the time.
Most drives will withstand a lot of force when not powered up - do a google search:
For example (google: hard drive impact rating) gives you this:
<quote>The IBM Travelstar 10GT offers industry-leading capacity (10 gigabytes) and an industry-leading shock rating of 600 G/2 ms (nonoperating) and 125 G/2 ms (operating)</quote>
Mind you, I still freak out at (read: give shit to) people who actually try to move their desktop PC while it's powered up, so they can plug something in.
Those of you who defend IBM do so wrongly. During the 'bad run' if IDE GXP based drives, which I believe from what I have read invloved GXP 60 and 75 ranges, IBM behaved irresponsibly, and should have come clean and advised customers as soon as it knew it had problems.
After a considerable amount of time, they issued new doctrines, such as 'drives must not be used for more than 11 hours per day'.
In addition, they did not handle warranty coverage correctly, nor customer advice correctly.
Users who shipped bad drives got either the same drive back after IBM had used their utility on the drive, or a replacement.
The joke was if you were a customer they advised you to wipe, using their downloadable tool, and by common account within 3 weeks the grinding noises and data loss returned.
Many people got returned drives, and then lost data again when the new drives failed.
Sending out bad batches is one thing. Sending out bad families of drives is a new scale altogether. Add to that the warranty handling, the multiple returns, the failure to make public the actual issues. The failure to withdraw a faulty product they knew damn well was loosing customers data. Resupplying the customer with said same drives with pretty clear knowledge the drive was a likely failure. Lastly the issue of new guidelines making the problem the customers (ie, daily no more use than 11 hours).
I had 5 of these drives. 3 were replaced. Out of a total of 8 drives 7, that is 7, died, made grinding noises, lost data, etc etc.
The bottom line is now this. I do NOT know if I can trust IBM disk again. I am neutral when it comes to brand. But given that IBM have not publicly accepted the problems, or given the true reasons for failure, OR SAID , on our new family of drives we cured the problem by X,Y,Z, that means until I know for an absolute FACT that IBM make IDE harddisk that are utterly bombproof, I doubt I or anyone I advise will buy an IBM IDE 3.5" harddisk in the future.
I just do not dare to put my data on their drive, and that is the bottom line.
It is a shame as they, looking at www.scan.co.uk come at a good price, good (speed) performance, and one huge gigantic stone round their neck care of the GXP issue in the past.
AdmV
We`re all equal
Let me see now, the 3 of the 4 remaining major hard drive manufacturers (IBM being the other) all announce that their warranty periods will be reduced to THE SAME 1 YEAR, EFFECTIVE THE SAME DATE. There's nothing suspicious about that, is there?
Conference call :
Chuck: "Profits are down. How do we save money? Jack, any suggestions?"
Jack: "Well Chuck, we could all reduce our warranty periods. Viola - more bucks for us. What do you think Bill?"
Bill: "I'm in, I'm in. More money - yeah! Besides, after we finish buying the other two of you, we won't have to harmonize that policy!"
Jack: "OK, what else can we do to get the profits up? We need to have a reason to all start raising prices now. They're too low per meg and until Gatesy gets that Palladium thing out, or the RIAA gets its head out of its butt, people are gonna start asking why they need bigger drives. Look what's happening over at Intel - they've had to put millions into seeding compute intensive applications so they can sell the high-end processors that really make the money."
Chuck: "Hey... do you think we could create a world-wide shortage of, I don't know..."
Bill: "Iron oxide?"
Chuck: "Bill, you're a freaking genius!"
Sigs are bad for your health.
"A company has to put $XX in the bank and not touch it to cover their warranty costs. If they reduce the warranty, they can use the $$ on other things, such as R&D to make more reliable drives."
Not true. A company does NOT have to accumulate & set aside cash to cover future warranty claims. A company must accrue the expected future warranty expenses, record that amount as liability, and book the increase in the total accrued warranty liability as an expense (or to income, if total warranty liability decreased).
Future warranty claims have no effect on curent cash, just on current income. Big difference.
For WD, IBM, Seagate and the like, this is an easy wasy to increase their current net income & EPS. It will have an effect on future cash to the extent that the company has to use otherwise-revenue producing drives to service warranty claims. It has no effect on current cash. It DOES have an effect on current and future net income.
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.
These guys seem to have forgotten what business they are in. They are in the business of providing persistant data storage, not data storage for 1 year.
I understand that storage is a competitive market with low margins. This move is probably intended to reinforce the distinction between SCSI and IDE drives, a distiction that has been lost over the years, but it is the wrong way to do it.
If they tell me that warrantys longer than 1 year are costing them too much money, then they are telling me that a significant number of drives are failing from 2-3 years out. That doesn't make me feel good, even with my home user hat on.
I keep a system for a couple of years. The prospect of data loss in that time frame. Using drive failure (and data loss) as incentive to upgrade is a bad idea.
Given the fast pace of development on hard drives, the HD manufacturers are making a choice not to support any drives older than 1 year. This is an important point - as having to support these drives means having to have a stock of refurb drives in the same size range, or larger, to replace bad drives that come in years 2 and 3 of the old warranty period.
Consider if someone with a 10gb drive from 3 years ago had that drive crap out today, and got a replacement from Maxtor for the price of shipping it to them. I know I did - my sister's iMac died, and since the internal drive was from maxtor, I took advantage of the 3 yr warranty to get the drive replaced for $8. The time I spent with the phone operator, the time the warehouse had to use to find, package, and ship the replacement, and the space the replacement took up while it sat on the shelf... that's all overhead folks.
What are the chances that your $140 120gb drive will be worth anything close to half what you paid for it in 3 years?
With that said, I wish Maxtor would take a cue from WD and allow consumers to purchase "insurance" on their drives, to extend the warranty up to 3 years. I'd like to use those 5400 rpm fluid bearing drives for production use (quiet, and should run cooler, and thus last longer), but I don't know if I can trust those drives if nobody is willing to stand behind them for more than a year... Yes, I'd buy the more expensive drives - if they made one running at 5400 rpm or slower!!!
Yeah, but Windows works after it's installed. When I installed Redhat I had to compile a custom kernel before it would even think about seeing half my hardware/disk partitions, change about 9 configuration files (including having to tell XWindows that resolutions my monitor can run at and what GFX card I have - even though they're both PnP) recompile Netscape and ask about 4 people for help. *OR* I could install Windows and everything will be working in about 20 minutes.
You can look at this 2 ways...
1: I'm a fucking idiot and I need idiotproofness.
2. I have work to do and/or a life - so I don't want to spend ages getting an operating system working.
That's just me - some people might find a broken (new) installation a really fun exciting challenge that they can fix. I don't.
I haven't tried a large Linux distribution recently, so I'll give it another go before complaining again, but I'm pretty sure I still won't want to use it as my main OS (yet).
Ever noticed how only Linux users complain about Windows' instability? I've never seen a BSOD in my life (apart from machines with fscking ATI cards/drivers on them) - and I've been using Windows nearly every day since Windows 95 RC1. Win2K seems pretty stable out of the box - and my XP machine hasn't crashed yet *at all* (4 months of daily usage).
From: Disc.PreSales.Email.Support@seagate.com
To: Neil
Hello Neil,
As noted below in the article from PCWorld, 85% of the hard drives in the world are sold through these three companies. All have dropped down on their warranties. If we want to stay in business, we have had to follow suit. This only affects desktop ATA drives, not the three and five year warranties offered on our SCSI and Fibre Channel drives. If PC makers offered the same warranties as the hard drive makers had for years, and if the prices of drives were not so low, as customers have wanted and repeatedly asked for, maintaining three year warranties on our lowest priced drives would still be feasible.
Hard Drive Vendors Shrink Warranties
Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital cite business realities for dropping consumer drive warranties to one year.
PCWorld.com, September 30, 2002http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105491,
Frank Thorsberg
The three-year warranty on PC disk drives that has been standard for more than a decade is going the way of the dodo bird on October 1. All three top manufacturers are switching to a one-year warranty for most consumer models.
Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate, which share more than 85 percent of the consumer market, call the move a business decision that brings their warranty policies into line with those for the other major components inside a PC.
Nobody is pulling products with three-year warranties off the shelves, but new stock sold after October 1 will have only a 12-month warranty. All existing three-year warranties will be honored through the end of the
policy's period. And even after the new policies take effect, you may be able to get an extended warranty. Some manufacturers may offer the additional coverage for an added fee or in their premium product lines. More commonly, extra coverage could be available from resellers that provide extended servicecontracts for other consumer technology products.
Strictly BusinessAnalyst John Monroe of Gartner/Dataquest applauds the change and says that the impact on quality-conscious consumers will be minimal.
"No way is this reflective of any degradation in quality of the disk drives themselves," Monroe says. "It's strictly a business move. In fact, drives are a lot more reliable than they were ten years ago when they went to the three-year warranty."
Monroe points to the steady drop in prices for disk drives and the move to standard one-year warranties from all the major PC makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Those were the major factors behind the disk drive manufacturers' decision, he says.
"It is a long-overdue business decision for an industry that has delivered the best and most compelling cost and performance and capacity benefits of the whole IT marketplace," he said.
New Policy DetailsMaxtor announced its plans first, saying its Fireball, DiamondMax, and DiamondMax Plus ATA drives will have a one-year warranty. The MaxLine premium drives will retain a three-year warranty.
However, Maxtor will not directly offer warranty extensions, leaving that option to its resellers, who may choose to provide the extra service.
Its two biggest competitors have quickly followed suit with similar announcements. Seagate says the company will back all its consumer ATA drives with a one-year warranty.
Western Digital announced a one-year plan for its Protégé and Caviar Advanced brands. It will retain a three-year warranty on its high-powered Caviar special edition model, commonly used in servers.
Western Digital is directly offering an extended warranty option, charging $20 to lengthen the soon-standard one-year warranty to three years. The extension is not available through Western Digital resellers. The company will not provide a warranty longer than three years for a drive, and owners of existing drives (with current three-year warranties) may not extend their drives' warranty, according to the company.
Quality CountsDisk Drive quality will be unaffected by the move to a 12-month warranty for consumer equipment, the vendors say.
"I understand people say that [a three-year warranty] is part of the value and provides some peace of mind two and a half years from now," says John Paulsen, Seagate's manager of product communications. "Ultimately, some consumers will feel that way, but [the policy change] doesn't reflect on the quality of the product."
The decision is strictly a business issue, say the trio.
The administrative cost of maintaining a standard three-year warranty program is immense and no longer makes good business sense for drive manufacturers, says Rich Rutledge, Western Digital's vice president of marketing.
"When we moved to a three-year warranty, the expense of doing that was phone calls, repair rates, return rates, refurbishments. None of that has really changed," Rutledge says. "What has changed is the average selling price. Back then, the average price was $175. Today, our average selling price is $65 to $75."
All three companies will maintain longer warranties on their enterprise-level drives.
Here is another article from CNET News you may be interested in:
Hard-drive makers weaken warranties
CNET News.com, September 27, 2002
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959831.html
By Richard Shim
Three of the major hard-drive makers will cut down the length of warranties on some of their drives, starting Oct. 1, to streamline costs in the low-margin desktop disk storage business. Read more about hard-drive makers
PC makers have been pulling back the warranties on their computers in an effort to reduce costs, and hard-drive makers Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital are about to follow suit. The three drive companies, which combined have about 85 percent of the drive market, will alter their warranties from three years to one year. The changes will only be for drives sold for desktop PCs and some consumer-electronics products, which traditionally have one-year warranties or less, according to representatives from all three companies.
"We're following the trend in desktop PCs, where they've all switched to one-year warranties," said Stephen DiFranco, vice president of marketing at Maxtor. "This should have no effect on consumers because we hardly ever get returns in the second or third year and it frees up cash that we have to reserve to cover the warranties."
The companies will maintain three- to five-year warranties for drives used in large businesses such as banks and companies that keep track of financial transactions. Western Digital will offer extended warranties directly to customers, while Maxtor and Seagate expect retailers to have extended warranty programs for consumers.
The move should have little effect on consumers, according to Dave Reinsel, an analyst with research firm IDC. However, the move emphasizes how hard drives are becoming more and more of a commodity as margins become smaller and smaller.
"Back when ASPs (average selling prices) were around $175 and margins were around 15 (percent) to 20 percent, those warranties were justified," said Richard Rutledge, vice president of marketing at Western Digital. "But now, with ASPs around $65 to $75 and margins around 12 (percent) to 15 percent, we're no longer able to afford to provide that as a standard feature."
It may not even matter to consumers that warranties are shorter; it would simply make more of component warranties on par with one another, Reinsel said.
"More than 50 percent of failures occur in the first 90 days of a product's use and even then that rate is less than 0.8 percent," Reinsel said. "This move is yet another lever (for manufacturers) to improve their bottom line...there is no degradation in quality; if anything, reliability keeps going up as the manufacturing process matures."
The only consumers who may be affected are those who buy drives in retail or after they buy a PC. Those consumers will have a shorter warranty period, but Reinsel estimates that market is comparatively small to drives sold with PCs.
More than 37.5 million desktop drives were sold in the second quarter and about 1 million were in the retail category.
The warranty changes come as hard drives are finding their way into a broader range of devices, such as digital video recorders and game consoles. However, consumer-electronics devices are expected to account for less than 10 percent of worldwide hard drive shipments in 2002, according to market researcher IDC.
Changing the warranty was something all the manufacturers wanted to do, but no one wanted to be first, Rutledge said.
"We were all basically playing chicken to see who went first," Rutledge said. "Maxtor took a leadership position...and we're supporting it."
The desktop hard-drive business is one where profits are lean, if present at all, and some, such as Fujitsu, have jumped out of the space opting to concentrate on server or notebook hard drives, where margins are better. Seagate went back to being a private company after it was bought by Veritas Software and an investment group for a $20 billion deal in 2000.
At the time, slim margins and intense competition had decimated profits for Seagate. The highly competitive desktop hard drive industry has not changed much.
"Prices continue to go down and this change in warranties is a response to the competitive nature of the market," Maxtor's DiFranco said.
"We were giving customers something we couldn't afford," Rutledge said.
To put it into perspective, if car makers had followed suit with Disc Drive makers, cars would now get 1,000 miles per gallon and cost 10% as much as they did 10 years ago.
We are not saying we don't understand your feelings, as we do. We wish we could afford to offer the same warranties as we have for years, but with prices what they are, we simply would not be in business any longer. We appreciate your past business and interest in our products, and don't want to lose a valued customer, but we have to do what is necessary to stay in business in this depressed economy. Thank you, Neil!
Thad S.Disc Presales
Thank you for your interest in Seagate products. If we can be of further assistance please don't hesitate to ask.
Seagate Disc Presales now has a web presence. Please see the webpage below:
http://www.seagate.com/contact/sales/presales/ind
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I'm not sure of the numbers for hard drives, but for many products the MTTF is cut in half for each 8 degrees C of increased temperature. Most PC's provide basically no cooling for the hard drive. Often the drives run quite hot.
For the last 15 years, I've put multiple fans on all my drives. For some of them, this resulted in a temperature reduction of about 20 degrees C. I've had no failures since I started doing this; previously I had two drive failures. Not a very scientific study, but the way I look at it, it can't hurt and the cost is minimal.
Note that the cost of a drive failing is NOT just the cost of the drive; it's the cost of the drive plus the cost of the lost data. If you have a good backup system, the cost of lost data can be minimized. If you have a RAID, it can be all but elminated.
Considering both my 400mb drives, the 1.6gb drive and the 3.8gb drive have died, but all after long and faithful service. Every disk from 9gb+ except my Deathstar is still working, but I don't suppose forever.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Modern production engineering can produce items to last a specifc time. Car compaines have done this for years. You get the right mix of plastics so they start breaking down in N years and as N gets smaller, the price gets better. If you can save $.02 on a million window lock knobs its only $20,000 but if you do it to all the plastic bits on a car, it will add up to a massive amount of cash.
Until about a year ago, Western Digital always sent a brand new drive on warranty replacements. NOW they send refurbs (just as Maxtor and IBM have done since forever).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've heard for years that SCSI drives have some mythical additional quality as compared to IDE drives, even though everyone knows the drives have 90% of their components in common.
I welcome this change in the IDE drive industry. What the drive companies are trying to capture is the "I don't know the difference" consumer "so I won't a dime more than the store across the street".
Among those of us who do know the difference and who do care about their data there will be a backlash against the new state of affairs. What we will see is a new niche for premium IDE hard drives that are mechanically and electrically as reliable as reputable SCSI drives. Those of us who care will pay an extra $30 per drive and we'll be glad we did.