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