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."

Comments

Good return policies make warranties a moot point.

[ezraekman]

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.

Thank you, Seagate!

[outZider]

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.

Re:Smart idea!

[Demolition]

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?

I don't know about other folks, but I've gladly "endure[d] the hassle of a warranty repair" on old defective drives, and have received much higher capacity drives in return for my troubles. For example, in the last four years, IBM has sent a 10 GB Travelstar in exchange for an old dead 6.4 GB unit, Maxtor sent a 60 GB DiamondMaxPlus9 in exchange for a dead 40 GB unit, and Seagate sent an 80 GB Barracuda 7200.7 in exchange for a squeaky 40 GB Barracuda III.

In each case, I phoned the tech support departments of the respective manufacturer to ask about RMA procedures. They asked me a few questions, approved the RMAs, then had new drives sent out (IBM sent theirs by Next-Day Air -- a very nice gesture). Upon receiving them, I repackaged the dead drives in the boxes that the new drives had arrived in, took them down to Purolator and sent them to their respective manufacturers at their expense.

Altogether, I spent about 20 minutes on each warranty incident, and received replacements that were, in my opinion, of higher value than the original items. So, I don't consider what I had to go through as a "hassle". In fact, if that's the sort of thing that I can expect if/when I need to RMA another drive in the future, then I'd gladly endure it without complaint. :-)

D.


p.s. Of course, my experiences are anecdotal, and I don't pretend to think that these companies regularly act so magnanimously towards all warranty claims. Perhaps I just happened to get lucky, though.

Re:5 years!!!

[pjrc]

Actually, with modern 3.5 inch drives, spinning the drive down and starting it again is probably rougher that simply leaving it spinning all the time.

While it's spinning, the bearings are the mechanical parts that wear. Seagate was the first mainstream drive with the fuild bearings and even now, their have much lower noise levels than Maxtor, WD, etc. Perhaps lower noise is an indication that less vibration or other energy is dissipated?

In any case, if you look at the hard drive specs, you'll see "start/stop cycles" specified for 3.5 inch drives as a measure of reliability. And it's not a giant number.

With the fluid bearings in late model drives, you're probably a lot better to just leave it spinning all the time.

What's the real MTBF curve?

[Animats]

The people who run a large archival disk farm (petabytes) tell me that about 7% of the drives fail each year. Detailed field MTBF reports from other sites with thousands of drives would be a valuable asset. Hosting services need that kind of info. Does anybody track this?

If you have 25,000 disk drives, one of them fails every five hours.

Re:5 years!!!

[Gaccm]

I just did a little searching and found that all of the drives I looked at (6 seagate and 6 western digital drives) all have 50,000 minimum* as their start/stop cycle. If someone turns on their computer twice a day everyday, then that person still has 68 years of service out of that drive (if only starting and stoping were the only wear and tear on drives, life would be nice).

*the Western Digital drives all said minimum 50,000, while the seagate drives simply said 50,000.