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Tom's Investigates Hard Drive Warranty Changes
Sherloqq writes "Tom's Hardware recently ran a story about major hard drive manufacturers drastically reducing their warranties on many of their products. Effective Oct 1, 2002, many IDE hard disks from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital will now come with just a 1-year warranty. This comes as a bit of a shock to me, as nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention). Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure, need to cut costs to remain competitive, advancements in technology used in manufacture of drives ("they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway") as well as warranty period mismatch with OEM computer manufacturers (std. 1-year). Good news in all this: there are no plans for warranty period reductions for SCSI drives. For now... :)"
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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 only wish it was decision makers like that who had to tell customer after customer that it would cost upwards of $3000 to retreive their data on top of the cost of replacing the defective drive.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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.
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.
From what I've heard, Samsung drives are the most reliable ones around (.01% RMA rate, I've been told). They also don't seem to plan to reduce their warranty, which is currently three years.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.
It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?" Let's see - the thing that all components of your entire computer, inside and out connects to, and you want it to be the CHEAPEST component? {SIGH!}
That settles it. No warranties offered for stupidity.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
If they reduce the warranty to 1 year, they have reduced their overhead, hence the cheaper cost to us to buy them.
Fae it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.
I don't know how many people I speak for, but I know I speak for my friends. I don't "want it cheap, and now", I want it inexpensive and when it's reliable. I'm the kind of person who would spend a few bucks more and buy the Apple computer, the Sony TV and compact fluorescent light bulbs for my home.
Obviously, I'm not in the majority, but I don't particularly care for the heat of SCSI hard drives in lore, and all my current equipment has IDE (with longer warranties). I want a high end "prosumer" IDE hard drive with a 5 year warranty. It may or may not be in use the whole 5 years, but I certainly want it to be my choice. If that means I don't get terrabytes of storage, that's okay. I don't honestly have much of a use beyond 10GB anyway. If I wanted terrabytes of storage, I'd get a tape drive. If I wanted high speed, I'd get a SCSI drive and adapter. Cheap, low power, modest speeds and high reliability are what make IDE worthwhile. Isn't it IDE that puts the I in the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?
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
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
Add to this that about half the drives we've bought at the office have failed within 2 years ... sure, we got replacements from the manufacturers, but this doesn't obviate the need to restore everything on the replacement drive.
It's not the cost of the replacement drive - it's the inconvenience, etc ... But now, it's going to cost us, not them.
By reducing their warranty to 1 year, they're facing reality, and so should we - in a production environment, swap out your drives every year, before they crap out, and back up your shit as much as possible.
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.
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)
Nope It's SCSI that puts the I in RAID really.
;)
All mission critical RAID systems use some form of SCSI drive (UW, Fibrechannel etc).
This might be partially because of the higher performance with SCSI in general (yeah yeah I know ATA/133 is nice and fast but my 15000 rpm fibrechanel drives are faster
If I toddle down to our server room I find a huge number of RAIDed 18Gb (total 50-60 Tb) SCSI drives and no IDE ones.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
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.
Consumers buy a new computer. They expect it to 'work'. They don't want to have to be back every two months with another problem, and they certainly don't expect to lose the resumees they've typed and recipes they've collected. I mean, who would?
So we're quoting out a new system. We throw in a CD-RW and a handful of CD-RW discs. They ask why. What do we tell them? "You should back up your data so that you're prepared for your hard drive failing miserably."?!? Sure, we could make up an excuse about power surges, water damage, etc. but they still pry, and they tend to determine that we're trying to sell them a lemon and then put them to work for it.
We had one customer, a business owner, who experienced a bad hard drive (Western Digital 80GB ATA100 7200RPM). So I sold him a few CD-RWs to use in his 32x12x40 CD-RW drive to back up his important data. Some four months later he was in for a copy of his invoice for his insurance company because his computer was stolen. "Did they steal the CD-RWs?" I asked. Timidly, he informed me that he hadn't gotten around to backing up.
See, even after catastrophic failure people can't be convinced that they have to back up their important files daily or weekly.
Ideally, we'd sell atleast one computer to all of our business clients with a 20/40GB Travan drive in it, they'd allow us to configure a nightly backup routine, and we convince the receptionist to swap labelled tapes every night on her way out the door. But hey, that would make sense. Of course, customers see a potential $2k bill for such a setup and they balk.
I'd love tell them "I told you so!", but that would lose us a client, rather than teach them a lesson. They'd just wind up spending money at another store and not backing up their data.
At home I have a backup regimen that includes a 4AM cronjob, weekly, that archives all my variable data (home directories, mail spools, etc directories, my hosted websites, etc.), and I back all of these files up on to two CD-RW discs; one labelled "Current Week" and one labelled "Previous Week". When I get a chance, I'll be utilizing the Rsync incremental backup solution and archiving the current weekly snapshot, and saving the previous week's burned snapshot, like I'm doing now but better. {smile}
With a quick'n'dirty script and some discipline (store your files only in designated places, not all over your drive) and a weekly half-hour routine, anybody can keep their file loss to a minimum.
We're starting to offer in-home tutoring to customers, perhaps this will be a special promotion. "How to mitigate data loss 101".
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
One time where I used to work, our supplier accidentally shipped us a whole box of them (About 20 drives). We decided to keep them and sell them for profit. About two months later (After we had built and sold about 10 machines with those drives), they quickly started to come back to the shop. So with the 10 we had left, we replaced them all.
I think that's called Karma. You ripped off your supplier, and actually took a hit on profit because of these drives.