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Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years
swordboy writes "Seagate have just announced that they are going to standardize on a five year warranty for all of their hard drives, including desktop and notebook units. While this seems like amazing news, I'm certainly hoping that the company will be around to honor these warranties." The press release notes: "The new warranty applies retroactively to applicable hard drives shipped since June 1, 2004."
. . . hello, HDDBurn!
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
If only IBM had something similar to this back in the day. My stupid 75GXP's crapped out after the warranty expired and I suffered 200gigs of data loss. Damn, does anyone know the actual failure rate of those drives?
GroupShares Inc. - Free and Interactive Stock Trading Community
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artlu.net
WOW.
:|
And to think I just bought a maxtor with a measly 1 year warranty
5 years. Wonder if I would use a hard disk that long. I mean... 5 years ago... I dont even know what was standard... 7 gigs? and now? 250 gigs seem to be the norm. U could so copy 7 gigs over to ur 250 gig machine:D
now... 3 years sounds more reasonable to me. Actually useful... I say
Perhaps this is because their drives are more reliable? I seem to remember most companies lowering the warranty range on consumer level drives from 3 years to 1 year not so long ago, so this is a welcome change.
Who cares about the warranty anyways? The data on that drive is a whole lot more important. Losing $100K of data through a hole in your backup strategy is a injury that will not be healed by the replacement of a $175 disk drive.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Expect several other drive makers to do the same shortly.
Manufacturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the failure age of the unit.
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Lifetime Warranties. Mine, the hardwares or the companies?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Seagate was private, then it went public, then it went private again, and now it's once again public...
Does that about cover it, or am I mistaken?
Also, has anybody bought a Seagate hard drive recently? Have they come through, and started selling them with Lindows pre-installed on the drives? Experienced any hardware problems with it?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Kudos Seagate!
This seems like it could hurt them financially in the long run, but maybe they're trying to increase short term sales?
Maybe I am just overly suspicious but most manufacturers don't just extend warranties, does Seagate have a problem they know about with their drives that we don't? Maybe I'm just a pessimist.
...This warranty is void when the tape covering the drive connectors is removed... ;o
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
i got a 7200rpm 2mb cache 40gig seagate drive less than a year ago and it's toast already.... weak
Most drive failures happen fairly early after purchase (first month or so of use). How many people will endure the hassle of warranty repair on a 3-5 year old hard drive, when they can pick up something significantly bigger and faster? Getting a refurbed 80-250 GB drive won't seem worth the effort when retailers will have 1-2 TB drives (guesstimate) available for the price of the original.
And like Ars Technica said, it's something else that they can advertise on the box to set themselves apart from other vendors.
Could this mean that they finalized the process or making a reliable drive yet again?? I remember back in the 90s I couldn't give away a WD drive if I could get a Seagate.. My customers still rely on the quality of the Seagate drives and dont mind paying the extra 20 bucks for them.. But I do agree with the previous posters, if you dont have a backup replacing the drive for free really isnt going to matter..
Gateway is now offereing lifetime warranties on all their products.
This may mark Seagate's preparation to release their new array of drives, including the much anticipated 7200.8 series (400GB capacity with a 16MB cache and support for native SATA including NCQ).
Seagate is really striking while the iron is hot. And to think I was about to order the Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB a few days ago. Phew.
Of course, they will offer you an upgrade price to replace your drive with a new (larger) drive immediately instead of having to wait 2 weeks for a refurb drive.
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I had to replace 2 western digital drives that failed at the same time...so much for my mirrored RAID setup :-)
This is music to my ears, as it seems that most of my drives die at 3 years, 1 month - one month past the warranty period. WD, IBM and others should follow suit, which will benefit everyone who buys hard drives.
Way to go Seagate!
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
...of course, it was a Maxtor :)
Verbing weirds language.
:-)
Try using a thesaurus, or perhaps a literate editor
i recently purchased a western digital raptor, and it came with a 5 year warranty (link)
although mine was the 36gb model..
Seagate is clearly saying to its competitiors:
We uped our standards - now up yours!
-Adam
Doesnt matter how good a drive is, it WILL fail eventually.. and if you lose real data then you arent doing your job.
The only data one should ever lose is the current open files.. If you cant bring back everything from yestereday, at the latest, then you need to re-think your backup plan, quickly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Of course none of it is any good if you have an accident.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Western Digital cut their warranties on their drives down to 1 year from 3 (with the exception of enterprise drives). I believe Maxtor also did the same, and Hitachi too. One years isn't anything for a hard drives lifetime, and it would be nice if other manufacturers would follow Seagate's lead.
no yuo
I buy my hard drives at Costco. (They don't sell them online; only at local stores.)
A little known fact about stores like this is that their return policy is "unlimited". They have a sign posted that says "it is helpful if you return the product with original receipt, in 30 days", etc. "Helpful", but not required. Of course, it's likely that the product will drop in price by the time you return it so you'd better keep the receipt... but the timeline is only a suggestion. It is generally thought that this policy is only 6 months... but that's for COMPLETE COMPUTER SYSTEMS. ("Desktop and notebook computers".) Everything else in the store (including peripherals) can be returned as long as you keep your membership.
Recently, I picked up a Maxtor external USB 2.0/Firewire external 160GB 8MB Cache drive with all necessary cables for $109. It's not the largest drive on the planet, but the price is decent, and the "warranty" is second to none. If I decide I don't like the color four years from now, I can just bring it back. It was also nice that it shipped with both firewire and USB cables so it was ready to go, out of the box.
Granted, there's nothing that can give the peace of mind of a decent backup. Also, their selection is somewhat minimal. But data aside, I have yet to find a better guarantee for hardware than Costco's.
I've had my ST36451A 6.4 gig hard drive for over 5 years. I had bought it back in the day when I was running a 133 Mhz Pentium on Windows 95. I had upgraded my computer many times, switching from that to a 300 Mhz AMD K6-2 (Quake 2 on Windows 98!) Baby-AT mobo then to a 600 Mhz Athlon (Quake 2&3 on Linux!!) in a new ATX case. I'm still getting much use out of the same hard drive. I carried the thing to a friends house once to prove the Compaq tech support wrong when they had misdiagnosed a boot-sector virus as a "bad motherboard/disk controller". It held up during the trip there and back in my backpack. Within the past 2-3 years, it has started to run excessively hot to the point where I believed it was causing Windows 98 to crash. I was able fix this with a bay cooler. Nowadays, I run it in my linux box.
I've never had a Seagate drive fail on me.. Ever...
I bought my first computer dirt cheap at a "computer show" and it had a 2 gig IBM drive which failed within 2 weeks of bringing the system home. Not sure if I should blame IBM, myself, or the dude who sold me the system.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Funny, I don't remember slashdot covering when Microsoft upped their product support to 10 years. I guess this means Seagate is on "the Good List"(tm)
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Lifetime is defined by the terms in the warranty agreement. Lifetime for PNY geforce graphics cards is the lifetime of the product cycle or until supplies run out. So if they have an old Geforce 2 GTS in the warehouse they'll gladly replace your broken one. If there isn't, well, then they're not obligated to send you a new 5700 FX.
For Kingston memory "lifetime" means forever. Kingston is able to manufacture memory modules on demand and can rebuild memory for your 286 if you so desire. I recently sent in a discontinued Rambus stick and the service was superb. They don't really even ask for proof of purchase or ownership either. If you ship them a module made by them and it's broken they'll fix it and send it back to you for free.
It really depends on what company you're talking about and what it exactly says in the warranty information.
I had a Quantum drive fail. They wanted me to call into a 900 number to speak to technical support before issuing an RMA.
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What about using the old style tape degauser?
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In the past I bought mostly Samsung drives because of their 3-year warranty and low reported incidence of failure. However, when a 120Gb drive actually failed, I had to wait about 6 months for a replacement. Everyone in the supply chain just messed it up (perhaps intentionally). The store I bought it sent the unit to the wholesaler, who claimed that there were scratches (which was BS), then decided they need to send it to the regional Samsung centre, then it took hell of a lot of time to determine that the drive actually died and it's not like I am just making stuff up. Then it took some more months for the news to propagate back, and noone actually cared to be prompt.
Meanwhile, the prices have dropped significantly and if I bought the drive 6 months later, it would have saved me at least 40-50 dollars or about 30% of the price. Of course, nobody though about compensating me for this.
Seriously, when I am already annoyed over the date I lost (don't tell me about backups, the DivX videos on that disk WERE backups), the last thing I want is being annoyed by an uncooperative manufacturer/store. If Seagate wants this warranty to be worth anything, they needs to work together with all their resellers.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I love Seagate drives. I won't put anything else in an important machine. I have servers that have been running continuously for more than five years with no problems.
On the other hand, I will NEVER use another Quantum drive ever. Those things run so hot you could probably cook on them and they're notoriously unreliable.
"Or perhaps they know that a 5 year old drive is not going to be useful enough to pay the postage ... ... I could get them replaced for $30 or so ... I could easily hit the used market and pick one up for about the cost of postage"
I have some older
errmmmm . . . I can understand the logic of buying used for *initial* acquisition (although I myself won't do it for items with moving parts, or with items at higher risk of being abused).
But what's the logic of *replacing* a used item with another equivalent used item, unless the replacement is refurbed / certified etc.? What assurance have you, that you're not just replacing one problem with another?
I'd NEVER buy used storage, except for cases (e.g. swap) where failure != disaster.
As for warranties: all other things being equal, longer is better; but I'd much rather lose money than data.
In the last three months, I've had three failures in relatively young, lightly-used Maxtor ATA drives, and I'll never again buy Maxtor. Maybe it's just a statistical fluke. Just the same, my next non-enterprise drive (i.e. non-SCSI) will be to have a try with WD SATA Raptors.
This is so great. I happily pay the premium every time for Seagate drives over anyone else. I've had two fail since I've started buying them, and they were taken care of with cross shipping, no questions asked. Great customer service, incredibly quiet drives, and very easy to deal with.
Ugh, I sound like an eBay response. A+++ DRIVE MANUFACTURER WOULD BUY FROM AGAIN.
Either way, that's great. One more reason to buy Seagate drives, as if I needed another one.
- oZ
// i am here.
We've just upped our warranties to 5 years. So up yours!
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
"we just purchased 6 SATA 10k rpm Raptor drives from Seagate and they came with the 5 year warranty"
Did Seagate take over WD while my back was turned?
For the longest time, I was a Maxtor fanatic. Had many drives made by them, with few failures. Compared to the shitheaps that WD makes, they seemed quite reliable. Then my power started to get flaky (at the time, I had no UPS) and I lost four drives, all at one time. I've since switched to Seagate, since the only drive of mine to survive those power problems was the Seagate 120GB in my MDD G4. Since then, I've used this as my mantra: "Maxtor for capacity, but keep it on a UPS. Seagate when it's mission-critical."
As a related anecdote... I recently pulled a 20MB Seagate SCSI hard drive out of an old Mac SE I had lying around in order to upgrade it. It had a date sticker from 1993 on it. 11 years and still running... seemed pretty impressive to me.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
This would perhaps be good for an Ask Slashdot question, but it fits here. I'd rather have a more reliable drive than a drive with a longer warranty. My only drive failure in the last decades was a Maxtor 60gig. Fortunately, drives don't fail often, but that also prevents one from getting a good statistical 'feel' for what brands are more reliable than others. Is there a site with reliability/failure data on drives? I haven't kept up with PC mags and scuttlebutt this century - The last I remember hearing something about hard drive reliability (or rather lack thereof) was CNI in IBM AT's.
Tag lost or not installed.
Maybe Seagate believes they have an advantage in quality (I'd believe it) and want to use that as the basis to attack the cut-throat pricing they have been facing.
Other makers recently cut their warranties, and I'm sure that cutting costs had at least something to do with it. This could be Seagate saying "Oh no you don't, not without taking a market share hit."
If Seagate can provide 5 year warranty service for less cost than their competitors, then it is a very smart business move to either have the longest warranty, which is a stable one-up that doesn't vary like biggest drive, fastest drive, etc., or else have the lowest (internal) costs in the industry for equal warranty offerings.
Other reasons Seagate could be doing this: maybe they just upgraded their warranty process (software, procedures, etc.), can handle the capacity, and want to boost sales slightly to pay for the upgrade. Maybe they want to force competitors who just made a big change to change back, costing them twice the cash. Any change at a company the size of these is pricey.
In any case, I'm guessing this is a shrewd (and very safe) move by Seagate to give themselves a little boost in one way or another.
That's been my only HDD failure in 19 years - a Quantum Fireball lct08. It actually burst into flames. Yes, really - fire came out of one of the chips, burning the HDD's board and cable. (Aside: That's how you use an apostrophe with an abbreviation, kids.)
They refused to send me a replacement PCB. They also refused to send me the replacement chip. I now have a total of 0 Quantum products in my house.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Note that consumer grade drives are often rated for something like 8 hours runtime per day.
And via SMART, anyone can see that you've been running yours 24/7 since you bought it.
Warranty void. Bugger ye off.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Didn't all the hard drive manufacturers get together a couple years ago and drop their warranty from three years to one? (Well at least it happened at the same time anyway).
So now they're ramping it up to 5? Good for them I suppose, but the collusion when they all dropped their warranty length to one wear was a real jizz in the eye...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'd be more impressed if the warrenty started from the purchase date. Currently, it starts from the date that the drive is shipped from the factory to the store.
So if you go and buy a drive that has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years, oops, now you have a two year warrenty. I guess you are not losing much if you buy a 3 year old drive though.
So if I'm based in the Cayman Islands and I make $1,000 selling in the US, $1,000 selling in England, and $1,000 selling in Mexico I pay US taxes on the US part, English taxes on the English part, and Mexican taxes on the Mexican part.
However, if I'm based in the US, I pay US taxes on the FULL AMOUNT. So in the above example, I pay English taxes on $1,000, Mexican taxes on $1,000, and US taxes on $3,000. I've paid taxes on $5,000, even though I only made $3,000.
The bigger my presence in other countries, the more insane it becomes to stay in the US.
Let's fix this huge tax problem before we complain about companies getting a better deal elsewhere.
I prefer WD, but a 40mb Seagate drive I bought back in the late 80's still works fine even today.
Seagate is trying to make their drives more attractive, a standard 5 year warranty will certainly draw attention. I trust my data to seagate drives, and have done so for the last 3 years... and I have not incurred data loss from hardware failure yet.
valuable!
Funny... Seems like they no longer supper windows 95 or 98 with updates... win95: 1995+10 = 2005 (ok, i think 95 came out in 94 so sure, this can get away with it but...) win98: 1998+10 = 2008... Hmmmmmmmm
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
"What I'm saying is "Backups: you must".
See the diff? Good, 'cause now I got to go rope me some goats."
I don't think I want to know what Yoda's going to be doing with a bunch of goats.
Have you ever tried to get a replacement drive from Maxtor under warranty? They SUCK!
They tell you they just got a shipment in, but they all have to be sent to stores. You ask when you are going to get your replacement, and they don't know. You are way low on their priority.
I'll never buy from them again.
"Nothing with as many moving parts as a hard-drive is going to last forever."
I think we just figured out what all that "junk DNA" is. One of God's old backups.
A few years back I lost 3 drives in the space of 1 year - 2 were seacrates and 1 was western digital. All 3 were the shonky 1 year warranty drives. Since then I haven't touched those drives - I only buy the 3 year warranty ones and they work without problems. In my opinion '1 year warranty' is just a manufacturer euphemism for 'you'd be an idiot to buy this one'.
You must be getting old.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Windows 95 came out in August 1995, 2 years late (which is why they had to change the name to Window 95 in the first place)
If you have 25,000 disk drives, one of them fails every five hours.
I thought that a major reason why OEM prices were lower was that the manufacturer did not provide a warranty for the drive. As part of the OEM contract, the purchaser (Dell or IBM) was responsible for providing tech support and warranty service to the end user. That has caused people problems in the past when they bought drives through non-authorized distributors. Many times, that "great deal" was for an OEM drive that had been diverted to the retail market. If the drive broke, they discovered that their only recourse was to have it replaced by the distributor that sold it to them.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This post is UNTRUE, it's a JOKE. Seagate makes the most reliable hard drive I've ever dealt with in my 10 years of computer experience. Even better, they are fast, quiet, AND cool to the touch!
Those drives are serious bad news, and you didn't have backups.
You should have been expecting them to fail ages ago. PAIR hosting threw out thousands of them. Do a search of the web on 75GXP and you'll find so many people having problems.
After suffering dozens of hard drive failures with WD, maxtor/quantum, and fujitsu, I only use seagate drives. I have never had a seagate drive fail yet, where as I have had a brand new WD die in under 24 hours. This is in a server environment though, you may not care so much for home use.
Seagate may be making great drives today, but they have also had their share of turkeys in the past. I used to have some large piles of dead Seagate drives, like the original Barracuda SCSI drives.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I didn't know that Seagate were putting little backup batteries in their hard drives...
My insider's recommendation: if the older drives still work, don't upgrade.
Posted anonymously to protect my source, who's still looking for a job...
I have had good luck with Seagate & Maxtor. Very bad luck IBM.
Probably a little late now but if your HD ever crashes download GetDataBack NTFS/FAT (depending on your drive) and give it a whirl. The free version does everything the registered version does except if you don't register you have to recover one file at a time (right click, open-with and then rename the tmp file created in Windows temporary files folder) which is rediculously tedious. But, if you need the file(s) Right Now(tm) the "cripped" version doesn't dangle carrots in front of your face. You can get any file you want regardless of the size with no watermarks or anything.
Anyway, the 160GB Seagate in my server decided to crap out and Windows decided it was a RAW disk. GDB found every single file and I restored everything. If you RD or shift-delete something you shouldn't have it can get those back as well.
I just picked up another 80GB Seagate so this extended warrenty is pretty nice but the drives seem to do well. I've never had to take advantage of the warrenty.
The reason the 160GB crashed was because of sloppy coding on my web-server (now fixed) and McAfee Virus scan going nuts resulting in 2.4 million files being scanned every day. There are less than 500,000 files on the entire system. It really beat the crap out of the drive.
I've since reformatted the drive and it's being used again for personal use with no problems so far.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Seems like a desperate move to me. I think market forces worked well for us users in this case - Seagate disappearing that is. I had stopped employing Seagate drives because they proved the most fault-prone by far. Both Quantum & Maxtor (now merged) had minor bad phases years ago, but both acknowledged and addressed problems right away. Badies in my book are (in order of badness): Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi/IBM. My fav is still Maxtor, with the least problems over many years, but I hear that their recent 160 SATA drives may be trouble ...
It is a part of their new scheme for World Domination(tm). Hitachi, Maxtor, and even Samsung are next on their list.
I feel your pain, I lost 30 GB of data because this was my backup drive while formatting my main drive. This includes all my homeworks since college, lots of rare mp3s and personnal pictures. Now I take no risks, I have a RAID 1 Linux server I use for regular backups.
I had a Seagate 200GB drive die on me - they told me to speak to their Australian distributor (who for all intents and purposes, is their face in the country), which I did. I was given a Word document to fill out and fax in to get an RMA number.
The problem was, the table cells in the Word document weren't wide enough to put any information in, so a WEEK after faxing it off, I got a fax back with all sorts of things saying 'not enough information'. So I spent half an hour to reformat their Word doc all nice and proper, faxed it off ... and never heard back
My time is too valuable to spend dealing with crap like that, so I reluctantly ceased being a Seagate customer after many many happy years and moved back to Western Digital. I'd much rather have a 3-year 'good service' warranty than a 5-year 'we hate you' warranty.
Have you been running the smartmontools, and keeping an eye on the logs? I get errors most of the time (temperature usually, HD's are hard to keep cool). Also don't forget to have a good PSU with enough capability. Any issues caused by that will drive you crazy.
Quantum's hard drive division was bought out by Maxtor in 2001, and thus assumed all of their hard drive support and production -- while you can no longer buy new Quantum hard drives, you would be effectively be buying a Quantum drive if you went with Maxtor.
If Seagate wants this warranty to be worth anything, they needs to work together with all their resellers.
Maybe things are different where you are, but here in the UK I have never in the whole of history returned a computer part under warranty to the retailer. Always to the manufacturer. Same story with several disks, video cards, hubs, tape drives.... Never had an argument over the matter.
Either they trust their own drives - or they don't. This could be a pump and dump by the current owners of Seagate, thus leaving the new owners with the problem of dead drives down the road while they laugh all the way to the bank.
If this there is no indication of foul play then I'll probably start choosing Seagate for my SATA needs. I do have a few disks that are nearing the 5 year mark right now, and as they're not in a RAID I would probaly just toss them, but if they were then I would be returning them.
Also, if arguing that no one return drives that are more than 3 years old - shouldn't they just go all the way and have lifetime warranties then?
What do expect from a bunch of liars, thieves, murderers, traitors, and anti-monopolists?
Hey mods, I took a swipe at Microsoft! Mod me up!
... fucked.
I had the drives mirrored and the primary OS wouldn't load. So, all together, I have 160/200/200 and 80/80/60 that I can't get to.
I think the PSU went... but I can't imagine how that could cook off so many drives. *sigh*
I guess I'll be testing that warranty alot sooner than I'd expected.
In the case of digital photos, IMHO it's worth taking every precaution. As I posted elsewhere, I make a backup copy on another machine, and also burn two CD-R copies, and one goes to work as an offsite. Also each CD-R has 50MB of PAR2 recovery files on it.
I have several hundred 9-year-old CD-R discs in my basement (yes, ok, it's an old pr0n GIF collection). I hadn't pulled them out in years and years, but last month I decided to check. I pulled two 50-packs at random, and ran Nero's CD surface scan on them. About 5% had one or two read errors that were fully recoverable (you would not have noticed them when reading from the OS; Nero checks for soft read errors) so CD-R is better than some people have let on.
Now, if you're buying the cheapest crap you can find, then you're going to have problems. There are several brands I won't buy anymore, I've had them either not burn at all, or have bad data 1 month later. But the good stuff (Mitsui gold, for one) I'm pretty confident will last 25 years or more, and though I probably won't be totally on top of all my data, my digital photos WILL get proper attention, and will get copied to new media formats as they come out.
It's not a PITA at all if you do it regularly. Few people are filling more than one CD-R per month. I fill a couple on a vacation (typically 600-800 photos at 6 megapixels for a 1.5 week vacation), but most of the year a CD will take me 6 to 8 weeks.
Two drives at once? I would suspect something else - a controller, a motherboard, or something like that.
The two times I tried using my heavy duty tape degausser it did nothing except create a couple of spots where reading returned an I/O errror. The vast bulk of the data was unaffected, and I bet the spots that returned an I/O error could be read perfectly with the right equipment.
;-)
The shielding around these things and/or the magnetic strength needed to flip bits on the disk seem to be stronger than one might expect.
Sticking one inside a high strength superconducting magnet like those used for magnetic resonance imaging might work, but you risk physical damage to both the machine and anyone close by as the strong field flings the drive around. I bet the physical damage there would also void your warranty...
The press release says:
_ warranty.html)
The new warranty applies retroactively to applicable hard drives shipped since June 1, 2004.
But Seagate's 5 year warranty FAQ says: (http://www.seagate.com/support/service/faq/5year
The warranty is retroactive to all eligible drives purchased after 7/1/2004.
I checked the warranty status of a Seagate drive I bought in beginning of June, and it says "Expiration 14-JUN-2005", so the press release is actually a bit misleading.
That's really odd. I would complain to the parent company, because that's asinine. In the US, you just head to their web site, fill out a web form explaining what's up, and it generates an RMA and shipping form to get everything taken care of. :(
- oZ
// i am here.
I can verify this. I returned a backpack to Costco when the zipper wore out after using it for a couple years. Most warrantees would probably call that normal wear and not cover it.
However, I think there may be problems if they don't carry the item anymore.
I'm sick and tired of hard drives f*cking dying of old age. Actually, a 120GB Seagate Barracuda just died on me a couple days ago, it's making sickly rattling and clicking noises and won't even identify as a drive. Still, I'm estimating I've has about the following number of failures in my time:
Seagate: 1 (last Friday -_-;)
Maxtor: 4
Western Digital: 6, only about a year old each
Fujitsu: about 20. Seriously, I have boxes of the things! Out of about 50 PCs it was like 1 was dropping every 2 weeks!
Quantum/IBM: Haven't used many, never seen a failure
I should also add that I have 2 40MB Seagates that have been working like they were brand new for about 15 years!
So... yeah. I think I'll stick with Seagate despite the recent death.
Nope. If you keep your receipt, you're fine. Without the receipt, you'll get the last price the item sold for, if it's still in their system. So, keep your receipt. :-)
If I can get a 5 year warrenty on an ide drive, I think that would make me less likely to purchase a scsi drive on the reliability factor alone. I'm only talking about reliability not speed.
If you don't care primarily about speed you're already buying IDE drives. We deal with reliability via RAID these days. Since IDE drives can hold five times as much as SCSI for the same price, a SCSI drive has to last five times as long as an IDE drive to cost-justify itself if capacity, reliability, and cost are the criteria.
Even if SCSI drives were twice as reliable you'd still have to be paying your techs > $200/hr to worry about the cost of swapping out the inferior IDE drives. (A 146 GB Seagate SCSI is $520, the 160GB Seagate IDE is $103).
People who buy drives for large storage typically just leave them on all the time which is the kindest thing you can do for a drive, so 80% of them last until they're obsolete (~3 yrs) regardless of the interface.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But I assume that this does not cover software, music and videos?
As far as I am aware, yes it does. Policies may have changed, but I successfully returned a game that I just never ended up playing. Now, I didn't open it, but I didn't get the sense that they would have cared if I did. When in doubt, ask 'em.
Go to JDPower.com and look up your favorite BMW model. You'll see that they are in the 1-3 range out of 5 in Overall Quality (and all the subcategories of Quality). Ask any BMW owner. That precision German engineering has earned a reputation that it fails to live up to.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent