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

5 years!!!

[mrokkam]

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

Re:5 years!!!

[wwest4]

Is it just me, or do Maxtor's IDE drives die at 18 months without fail?

With the oft-misused, favorable-looking MTBF ratings that are released along with many manufaturers' drives, they should be offering more than 3 yrs in some cases, if only to back up the (mostly) baseless implication of the MTBF ratings. It's only fair to get an exchange, since a consumer could get stuck with a crappy batch, i.e. an unfair burden of the failure statistic. I wonder if they will be keeping old lines running longer or exchanging broken drives with newer models... maybe I should just RTFA.

Re:5 years!!!

[GORby_]

If someone turns on their computer twice a day everyday, then that person still has 68 years of service out of that drive

That would be nice indeed, but consider that some users will probably be running with some power saving features enabled, causing the hard drive to spin down (and up) regularly. Let's assume that this happens about 8 times an hour with extreme settings, which would mean 64 times on an 8-hour working day... meaning that the drive would reach 50,000 start/stop cycles before it's 3 years old.

More reliable drives?

[chrispyman]

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.

Re:More reliable drives?

[Nakito]

Or how about a more cynical view: what if this is driven by marketing, not quality? Consider automobiles. Which cars have the longest warranties? Cars like the Kia (ten years). Now which cars have the shortest warranties? Cars like the BMW (three years). Which is better engineered, better made? Which will last longer? Is a correlation between warranty length and quality? Is there a negative correlation? In light of the automotive evidence, I am not persuaded that length of warranty is any indication of product quality. It's only an indication that marketing believes the warranty will sell more units.

Re:More reliable drives?

[hawkbug]

You'd actually be surprised to find out then that Kia is tied with Toyota in the minivan market for lowest number of customer complaints regarding quality issues. I'm not saying you should buy one, but from what I can tell, Kia is just trying to market their vehicles well since nobody trusts the brand yet. If the company stands behind it for 10 years, I can only assume that puts out a positive message for the company.

Re:More reliable drives?

[SamNmaX]

Or how about a more cynical view: what if this is driven by marketing, not quality? Consider automobiles. Which cars have the longest warranties? Cars like the Kia (ten years). Now which cars have the shortest warranties? Cars like the BMW (three years). Which is better engineered, better made? Which will last longer? Is a correlation between warranty length and quality? Is there a negative correlation? In light of the automotive evidence, I am not persuaded that length of warranty is any indication of product quality. It's only an indication that marketing believes the warranty will sell more units.

Though long warrantee does in some sense imply to the customer that the product is going to last longer, I think the best way to think of it economically is as something that adds value. The product has a base worth, which can be whatever, and is then protected by a warrantee, which raises it's total value. Perhaps BMW feels their cars are worth enough in the eyes of their customers as it is for how much they are selling for, and felt that longer warranty wasn't necessary.

In terms of hard drives, I personally specifically seek longer warrantees (the last drive I got was a Seagate with a 3 year warrantee), because they are the most likely piece of equipment to die. I've gone through so many Maxtor hard drives it's not funny, and I can tell you in the case of their new 1-year warrantee, there is no inverse relationship between warrantee length and quality.

Yeah but what about ...

[drsmack1]

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.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Cthefuture]

But if you're using proper procedures it shouldn't be a problem. RAID array, backups if you can... etc.

Then when a drive in your RAID array fails, it can be replaced under warrenty for 5 years. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Nothing with as many moving parts as a hard-drive is going to last forever.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kayen_telva]

I do. To replace the drive and restore from backups. DUH.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Plake]

That's true it that loosing data does burn a whole lot more then a replacement drive but you should be doing regular tests on critical backups if for example they're worth 100k.

The drive replacement just smooths out the whole process. When I RMA a drive with Maxtor, WD, Hitachi or Seagate I'm doing it because we'd still be down a spare drive. 5 years is amazing, we just purchased 6 SATA 10k rpm Raptor drives from Seagate and they came with the 5 year warranty.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Wanker]

At least you don't have to pay to replace the second drive in your mirrored set.

Oh, you don't have a mirrored set? I guess that $100k of data wasn't worth the $175 it cost for a second drive then... ;-)

Seriously, if your data is worth anything more than few hundred dollars (based on your own value of the time you'd spend re-creating it) it should be mirrored, and backed up to some sort of removable media. While few of us have data that's worth a whole lot, the cost of making a backup once a quarter (or once a year, even) is pretty negligible compared to the cost of re-creating everything.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Vainglorious Coward]

most people don't have much valuable data on their drives. Face it, your porn, mp3s, and videos can be redownloaded. Your resume can be retyped.

For many people these days, it is pictures taken with digital cameras that are irreplaceable.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[drinkypoo]

For many people these days, there is no excuse for not spending $80 on a DVD+DL recorder and putting their images on DVD-R or similar. (I'd just buy the +DL for the future, the dual layer media is ungodly expensive. Besides, the drives are cheap.)

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Tobias Luetke]

Regardless, If the drive fails and you get your money back they didn't do any business. In fact with inflation they even lost money.

A warranty is basically a bet without you having to put in any ante. You can read it as "We bet your drive will work for the next 5 years or you get your money back!". They know their product best, so if they are that confident in it that is a good sign. If other manufacturers only bet on a year of lifetime you know whats up.

To me this would be a really strong point for a seagate HD. Not that I needed any more, all my recent drives have been Seagate barracuda drives because they are just plain the best drives around ( price, noise, speed ). I have seldomly seen such a superior product, especially if they slap a 5 year warranty on it.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Anonymous Crowhead]

In fact with inflation they even lost money.

Isn't that backwards? $175 today is worth more than $175 in 3 years, plus they have had their profit for that time from which they could earn interest.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

RAID is not a backup strategy. It's a tactic to protect against single-disk failures, but it's not a backup strategy. RAID won't protect you from an rm -rf * in the wrong directory. RAID won't save your data if a fire burns down your house or office. RAID won't help you if someone breaks in an steals all you computer equipment. RAID may be part of your strategy, but shouldn't be the whole thing. If your data is truly valuable, have a backup and have an offsite backup.

Why does it matter?

[www.sorehands.com]

They probably saw that their drive drive lives are averaging over 5 years, and competition is increasing. Thus, they make a big announcement of a longer warranty. Of course to get a replacement, you will have to submit the original receipt.

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.

Re:Why does it matter?

[Abcd1234]

You do realize that many of those companies who provide 1 year warrantees are providing said warrantee from the date of manufacture, and *not* the date of purchase, right?

Smart idea!

[travail_jgd]

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.

Re:Suspicion?

[AuMatar]

Umm, if they knew they had a problem, they'd reduce the warranty to avoid paying. Not increase.

Re:Old IBM

[DrShasta]

This warranty wouldn't have helped you with your data loss.

But it may have helped me with the fact that every 75GXP that I got as a replacement eventually crapped out as well. If they had 5 year warranty on those, I would have ended up with at least 4 different replacements for my original drive.

I don't really understand why manufacturers haven't moved to 5 year warranties sooner. Usually if a hard drive craps out after a year it is because the drive sucks. If the drive lasts for 3 years, it will almost always last for 5. Seagate probably did a study on this and found that to be the case. I assume thats why they did this.

RE: Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years

[JPriest]

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)