Slashdot Mirror
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."
now... 3 years sounds more reasonable to me. Actually useful... I say
I don't know about that. I'd sure like it if the 500G SCSI raid array I just set up was warranteed for 5 years.
This seems like it could hurt them financially in the long run, but maybe they're trying to increase short term sales?
It's also about how long a heavily-used HD can be expected to live, from all I've read and experienced. Unless seagate has some sort of trick up their sleeves, this could kill them.
Very, VERY, unlikely.
Maxtor and Western Digital both very recently reduced their basic warrant to 1 year. Now, they seem to be quite happy with their basic drives with 2MB of cache, and a 1 year warranty, while charging more for 8MB cache and a 3year warranty.
I doubt they are going to be anxious to ruin that nice warranty tier model that's bringing in extra money for them. If anything, they MIGHT start extending warranties a few years, for an addition fee. They'll probably make their drives +5 year warranty cost just a bit less than Seagate's to stay competitive.
However, Seagate has a reputation for having quieter, better built, and lower power hard drives, so being slightly cheaper may not be enough.
You'd think that Maxtor and Western Digital would want to compete, but from their recent offerings, it seems like they're content to just be close in price and features, and not too worried about really competing. Maybe the margins are too low for price/feature/warranty wars to make sense?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
> 5 years ago... I dont even know what was standard... 7 gigs?
FWIW, this weekend I decomissioned what had been my main machine years ago (I was still using it for some tasks but the MB or power supply is getting real flaky and causing some problems... not worth investigating I guess) The HD in it had a manufacturing date of april '99 and is 18G. If I remember right that was fairly large at the time but not the largest I could have bought.
It's one of the old IBM deskstars, before they had the run of really flaky ones. Still works great!
These days ALL of my servers use mirrored drives. Disk space is so cheap and full backups are so hard, there's really no excuse not to use RAID.
3 years sounds more reasonable to me.
Seagate was already offering 3-year warranties on their disk drives. In fact, several different drive makers are offering 3-year warranties... don't recall which ones, but when I was shopping for a 200GB SATA drive just a week ago, they all had 3-year warranties.
I also verified my warranty by doing a serial-number -> warranty query at the Seagate web site after I had the drives in hand.
Five years? Great! (Especially since the Promise RAID-0 controller I'm using with Windoze doesn't spin down the disks when idle.) Looks like I picked the right disk drive at the right time.
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.
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.
I take it you have never RMA'd a 5 year old drive.
They do NOT stock 5 year old merchandise.
I RMA'd a 13 gig maxtor a while ago, and got a 80gb back. They usually replace it with their lowest model, or a model who's cost was similar new.
So it kind of does make it worth it hey ?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
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
Here's another cynical view: Perhaps Seagate can afford to increase their warranties to five years because they are tax-dodgers. According to this link at www.citizenworks.org -- http://www.citizenworks.org/corp/tax/taxdodgerslis t.php -- Seagate reincorporated itself out of California and into the Cayman Islands in order to avoid paying United States taxes.
Not that reincorporating has anything to do with the quality of their drives; it has more to do with them being good corporate citizens.
When you cheat the government and your fellow citizens, you might find that you have some extra cash laying around. Too bad I can't reincorporate into the Cayman Islands.
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 $3,000.
The bigger my presence in other countries, the more insane it becomes to stay in the US.
Let's fix this huge tax problem before we complain about companies getting a better deal elsewhere.
A replacement PCB would only work marginally with your drive, since each drive is run though the self-test and optimization process as a unit. The drive accounts for variations in manufacturing process (of every single part in the drive) at the time it is manufactured, and adjusts accordingly.
Your PCBA wouldn't sync with the HDA it was attached to, making reading and writing with the new drive unreliable.
If you send in the dead drive, they'll replace it with a functional one. That is how warranties work.
More data, damnit!
I had a Seagate drive fail about 5 years back. I called support and talked to a nice lady in Oklahoma (no, not Oklahoma, India - even "charm school" can only fake it so far). They swapped me out a drive, minimum hassle. I'm glad to see they're reversing the trend towards shorter warranties.
I lost 5 weeks worth of work off a Quantum drive failure, thanks to a #$%*#$! LAN admin who knew full well that we'd been seeing a 30% early mortality rate on that model but still didn't backup regularly.
Another Quantum drive that failed about the time I lost my Seagate left me being bounced from coast to coast and back with no resolution. I finally gave up and sent the thing back to our purchasing department with orders to shoot the thing and threats of bodily harm if they ever bought me another.
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...
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 ...
If you have 25,000 disk drives, one of them fails every five hours.
Replace "disk drives" with "vacuum tubes" and this could easily describe mainframe computers from about 40 to 50 years ago!
Tag lost or not installed.
The tube guys had a handle on that problem. The big UNIVAC tube machines had a "high margin" mode, which increased the voltages on the tubes by about 15%. Each morning, after powerup, the machine was run in "high margin" for about ten minutes. Any tubes that failed were replaced. Lights on the cabinets indicated tube failures, so replacement was quick. After that, tube failures during normal operation were almost nonexistent.