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

So long, smartmontools . . .

[homeobocks]

. . . hello, HDDBurn!

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!!!

[Neil Blender]

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.

Re:5 years!!!

[kayen_telva]

did you just suggest that a shorter warranty would be better? and got modded up. good grief.

Re:5 years!!!

[AndyChrist]

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.

Re:5 years!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:5 years!!!

[kzinti]

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.

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!!!

[Unnngh!]

I guess that to a degree you're correct, for your average home user they probably won't care less about that HDD or its data five years from purchase. Some of us, however, are running even older HW than that. Especially if you set up a production box of some kind and expect it to keep running for years without a lot of intervention, with lots of reads and writes, I would really appreciate that warranty.

Why not a 20-30 year warranty, though? As hardware keeps advancing the need for the latest-and-greatest is becoming less and less a financial motivator for many people. I fully expect that if I bought a medium-end machine today for medium-end needs, it would still be meeting those needs for at least five years.

Re:5 years!!!

[ejaw5]

I actually wish new drives were still available in 5, 10, and 20GB sizes. Fortunately I still have a few around but it'd be such a waste to have to buy a 40GB+ to put in a small lite server such as a network gateway/webserv box.

Re:5 years!!!

[leathered]

We have a couple of hundred of Maxtors in our desktop machines, I can count the failures we've had on one hand. However the bearings go off after a year though and start making a horrible whine. Shouldn't be a problem with the fluid bearings you see in the latest drives.

The IDE Maxtors in our NAS boxes are a different matter. They take a beating and it shows, rarely do they last more than 18 months, sometimes less than a year. Perhaps it's worth looking at another brand for heavy duty stuff.

Re:5 years!!!

[MonkeyCookie]

I'm sure you can get some decent 5, 10, or 20 GB hard drives off of eBay or from some surplus computer parts store for a good price.

Re:5 years!!!

[value_added]

You know, the idea sounds goofy but I know you and I aren't the only ones cringing at using large capacity drives where that extra space isn't needed.

Unfortunately, I believe the economic reality is that a manufacturer can ship an 80GB drive for the same price as a 20GB. The capacities keep increasing but the price stays much the same.

Re:5 years!!!

[PReDiToR]

The capacities keep increasing but the price stays much the same.

I think what the parent was trying to say is that it is a shame the price stays the same. Buying a 1GB drive years ago cost $400, it would retail today for $4, which would make building a TinyLinux or SmoothWall box a lot cheaper. Think FloppyLinux and a 100MB drive ...

Re:5 years!!!

[aldoman]

But what about you accidently deleting things? That will not solve anything - neither will a virus or a badly setup piece of software.

Re:5 years!!!

[BayBlade]

Why not a 20-30 year warranty, though?

Quality. More specifically, the cost of implementing something capable of living that long.

Its pretty much the same reason you can't get a 20-30 year warranty for anything.
Assuming you could create a drive that lived 20 years and sell it at a reasonable price--lets face it, in 20 years when the drive fails, either the company or the consumer will have to spend the $100 for the bottom-of-the line 20 petabyte repalcement.

Or, to put it another way--would you *really* care tha you still have another 2 years worth of warranty on your 10 megabyte drive now in 2004?

To make it worse, not only have they replaced your old drive with something substantialy newer, but odds are you'll not buy another disk from them until the repalcement dies in another 20 years.

In general, it makes sense to warrany a product over the same period what the driver can be purchased and replaced by someting sufficiently similar in specification to the warrantied product.
Offering free upgrades into a period where a product is no longer marketed and is downright obsolete is shooting oneself in the foot.

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.

Re:5 years!!!

[anon*127.0.0.1]

No, if a company today decided to manufacture and market brand-new hard drives with a 1 GB capacity, they'd still have to charge $15.00 or $20.00 at least. Price doesn't increase or decrease in direct proportion to the capacity of the drive. A 1 gig drive is still going to need controlling electronics and platters and have to be tested and packaged and shipped.

I've looked at the drives on EBay, but once you add in shipping, they're really no bargain either. Looking over there just now, I saw a 10 GB Maxtor drive about to go for $21.00 with 6 bids. Shipping is another $6.00. So I can spend $27.00 for a used 10 gig drive with no warranty, or I can go to Frys and spend $49.99 (after rebate) for a brand new 120 gig drive with a 3 (or 5) year warranty.

Hmmm.... pretty much a coin flip there.

I'd buy the old drives for some simple system if I could get them for a reasonable price. Maybe somebody should start buying up all the old 10 and 20 gig drives that are being retired and start selling them in lots of 10.

Re:5 years!!!

[MaxwellStreet]

Unless seagate has some sort of trick up their sleeves, this could kill them.

Hrm. Maybe with their plummeting prospects, this is a poison-pill strategy to keep the corporate raiders on the other side of the moat.

Course, that doesn't really make sense - but then most conspiracy theories don't.

Re:5 years!!!

[Izmunuti]

Buying a 1GB drive years ago cost $400, it would retail today for $4

Think of it this way: the most expensive thing in a hard drive is the head disk assembly. One they've reduced it to one head and one side of one platter it's about as cheap as it's going to get. Everything else has to be there or it isn't a hard drive. That one side of one platter translates into the 40-80 GB capacity of today's cheapest hard drives.

Iz

Re:5 years!!!

[Hallowed]

I have had very good luck with maxtor drives. I have only had 2 of them ever failout of probably 20 drives, one was a 40mb in a 386 in 1993, and a 30gb last spring, both were covered by warranty (2.5years into a 3 year warranty for the 30gb, was replaced with a 40gb with more cache) and was absolutly hassle free.....that being said, I leave my systems on 24/7, and really believe that the termal cycling of hardware turning it on and off does more damage than anything......

Also, as a side note, I have never had a failure with a Seagate ;)

Re:5 years!!!

[ibmman85]

ive had a few awful samsung drives.. one started out as 800mb but after a few months it ended up being like 300 because of bad sectors.. that was a few years ago though. never had a seagate drive fail and i still have a few of the huge 20mb ones around that probably still work..

Re:5 years!!!

[Master of Transhuman]

My understanding is that most of the industry went to one-year warranties in the last year or two, except for their higher-quality/higher-performance drives (8MB cache) which are still three years.

I think it was Maxtor who came out with an announcement saying that .08% (less than one percent) of their drives were failing, so a three-year warranty made no sense to them and would have no effect on the return rates (which is the only usable statistic - MTBF is almost meaningless given the huge numbers being tossed around.)

It would be nice if every company routinely published a TRUE "Rate of Return" figure for each of their drives.

Of course, this being historical information, it wouldn't help you if you were one of the persons contributing to a BAD Rate of Return.

Like the medical students say, you have to play the odds. To play the odds, you have to know the odds.

Re:5 years!!!

[Master of Transhuman]

This is likely true.

Have you noticed that 40GB drives cost $1.50 per GB whereas 80GB and up cost $1 per GB - until you get to the really BIG drives where the price per GB goes up again?

That's not an accident. It probably has to do with marketing and rate of return on investment on particular drives. I don't pretend to understand the drive manufacturing industry but the price structure is clearly oriented to selling the most available drives. Older, smaller drives aren't around, so the price goes up. Newer, huge drives aren't in full production or accepted by users or filling the distribution channel yet, so their price is up. Medium-capacity drives are in full production and are in the supply channel so their price is down.

Market economics at its finest, apparently.

Re:5 years!!!

[evilviper]

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?

I have a 27GB, 7200RPM Maxtor hard drive sitting right next to me... According to it's date-stamp, it was made in the first quarter of 1998, and I probably bought it about half-way into that year...

So, are you telling me that, these days, you couldn't use a 27GB hard drive? Lots of inexpensive computers don't even come with that much storage. The system I'm typing on has a 40GB hard drive, but has lots of free space (despite the cruft of undeleted download programs, videos I long ago burned to CD, lots of music I don't need on-line, etc).

Re:5 years!!!

[timmi]

I have had very good experience with seagate hard drives, (although not that many of tnem)

I have a 4.3 GB and a 20.4 GB that are still going strong.

Re:5 years!!!

[timmi]

although honestly, I returned 2 seperate 80 GB WD drives for new ones before discovering that I needed to update the BIOS on my Asus A7V Motherboard in order to get it to work right with 8 MB Cache drives...

Re:5 years!!!

[timmi]

I'd figure that the deciding factor would be the system you are putting the drive into.

Buy on e-bay for a ressurected Pmmx or PII box, get a cheap 40-80 GB drive for anything with a PIII, P4, K7, or K8

Re:5 years!!!

[slaker]

Flamebait?

I wasn't kidding or making anything up. Check the numbers for various Samsung and Seagate ATA products at Storagereview.com if y'all don't believe me. The biggest drive manufacturer in the world can't make a fast ATA drive, and it can't make a cheap one, either (Samsung, Maxtor and WD are all normally less expensive even for resellers).

Link to the new Seagate warranty policy. Including the bit about the last two years as credit at 25% and 10% of the final retail price in years four and five, respectively.

It's not uncommon to find EOL'd drives at around the $40 price mark, folks. Hope that $4 or whatever is worth what it cost to send the defective drive in.

Re:5 years!!!

[0111 1110]

Samsung drives are in fact quieter than Seagate ones. Especially if you compare large capacity drives and not the older Seagate ones with the Seashield. The seeks on the Samsung are much quieter. The idle noise on the newer Seagate drives is quite noticeable. Aside from Samsung Seagate is definitely the quietest though, with Hitachi a distant second. WD and Maxtor sound like turboprops revving up for takeoff.

Re:5 years!!!

[LurkerXXX]

Sounds like the right pricing for the component differences to me...

The smaller drive still needs an enclosure, the circuitry, the motor, and the platters. Lots of components, plus a small platter means more $/GB

The slightly lareger drive needs... an extra platter or higher density platter. So they use lots of the same components, plus one slightly more costly that really increases the density. (less average $/GB)

When you get to the extremely large drives they need more reading heads, more platters, and might be higher density platters, which aren't cheap(therefore more $/GB).

Kinda makes sense the way the pricing goes.

Re:5 years!!!

[Reziac]

I drag home a lot of salvage, including HDs of every size, age, and type, some of which naturally prove dead. So I have piles of IDE HDs here dating from 1991 to 2004. In my experience, the vast majority of long-survival HDs are Western Digitals. Some are Seagates (except for their spate of rebadged Conners, which are found pretty uniformly sick or dead). A few are Quantums. And Maxtors are the *least* likely to still be alive.

Every manufacturer has the occasional bad batch, even W.D. has suffered from this. But you're right -- Maxtors do have a habit of dying shortly after the warranty runs out, and it's too consistent to be merely an occasional bad production run.

The other issue is that when a Maxtor dies, it typically just QUITS without warning. Conversely, W.D. usually give you plenty of warning (complaints from "S.M.A.R.T.", funny noises, or the odd bad sector).

My main issue with Seagate over the years is that they've been so much slower than concurrent W.D., and run quite a bit hotter/louder (tho I can't speak for their newest models). Otherwise, for reliability Seagate would likely be my next choice. Whereas I don't buy Maxtors at all.

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.

Re:5 years!!!

[ryanwright]

Wonder if I would use a hard disk that long. I mean... 5 years ago... I dont even know what was standard...

You might not use it that long. That means Seagate drives effectively have a lifetime warranty. By the time the warranty expires, you'll have upgraded to a bigger drive.

That's a good thing. I wish I only had to buy drives when I wanted something bigger. I've replaced a couple that died after the warranty, but while they were still very much needed. That sucks.

Re:5 years!!!

[gottabeme]

Ok, I'll but that their specs say that. But I do know that the last two hard drives that failed on me worked fine until I turned on the computer one day and got SMART errors. I've never had one start malfunctioning while the computer was running. It may not mean anything, but that's been my experience.

Re:5 years!!!

[Phishfry]

I call bull...
All drive manufacturers rate by "Power On Hours" and no it not best to leave your drive running for nothing.

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread/t -461.html

Re:5 years!!!

[Master of Transhuman]

Ah, but wait!

The 40GB drive sold for $1/GB WHEN IT WAS THE MAIN SELLER!

NOW it costs more per GB than it did when it was the main seller.

Component costs don't explain that. It's the same components but the price changes.

The only explanation I have is production is ramping DOWN, so availability goes down, so the price goes up.

Re:5 years!!!

[TheLink]

Huh? Has the price of 40GB drives really gone up significantly? Which country's prices?

Over here the prices haven't gone up, except for temporary increases due to shortages or other factors ( e.g. earthquakes in taiwan).

Re:5 years!!!

[arivanov]

I think it was Maxtor who came out with an announcement saying that .08% (less than one percent) of their drives were failing, so a three-year warranty made no sense to them and would have no effect on the return rates (which is the only usable statistic - MTBF is almost meaningless given the huge numbers being tossed around.)

Marketing bull.

?They went to it because the forecasted failure rate on Diamond Max 8 was so high that there was no way on earth it would have lasted 3 years on average. I wish I would have known this at the time and not now - 30+ drive failures later.

Not that there was a choice at the time, as Seagate was running in their new Chinese assembly lines and shipping barracudas which lasted 100 days on average.

Re:5 years!!!

[mlyle]

Read your link again-- it says that distributors will only get return for credit, but that customers can get a replacement drive direct from seagate in years 4 and 5.

From the warranty:

Beginning on the date of shipment to its direct customer and continuing for the published warranty period, Seagate represents that the Products are new or, if they contain remanufactured or used components, are the equivalent of new in performance and reliability and warrants that each Product failing to function properly under normal use, due to a defect in materials or workmanship or due to nonconformance to the agreed upon specifications, will be repaired or exchanged, at Seagate's option and expense.

Re:5 years!!!

[krist0]

My wife works for Western Digital and I know that pretty much all the harddrives are manufactured the same, just that some have 1 platter active, 2 platters active, they mess with the firmware to make only so much space available, stuff like that. I mean, from a mass production point of view, its cheaper to create just 1 unit type, than having a line for 40gig, 80gig, 120gig, 200gig, 250gig.....much easier to just have one line. Kinda like with processors, they dont go, ok, this is the 2Ghz batch, the 2.2Ghz batch and as with processors, I am sure such things as manufactoring defects also dictate that kind of drive it is....

so yeah, the 40gig costs them pretty much the same as the 250, cool aye? :)

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.

Re:5 years!!!

[hughk]

A heavily used HD can last a lot longer if it doesn't overheat. SCSI drives traditionally came from the better quality end of the line and they always worked so well, that you were retiring them for upgrading before they failed.

If Seagate has improved their whole range then it shouldn't be a problem.

Re:5 years!!!

[jayminer]

In Turkey, a product should have at least 2 years of production warranty (including imported ones), therefore those Maxtor drives have 2 years of warranty here. (I think that should be the same in the EU).

Re:5 years!!!

[ColaMan]

Your BIOS normally checks SMART values on boot.... if your system doesn't have an active SMART monitor, the only time you'll see the SMART errors is on boot.

Re:5 years!!!

[DarkVader]

My experience has been almost the exact opposite. I went through a stretch a few years ago where the average lifetime of a WD drive was about a month, with the quickest failure in 2 days. I give the ones I get back from RMA away - because I know they're going to fail soon, too. I warn the recipients about it, they don't listen, and then they whine at me about the drive failure. I just remind them of my warning not to put any critical data on the drive.

I use a lot of Maxtors these days, because they're cheap. While they don't last like Seagates, they're acceptable for most uses, and in my experience they get annoyingly noisy long before they ever fail.

I think the longest lived drive I've ever had was a Rodime - it was an early 3.5", 20MB SCSI drive, and lasted from 1986 - 2002. It wasn't getting very heavy use those last few years, and finally succumbed to stiction.

Re:5 years!!!

[Master of Transhuman]

The actual price for 40GB drives has gone down, but the price PER GB has gone up relative to newer, higher capacity drives.

When 40's first came out, they cost more than they do now, but the overall price per GB cost more as well. Now they cost less in actual dollars, but the price per GB for them is still higher than the newer, larger capacity drives.

Re:5 years!!!

[TheLink]

You said: "NOW it costs more per GB than it did when it was the main seller"

It doesn't.

The price per GB for 40GB drives hasn't gone up. Just the price per GB for bigger drives has gone down more.

The price for old computer stuff may go up if it does something that the new versions don't. See the SDRAM vs DDR RAM prices. We may see ATA drives become more expensive than SATA drives.

In contrast you can typically use a 40GB or larger drive on an old PC that doesn't support large drives, either by setting a jumper or just using a smaller partition. So there aren't that many manufacturers making expensive 8GB ATA drives.

Re:5 years!!!

[gottabeme]

Ah, cool, thanks.

Re:5 years!!!

[Reziac]

Sounds like you hit W.D. in one of their Ooops releases... there've been a few, just like everyone else, where chances of getting a bad one are seriously high. I've had a few myself.

However... FAT32 partitions over 32GB can experience a data wrapping bug in WinXP (and possibly previous Win32 versions, not sure) -- I've seen that myself, and before I knew what caused the data corruption and vanished files, I'd RMA'd the HD. Later I found info on the issue, and realised it wasn't the HD at all, but a filesystem bug of some sort. :( The bug does not occur on NTFS partitions. -- W.D. had the first widely consumer-available HDs over 20GB, and at the time NTFS wasn't yet used much in home/SOHO systems, so I expect a LOT of perfectly good HDs got RMA'd due to this issue. It really does *look* like the HD has failed, when it happens.

I tend to need 5-6 years out of HDs, either for myself or for clients, and Maxtors just don't cut it for that. Most that have come my way were already dead (in fact, only in the past year have I seen *any* live Maxtors from salvage, but 50% of the Maxtors in that heap were dead and some of the rest are suspect), but I know a guy who has run into the "sudden death" issue over and over while doing business networking support. :(

Conversely, I've yet to see a dead W.D. in salvaged boxes, and some have 7-8 years of heavy use behind 'em.

Re:5 years!!!

[DarkVader]

I was definitely not seeing problems with FAT32, since if a drive is formatted FAT32 and I'm touching it, it's about to get formatted, and HFS+ and ext3 don't have a problem with >32GB partitions.

I do see quite a bit of 5+ year old hardware, as I primarily work on Apple hardware, and people tend to keep their Macs for quite a while. I'll see in a few years how Maxtor is really doing, as Apple has been using a lot of Maxtor drives in the last 3-4 years. I did replace a lot of Maxtors on the slot-loading iMacs under warranty - but there was generally no data loss, I just replaced them because they were noisy, and Apple covers that.

Apple hasn't used many WD drives since the beige G3s, and I've changed quite a few drives in those. Most of them made it through the warranty, and then the failures started.

I think the industry in general is getting better, though. I'm replacing more drives for capacity reasons and fewer because of failures these days.

Re:5 years!!!

[Reziac]

Back when I was occasionally sticking my hands inside a Mac, all the HDs were Quantums, and IIRC they were SCSIs at that. Boy, do I feel old :)

I've noticed that that every time there's a major new size threshold, *someone* has a spate of bad drives (not necessarily the first made in that size range, either). After the flurry of RMAs dies down, most of what's left are pretty reliable on average.

My clients tend to keep 'em til they show signs of impending death, or until a major upgrade requires a fresh HD. Most aren't accumulating enough data to keep a 4GB HD properly exercised. The oldest HD in continuous service among 'em dates to 1992 or thereabouts.

[eyeing HDs in immediate view] Unlike my own, where there is never enough disk space...

Re:5 years!!!

[DarkVader]

Apple has used just about every HD out there - the Rodime that outlasted just about every other drive I had in those days was shipped as an Apple HDSC 20. It never touched a Mac - it was on my Apple IIgs.

My clients are varied enough to have drives sized anywhere from 500MB SCSI drives that aren't full to terrabyte Xserve RAIDs that are. I don't think many of the drives are older than about '94 vintage, but I see working ones from the late '80s occasionally.

And I agree with you on never having enough myself. My G4 has a 200GB, a 120GB and an 80GB drive right now - and they're nearly full. I'm running 2 Samsung drives and a Toshiba - so far, so good on all of those - but I rarely go more than a year without changing a drive. They fill up so quickly...

Re:5 years!!!

[System.out.println()]

Don't you worry. I got the chance to metamoderate that 'Flamebait' mod and I can't for the life of me figure out what that mod was smoking. Consider them "unfair"ed.

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?

[zakezuke]

Perhaps this is because their drives are more reliable?

Or perhaps they know that a 5 year old drive is not going to be useful enough to pay the postage to get it replaced. I just replaced one of my old 80gig drives. It was a 2 year old unit, postage UPS was about $10.00. It was worth it to me because it's a decent size, and I payed 80% less then new value.

I have some older drives still in service between 20-40gig. On the new front, I could get them replaced for $30 or so. While postage would save me 66% of new value, I could easily hit the used market and pick one up for about the cost of postage.

And, most importantly, how many systems are actually going to still be in service in 5 years? Most people typicaly replace rather then upgrade.

Re:More reliable drives?

[origin2k]

This may because of poor quality.

I heard that Seagate has had some quality issues, which has hurt profits. This change could be to help resolve relations with large OEM companies like DELL, HP etc. which offer 3 year warrantees on the system when the drives only carried a 1 year warranty.

In effect the drive companies moved the liability to the computer companies when they moved to 1-year warrantee with their disk drives.

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?

[pHatidic]

The reason warranties were lowered was because people would purposely destroy their hard drives toward the end of the warranty period to get a free bigger one. However with this plan if the hard drive fails at the end of the warranty period then the company can offer to subtract the cost of replacement old drive from the cost of a new bigger drive. However now that hard drives are often 200GB this is less of an issue.

This is just like trading in your old car for a new car and saving a thousand bucks, it locks you into buying the same brand again and again.

Re:More reliable drives?

[HungWeiLo]

Well, according to the latest JD Powers 90 days study, Hyundai makes a better car than BMW.

You don't mass-sell a bunch of cars and give up 10-year powertrain, 6-year bmp-to-bmp, 5-year roadside assistance if you didn't have a halfway decent car.

Someone also pointed another Hyundai factoid to me the other day - they've almost tripled their sales in the US for the past few years, but their warranty claims have actually gone down.

Why did I bring this up? Kia is owned by Hyundai, IIRC.

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.

Re:More reliable drives?

[ikea5]

You'd be suprised to know that Hyuadai as a whole company(Hyunday+Kia)scores higher then BMW as a whole company(BMW+Mini) in JDpower's initial quality study for 2004. In fact, Hyundai is placed third behind Toyota/Honda in the whole industry

Usually the car scores higher in the IQS(initial quality study), preforms better in long-trem depebility study as well.

So yes, those Korean cars are most likely ganna out last those German engineered ones.

Re:More reliable drives?

[afidel]

I had always looked down on Hyundai's until about three years ago I drove a Sonata out west. Cruise controll at 90, AC cranked to the max, never broke a sweat which is much better than a bunch of the cheaper Japanese cars I've driven out there. Not quite as large as my Taurus but since I only plan to have two kids that shouldn't be a problem. Fit me fine and I'm 6'3 220lbs. The guy at the rental company said they have fewer problems with the Hyundai's but they use the cheap Taurus with the old Vulcan V6 so I'm not suprised.

Re:More reliable drives?

[GovBoy]

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.

Re:More reliable drives?

[coene]

Over the course of the past 5 years, for mostly business reasons (but often personal as well), I've used my share of hard drives - and had to deal with the support for them as well. I'm talking about around 300-500 drives, mostly Seagate, IBM, and a few Maxtors (until I learned to avoid them). All but a handful of them ATA-66/100, 7200 RPM.

I can say without a doubt that I've seen the lowest failure rate from Seagate drives. Out of all the drives we shipped, over half were Seagate, and we've had around 5 failures. The best news? They were pretty good failures, i.e. the drive may not spin up every time - but when it does the data is fine (good for recovery).

Maxtor gets the highest failure rate, period. Of the 25 or so drives I've used, nearly all of them have failed - many within 6 months. Additionally, once they fail, it's nearly impossible to get them spinning/reading again. The only thing good that I can say about Maxtor drives is that their 5400RPM's are more reliable than the 7200RPM's.

There was a whole series of IBM drives that we shipped, which had quite consistent long-term (3+ year) failures. I believe it was the 75GXP line. IBM never admitted any problem, though it was widely reported (even here on Slashdot) that it was a very common issue. Otherwise, I've been quite happy with the performance and reliability of other lines of IBM drives.

I've heard good and bad about Western Digital, but haven't used but a handful of WD drives (we used all these drives in hot-swap RAID, and WD likes to make their back-plugs incompatible with the "standard", so WD is a non-option).

At the end of the day, Seagate is the IDE drive I would recommend, and I think that with this much experience dealing with the day-to-day support of these types of disks, that recommendation is quite justified.

I'm glad they've increased the warranty length. Perhaps it will make Maxtor do the same, and in the process make them turn out higher quality disks.

Re:More reliable drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

BMW's build quality is crappy, actually. Same as all other german cars. Check your Consumers Reports, april issue.

Re:More reliable drives?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

It's worth pointing out that BMWs were not always as crappy. And German cars used to be high quality in general (esspecialy Mercs).

But hey, that what happens when you sell-out to a bigger, foreign company.

Re:More reliable drives?

[theTerribleRobbo]

> Perhaps this is because their drives are more reliable?

I beg to differ. Three of our five Seagate drives have died, and there's one that's well on the way with bad sectors all over the shop.

I was going to go with Maxtor on my next purchase, but I keep on seeing reports of those dying in the first 18 months or so.

Are there any vaguely reliable drives around? I'm going to have to go for triple RAID 1 setups or something at this rate. :S

Re:More reliable drives?

[winwar]

Well, considering the first cars they imported to the US were unmitigated POS, it would be reasonable to have looked down upon them. Their reputation suffered greatly. I'm sure their current cars are better. How much better however? Frankly, I am not too concerned about what happens to a car in the first 10 years or 100K miles. Any good car should hold up with low repair costs in that time frame. It is what happens after that which defines real quality....

One of the reasons for the long warranty is to combat their poor image (their cars may or may not be really good, but if no one buys them you can't make any money, so the warranty is just a cost of doing business...) However, having seen their first generation of cars, I will never buy one. Becasue if they sold what they knew was crap once (and they DID know it), there is no reason they wouldn't do it again.

Re:More reliable drives?

[winwar]

"Usually the car scores higher in the IQS(initial quality study), preforms better in long-trem depebility study as well."

I think the key word here is ususally. Granted, if it sucks in the beginning, it isn't going to get any better. But just because something is put together well to begin with doesn't mean it won't fall apart later... Many problems take time to develop. I think the German cars will be around longer than the Korean ones (for one, they cost more = more likely to be repaired, maintained, etc.) Granted, some of them might need a new electrical system....

Not that JDpower's ratings are very useful in my opinion. You create enough categories, it's hard not to win one of them.....

Re:More reliable drives?

[ikea5]

Any car will be around longer than Korean cars if you keep pumping money into the car.

You can go look at some eailer VDS and IQS reports. IQS goes up, VDS usually follows. I am welling to bet that a new Hyundai today will out last your German engineered mechines.

And JDPower is the single most respected quality report in auto industry. Don't mistaken it for 'low rider 5 star best pick' or some other useless awards.

And if you think German car's only weak spot is electrical system, you are dead wrong. Ask me how I know. At one time I maintained three German cars in my family. '93 318, '97 E320, '99 A4.

Re:More reliable drives?

[chefren]

We have had a big bunch of Seagates dying over the last 2 years. All of the were of the same type (U5). The truth is that all hdd manufacturers get it wrong every now and then and come up with a crappy model. Most hdds sold are ok. The IBM Deathstars are legendary.

Re:More reliable drives?

[TheLink]

Even if Kia is owned by Hyundai, Kia != Hyundai.

Daihatsu and Lexus belong to Toyota. And they are quite different.

That said, I've seen more BMWs at the side of the road with their hoods up than Kia's. And there are probably about the same number of Kia's and BMWs in my part of the world.

That's anecdotal though. Someone should probably whip out the defects per car statistics.

Re:More reliable drives?

[zz99]

This is a good point in general. Be ware of sweet promises, at least from strangers :)

An actual case of this was the introduction of Hyundai on the europeean market. A relative of mine bought one of these wonders, since they were cheap and had an all inclusive 5-year-warranty.
He said that if there was any problem with the car he could just go and get it fixed. And he figured that he got a great deal, because the car was cheap, even if it just lasted for five years.
The only problem was that the quality was so low, that the car developed problems faster than he had time to go to the dealer and get it fixed. After four years the car looked like peace of junk.

Re:More reliable drives?

[Scudsucker]

I've had nothing but good expereinces with IBM/Hitachi.

Re:More reliable drives?

[beyonddeath]

I dont agree that bmw's would last longer, driving a 2002 bmw x5 that requires an order of magnitude more maintence than our 1997 acura with 250000km's on it. Has to say somthing about quality.

Re:More reliable drives?

[muyuubyou]

But Seagate is not the Kia of the HDD world, but rather the BMW. Also, warranties in HDDs usually mean replacement, and people make use of them when they have the opportunity.

Making parallels like that is often oversimplifying.

Re:More reliable drives?

[jedrek]

People will replace systems, but they'll take their peripherals with them -- including the hard drives. It's a lot easier to add a hard drive than it is to copy a backup.

Re:More reliable drives?

[freqres]

Why would anyone buy some crappy Korean car like a KIA when they can get a real American quality vehicle like the Chevy Aveo?

Re:More reliable drives?

[freqres]

2 kids in a Sonata or Taurus will be a problem, trust me. After 4 years with 2 kids in a Lumina sedan trying to lug around car seats, stroller, numerous bags, etc. it was a problem. Unless automakers decide to re-introduce the large woody station wagon, it's gotta be minivan/SUV if you have multiple kids.

Re:More reliable drives?

[phuturephunk]

If I'm not mistaken BMW is still a closely held family company. They've been notorious for years for being low on the reliability totem pole, usually due to German over-engineering. The higher the price != better quality, I know one M3 owner thats had to have 3 rear transaxle replacements due to faulty manufacturing. I know several others who go in at least once a month to get something or other worked on that would be simple in an American Car.

Re:More reliable drives?

[HungWeiLo]

However, having seen their first generation of cars, I will never buy one. Becasue if they sold what they knew was crap once (and they DID know it), there is no reason they wouldn't do it again.

It was nary 20 some years ago that Honda and Toyota knew they had substandard vehicles, but sold them here anyway. They've certainly improved their respective qualities a little bit.

Re:More reliable drives?

[afidel]

Nah, I already watch my niece several days a week (mother is fortunatly single as the sperm donor is rotting in jail where he belongs) and I have zero problems with hauling them both around in my Taurus.

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 ...

[AuMatar]

Well, if they offer 5 yrs, they must be pretty sure it won't fail...

Besides which- 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. Really a few hours of work will get them back in good condition.

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 ...

[stretch0611]

Who cares about the warranty anyways? The data on that drive is a whole lot more important.

I care about the warranty. A warranty is a measure of how long a company thinks its drive will last. If a company thinks that their drive will last only 2 years with real world use it will put a one year warranty on it instead of five.

The warranty will not replace your lost data; but it will tell you if the company has confidence in the equiptment it sells.

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 ...

[justMichael]

If your data is really worth $100k, I would hope you have the common sense to test your backups and know there are no holes...

Also at the very minimum RAID 1 in addition to your tapes. Maybe an hourly, non-delete rsync to another machine also RAID 1, to cover the occasional user oops.

If you trust $100k worth of data to a single $175 IDE drive, you probably don't deserve the data to begin with ;)

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 ...

[badasscat]

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.

I think the point is a company doesn't provide a 5 year warranty if they're not confident in the quality of their drives. Over the years, IDE drive makers have gone from 5 years, to 3 years, to 1 year, and over that time I think it's pretty much conventional wisdom that the quality of the drives themselves has gone down as well. After all, why else change your warranty from 3 years to 1? You do that because you're getting more returns within the 2-3 year period than you would like, and you no longer want to pay for those as a manufacturer.

It was a cost-cutting measure, obviously, and it's one reason why we now have 120GB drives that cost under $100. If Seagate is now saying they can maintain that pricing with a 5 year warranty, that can only be a positive thing for consumers, because a) if you do need to replace the drive, saving $100 on a new drive is still saving $100, and b) it shows that Seagate believes their level of construction quality is so high that their costs under this five year warranty will not be significantly higher than under their one year warranty. This is a big statement to make, and it will definitely put pressure on WD, Hitachi and Maxtor at the very least.

Look at it this way: Seagate is telling you their drives should last for five years, Maxtor, Hitachi and WD are telling you their drives should last for one year. Which would you feel more confident buying?

(I'll add to this that all of the major drive makers have particular models and lines with longer warranties; I'm talking about the "basic" consumer models, since Seagate's new warranty applies to those as well.)

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

Who cares about the warranty anyways?

Some people say that a longer warranty indicates that the drive is better made, and will last longer. That's the optimistic point of view.

On the other hand, maybe Seagate believes that most people outgrow their disk drives (or the computers they're in) in just three years anyway. Then it wouldn't cost them much to extend the warranty to five years, and it gives them a new marketing ploy. That's the pragmatic point of view.

Or, as the article suggests, maybe Seagate knows they won't be around in five years anyway. That's the cynical point of view.

I just bought a pair of 200GB SATA drives, so I'll stick with the optimistic point of view. You choose yours.

As for the worth of the data vs the worth of the drive: absolutely. You must have a good backup strategy. And no, a RAID-5 array is not a backup strategy. Not a very good one anyway.

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.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[evilviper]

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.

No matter how much you might want them to... Seagate can't stop you from doing something stupid.

Nobody makes 100% reliable drives, so the only thing they can reasonably do is to provide a replacement if it does fail.

You can advocate data insurance all you want, but it has the same problems as all other forms of insurance... Those that are carful and don't ever need to collect on insurance, have to foot the bill for those that are careless.

And finally, unless the platters shatter, or the heads start scraping the coating off the platters, it only costs a few hundred dollars to have professionals recover the data from a broken hard drive. I imagine, like everyone else, Seagate has a few data recovery companies it partners with, and will allow you to send them your dead drive, and recieve a replacement drive with all your recovered data on it.

But it would probably be cheaper in many regards to just buy an extra hard drive, and keep your backups up-to-date.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[JungleBoy]

If you have $100K of data on a single $175 drive, you, sir, are a fucking idiot. That much data (value wise) demands multiple redundencies. Hardware RAID 5 with redundent UPSs at least. A tape backup system is also highly required. And to finish it off, you ought to setup an off-site mirror.

I have a large dataset with this type of configuration. I had one of the UPSs go down today, and it released a flaw in my strategy. My rack ventilation fan was connected only to the failed ups. So don't forget to provide redundent power to your cooling system.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[jpmkm]

He never said it was, you ignorant goat roper.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[tzanger]

On the other hand, maybe Seagate believes that most people outgrow their disk drives (or the computers they're in) in just three years anyway. Then it wouldn't cost them much to extend the warranty to five years, and it gives them a new marketing ploy. That's the pragmatic point of view.

So those of us who will actually return an old drive for warranty get better bang for our buck.... Sounds like a deal to me.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Carnildo]

And finally, unless the platters shatter, or the heads start scraping the coating off the platters, it only costs a few hundred dollars to have professionals recover the data from a broken hard drive.

The cheapest data recovery company I found charges $1150 if they need to open your drive in a cleanroom.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[aldoman]

Sorry, but your machines will start crashing and shut down (or should do if they have half decent BIOS) before you get temps in your rack to anywhere near enough to start doing damage to a HDD.

You could keep a HDD running in 40*C-50*C for months and have no problems. A failed UPS will be noticed in a few hours, maybe a day, maximum, and you will not do any damage, unless the drives are near death anyway.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

What he said was "Backups, if you can".

What I'm saying is "Backups: you must".

See the diff? Good, 'cause now I got to go rope me some goats.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[afidel]

hardly, try a Netapp with hourly snapshot's and snapmirror to a second unit across the WAN with backup to a robotic library. Yeah it costs a bit more but if the data is really worth $100K then it's worth protecting as such. It also works with databases or Exchange server stores. They have some unbeatable features (like in a cluster the systems can take over the personality of the other unit if it crashes and mount and share its disks, they can also use hot spares from the other part of the cluster).

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Cthefuture]

True, but for many people it's quite easy and cheap to build a several terabyte array. Trying to find a backup solution for that size array is not cheap or easy.

For example, my MythTV machine has a 1 TB array. I don't necessarily want to make a backup of that system but I wouldn't want to lose all that data either. A RAID array is good enough and cheap.

Now, if we're talking about losing $100k of data like the original poster said, then yeah, a backup solution is a must and would be a good investment. Often my "must never lose" data will fit on several DVD's so that is a cheap backup solution if you don't have much data.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[SilentMuse]

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.

If you've got $100k worth of data, you probably aren't storing it on a $175 disk drive.....

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

Not all value is monetary. I make backups, and offsite backups of my six years of digital photos. They are priceless to me. I also have them on a RAID-5 array. I don't have enough offsite storage to back up all my data, so I pick and choose what goes to backup - and my digital photos are part of the backup. A RAID-5 array is wonderful, but it's not a complete backup strategy. I'm just saying "Don't kid yourself." Because some people will.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[tcc]

> Who cares about the warranty anyways?

I do, had a batchload of failing Deathstar and Fujitsu drives a while back, let me tell you that I replaced every single one of them, when they were shipping them back with new/refurb units, I'd simply put them in a raid config, when they'd offer a check (fujitsu did) I simply turned around and went seagate.

Face it, if you have mixed experiences you probably see seagate lightyear more reliable than maxtor or ibm.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Thing 1]

How do you like your RAID-5 array? I'm considering building one myself but I'm torn between 4 x 250 GB drives in RAID-5 (750 GB storage) or a RAID0+1 setup (500 GB storage, but faster because it doesn't have to compute parity).

Did you try RAID0+1? (Or RAID10, the difference really doesn't matter with just 4 drives but with 6 it's important because one version can lose more drives and maintain the data.)

What do you back up onto? Few tape solutions are cost-effective at that size; it might be better to just clone the array and then vault that. Of course it'll experience effects from magnetism... Or are DVDs an acceptable solution? (It would take ~125 DVDs to back up 500 GB...)

Thanks!

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

My RAID-5 is not an impressive setup. Basically, it was a way to glue together a couple of 200GB drives with some older drives to get a little redundancy. It's not a high-performance array, but it doesn't need to be because I access it across the network, via NFS or Samba.

I have a 80GB drive and a 120GB drive in linear as a 200GB /dev/md0. That, plus a pair of 200GB drives form /dev/md1, a RAID-5 array - three "drives" for a total of 400GB. I haven't tried RAID0+1; I figure single redundancy is good enough.

The RAID-5 array hasn't been in use long enough for me to get a feel for whether I like it or not; I've only been using it a couple of weeks. I guess whether I like it is going to depend on how much trouble it gives me, aside from disk failures.

I back up onto a LaCie 500GB "BigDisk". Expensive, as compared to a pair of 250GB bare disk drives, but I like the portability. Every other month I make a full backup (which will be easier now that I have merged all my other disks into that RAID-5 array). Then I take the LaCie to work and lock it in my desk: offsite backup.

DVDs aren't an acceptable solution. It takes too many disks to back up a few hundred gigabytes. Backups should be quick and easy, so you're never tempted to skip one. Copying hundreds of gigs of data isn't fast even to hard drives, but at least with the LaCie it's easy, and there's no media to change.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

Nobody is talking about backups...

Actually, that's exactly what this thread is talking about. Here's how it started: "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..." A backup strategy has to be about more than disk drives failing, because guess what, Sherlock, other bad things can happen to your data! Do you have a clue, yet, Sherlock, or have you still got your head stuck up my goat's ass?

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[jpmkm]

And how the hell is a drive manufacturer's warranty going to help when those other bad things happen? A warranty is useful when drives malfunction. RAID is useful when drives malfunction. RAID performs perfectly well when a drive malfunctions. Of course other things happen to data. Backups are necessary. But in regards to a malfunctioning drive(which would require warranty service), RAID handles just fine.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[prash_n_rao]

Warranty numbers are arrived at by looking at MTBF statistics. If they blindly increase their warranty period, they will end up losing a lot of money on support and replacements.

Warranty indicates how reliable their internal benchmarks indicate their products to be. Of course, I have simplified this a bit here, but, that's the general idea.

So, given an option, if you want reliability, it is better to go with something that has a greater warranty period.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kasperd]

If they blindly increase their warranty period, they will end up losing a lot of money on support and replacements.

Replacing a drive that fails after more than three years shouldn't cost much. Consider how much the price will decrease in that time. Of course it is possible to increase the cost of performing a replacement, by spending a lot of time on testing the deffective drive, and by sending the deffective drive back to the manufacturer. Just don't do that. Let the shop that sold the drive replace it without making a big deal of it, and Seagate will just have to pay whatever the price amounts to at that time, and they will still have made money on the entire deal.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

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

Simple solution: get a 100-pack of CD-Rs (about $35 at Best Buy), and start burning your photos. If you have a 5 megapixel camera, we're talking about 3MB a picture with decent quality JPEG.

If you have, say, 3000 pictures, that's only 15 CD-Rs.

Almost every PC has a CD burner, so there is no longer any excuse not to back up your photos.

Or, alternately, if you have an iPod, use that. Or, do as I do, and back them up over the network to another computer.

Problem solved.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[lucas teh geek]

If you have, say, 3000 pictures, that's only 15 CD-Rs.

No, its more like 45 CD-Rs, not a big difference in cost but a PITA and lot of time burning off all those cds. with cd failure rates as bad as they are you ARE going to lose photos if you dont burn off multiple copies of EVERY disc. I trust my hard drive more than flakey CD-Rs

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[RogL]

He was making the point: backups are necessary. In response to a post stating: backups if you can (paraphrased as "backups are handy, but optional").

Seemed clear to me; but then, I agree with him. I've run RAID arrays, for redundancy or for speed, and never ignored backups. They are always essential.

Heck, on my home network, important data on the Windows boxes gets backed-up to the OpenBSD boxes, important stuff on the OpenBSD boxes gets backed up to the other OpenBSD box, and I make periodic CD or DVD backups to archive.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[jridley]

You're right, my digital photos are the only thing on all my systems that I'd actually cry if I lost. I'd be really irritated by the rest, but I'd live with it. That's why, since I had access to a CD burner, I've made two copies on CDR - one stays here, one goes to work.

Nowadays I'm also burning 50MB of PAR2 files onto each CDR. Also I make DVD-R's as a third copy when there's enough to fill a DVD, but this happens less often; I still use CD-R because I can burn a full one every few weeks with new photos. If I was using just DVD-R I'd either have to wait several months to fill it up, or use the non-standard DVD multisession, which I've been told (by a Nero pop-up window) will only be properly recognized by Windows XP (though I'm sure Linux probably will read it as well, or if it doesn't, will eventually). With CD-R, if it's been a few weeks and I can't fill a CD, I can use CD multisession to backup a partial CD, then fill it later. With the price of CDs, I also don't mind just tossing the old CD and re-recording with more data on it.

I also replicate my entire photo collection to a hard drive on another computer every time I put a significant number of new photos on it (just got back from an event/vacation/etc).

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Thing 1]

Thanks for the info, I didn't know about the LaCie drives.

One potential issue with them, though, is that they appear to use two 250 GB hard drives in RAID-0 setup (striping), so that if any one drive fails you've lost all your data. Of course, using them strictly as a backup makes them less likely to fail since they're in use a lot less.

I guess I'll just have to set up two arrays (most likely not at the same time) and run some performance tests on them to see which will be best for my needs. I do some video editing, so the striping of RAID0+1 is attractive. Thanks again!

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[kzinti]

I definitely wouldn't run the LaCie as a primary disk. It runs way too hot for my taste. As a backup, though, they're great. I do video editing, too, and for that I just set up an internal RAID-0 set of two 200GB SATA disks. (Seagates - I just bought 'em so I get the five-year warranty.) Because this array is "scratch" or working space, and contains no permanent data, I don't back it up. When I finish a DVD, though, I make several copies of the DVD.

Re:Yeah but what about ...

[Tobias Luetke]

Outch, agreed, thank you for this.

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?

[mrokkam]

that's not exactly true. I had a maxtor die on me after around a year of heavy duty usage. I just had to download a diagnosis tool, run it to show that my hard disk, was indeed, damaged and they sent me a replacement immediately. As for saying that they always give warranties less than the life of the product.... why would they first reduce the warranties to 1 year... and then now increase it to 5? methinks... they think... noone will think of asking for a replacement after 5 years. You know... like the whole Mail In Rebate scam. Half the people tend to forget to send them in!! And what with hard disks becoming sooo cheap...

Re:Why does it matter?

[prewashedironman]

But the receipt problem shouldn't be too much of a problem, because i expect that with a techy item like a hard drive at least 80% of hard drive purchases are made online. So instead of keepiong a small piece of paper its just an email you need to find.

Re:Why does it matter?

[Cthefuture]

you will have to submit the original receipt.

I've never had a manufacturer ask for the receipt. Most (all?) of the drives nowadays are stamped with the manufacture date on them and often even have the warrenty expiration date.

Re:Why does it matter?

[evilviper]

Expect several other drive makers to do the same shortly.

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?

Re:Why does it matter?

[aka-ed]

In 1999, standard desktops came with 5-to-15 gigs drivespace. If 10 gig drive crapped out on you today, how much trouble would you go to to replace it?

Many drives will outlast 5 years. Many drives will be replaced and become idle, or be passed on to third parties, before 5 years are gone. Of the drives that quit in the 4th or 5th year of operation, I doubt that many will be shipped out for replacement.

Re:Why does it matter?

[evilviper]

Most (all?) of the drives nowadays are stamped with the manufacture date on them

However, a warranty takes effect upon the date of purchase. So, if the drive you buy was manufactured 6-months earlier (very common) then you need the reciept if you want to collect on the warranty in the last 6-months of the warranty period.

This might not be so significant with 5-year warranties, but it cuts a 1-year warranty in half if you don't keep the reciept.

Re:Why does it matter?

[Wanker]

(Note: For the sarcasm impaired, the following is humor. I hope.)

I think they finally realized that the best way to make money is by selling personal information to marketing agencies. This is all part of their plan to cull E-mail addresses, bank accounts, social security numbers, tin foil hat size, and pornography preferences directly from the platters of the RMAed drives.

Think about it! The drive is dead so you can't wipe it. Physical destruction voids you warranty. Ha! They've got you. :-)

Re:Why does it matter?

[nvrrobx]

Funny, IBM, Hitatchi, Western Digital and Micropolis never made me submit a receipt.

Re:Why does it matter?

[drinkypoo]

Amen. I have RMA'd tens of drives (I'm sure many people have done more than I have) from assorted manufacturers including seizegate, western digital, conner (back in the day), IBM, quantum, and maxtor, and none of them asked me for a receipt. This is a good thing, because some of them were donations from people too lazy to RMA them. They just want the serial number.

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?

Re:Why does it matter?

[adolf]

Receipt? Huh?

I've had warranty replacements on hard drives now and then, mostly with Seagate and Maxtor.

I always just hit their web page, and follow the instructions. The process generally consists of running a special diagnostic utility, and filling out a form. An RMA# is then issued.

I have no idea how they determine warranty status, but I strongly suspect that they just take the drive's date of birth, add a few weeks, and use that as the date of sale.

If there is a dispute over whether or not the drive is warranted, a receipt might help. I've never had to show anything except that the drive is fucked, however.

In addition to not requiring a receipt, I've found that at least half of the time, the replacement drive is larger than that which failed. I recently RMA'd a 30 gig Maxtor and got back a 40 gig drive. Some years ago, I sent in a 2.5 gig Seagate, which they replaced with a 6.3 gig unit.

So, how nice of Seagate to increase their free upgrade period to 5 years.

Re:Why does it matter?

[SnappleMaster]

That's kinda true, kinda not. e.g.

Maxtor warrants to the original consumer purchaser that new Maxtor disk drives will be free from defects in material and workmanship for the Standard Warranty Period. The start of the warranty period is the date of the last production for that drive, plus three months. If a drive is purchased from Maxtor or Maxtor's authorized reseller after the last production date for that drive, and proof of purchase can be provided, then the start of the warranty period is the documented date of such purchase.

Re:Why does it matter?

[SpecBear]

Hopefully things haven't changed since, but I returned a Seagate drive under warranty back in the days of 3-year coverage, and I didn't need the original receipt. They had a nifty tool on the web site where I punched in the drive serial number to confirm its warranty status, and they gave me an RMA number. I sent them my dead drive and had the replacement a little over a week later. I was actually quite astonished at how painless it was.

If their drives are living longer than 5 years on average, that's great. If someone at Seagate did the calculation and figured out that they'd probably gain more in increased sales than they'd lose from providing warranty service, that's great too. It's the free market at work.

Re:Why does it matter?

[AipomOfDoom]

How would the email confirming the purchase of the failed hard drive be on it?

Re:Why does it matter?

[WuphonsReach]

I always just hit their web page, and follow the instructions. The process generally consists of running a special diagnostic utility, and filling out a form. An RMA# is then issued.

IBM and Quantum are the same way (although back then, I think I had to call a phone number for the RMA). When you buy the higher line drives with the 3 year warranties, it's extremely rare that you get *any* flak about getting it RMA'd. Never needed anything other then the serial number off of the failed drive.

It's been a while since I RMA'd an older drive, but I remember also getting back something that was larger capacity then what I sent in.

Re:Why does it matter?

[jmorris42]

You think you are joking..... but you just aren't old enough to know better. Back in the day, my dad was running DataExchange BBS. Some wanker uploaded Autocad trying to score some upload ratio and the drive died before pops noticed the file in the upload dir. He sent the drive to Seagate under warranty and found out the hard way that they DID scan all retured drives for contraband. At least they were decent enough to contact him before the FBI and accepted his explanation that he had no way to control what people upload but that the upload dir was not publicly visible.

Thankfully that was the only piece of warez in the upload dir and the datestamp made the story plausible enough they didn't send the goons because back in those days the Feds stock response was to just take all of your stuff and dare you to object. Few sysops ever saw any of their gear again because you were guilty unless you could raise the funds to prove your innocence. That was back in the dark days before the Feds hit Steve Jackson and the EFF was founded in response to fight back against the repression.

No way to really know if they still do it (even if you get away with it once, who can be sure they don't just spot check now) so 'yall be careful out there with the p0rn and warez, ok? And yes, I bet they do know how to scan an ext3 or reiserfs partition. Encrypt anything you don't want your drive vendor looking at or just ignore the warranty if the drive fails to the point where blanking is no longer an option.

Re:Why does it matter?

[RedBear]

Manufacturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the failure age of the unit.

No, manucaturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the average failure age of the unit, adjusted for the percentage of people who ever bother to claim warranty replacements and also have kept all necessary paperwork to do so for the duration of the warranty period. Since this percentage is oftentimes small, the warranty will often be slightly longer than the actual expected life of the unit, and the few people who have kept the proper receipts and manage to claim a replacement will simply be written off as a marketing expense. Meanwhile the long warranty terms will create a partially false confidence in their products and pull customers away from their competitors who may or may not have better actual life expectancy on their products regardless of their warranty terms.

I'm glad I could be here to simplify that for you.

Lifetime Warranties.

[Kenja]

Lifetime Warranties. Mine, the hardwares or the companies?

Re:Lifetime Warranties.

[evilviper]

Lifetime Warranties. Mine, the hardwares or the companies?

"Lifetime" refers to the individual who purchased the product. You would know this if you've ever read the terms: "...warrants to the original purchaser that this product will be free of defects in..."

However, it's also true that the company going under can nullify that lifetime warranty as well. If it's bought by another company, they must continue to honor the terms, even though you might have to find somebody high-up, and hassle them for a while...

If it refered to the lifetime of the hardware, it would be absolutely pointless, wouldn't it?

Re:Lifetime Warranties.

[MrNemesis]

Whichever comes first.

Be sure to check the small print though. A great many companies have a cryptically worded disclaimer which says they reserve the right to assasinate you if they're going through a bad patch ;)

Re:Lifetime Warranties.

[mdfst13]

Kingston memory comes with a lifetime warranty where it's the lifetime of production. I.e. they stop making the product, they won't replace it for you (ignoring exceptions). Since they end of life products regularly, this means that most of their lifetime warranties are shorter than five years.

I used to read a lot of warranties in computer parts, and at the time, that kind of lifetime warranty was common. Kingston is just the company that I remember offering it. To understand what a company means by lifetime, you always have to read the fine print.

Re:Lifetime Warranties.

[Engineer Andy]

I never really bought into the whole lifetime warranty thing til my victorinox knife had a bit break in it years after I bought it. No receipt of purchase, no longer in the city i bought it.

I took it to a random store that sold their knives, they sent it off, and I got a brand new knife back a week or so later.

Made me happy enough anyway.

Refresh my memory...

[evilviper]

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?

Re:Refresh my memory...

[Gr33nNight]

I have had 5 Maxtor harddrives fail, a couple WD, a bunch of IBMs and 0 Seagates.

All my computers that I build for myself, and for customers I put in Seagates and so far I have yet to have one of their drives fail. They are relatively quiet, the setup is simple, and they are solid.

Now they are updating their warrenty, this is awesome.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[kayen_telva]

buy them all the time. they are the best drive avail IMHO

Re:Refresh my memory...

[TeraBill]

I would say that I have bought at least one of each of the biggies in the last six months, Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate and WD. I dislike the WD drives since they seem to run hotter than the others. And their warranties are 1 year from date of manufacture, not purchase and that bites. Plus, I lost one late last year after less than 24 hours. It was totally dead. I have lost two Maxtors in the last five years, but they went slowly and there was no data lost. The Hitachi and Seagate drives are pretty recent, but they seem good. I like the Seagate 160GB and 200GB drives quite a lot.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[builderbob_nz]

I build computers exclusivly with Seagate drives, they have proven to be the most reliable drive I can get in NZ. Previously this was Maxtor's position but their current models are proving to be a complete waste of time.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[PhoenixFlare]

Also, has anybody bought a Seagate hard drive recently?

Yep, bought an 80 gig about 7 months ago.

Have they come through, and started selling them with Lindows pre-installed on the drives?

No clue. Why would you want a hard drive manufacturer to do this? Seems like that should be up to those selling the complete systems.

Experienced any hardware problems with it?

None whatsoever. It's been quiet, fast, and reliable. Which is much more than I can say for my WD 40 gig that went bonkers and had to be RMA'd after only a year.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[Polymorph2000]

The problem with maxtor/wd/ibm drives is that they require additional cooling to last a long time. If you just put them in a case with little or no ventilation, they will die (while slowly corrupting your data too). Even if you don't think the drive will overheat, a simple $10 investment that you can attach to any drive is easily worth the cost if it saves your data.

I haven't purchased one of their drives in the past few years but their 2gig drive that I got about 8 years ago still works fine (it's installed in an old server that runs 24/7).

Re:Refresh my memory...

[tzanger]

Uh... what IDE drive isn't simple to install and "set up"??

Re:Refresh my memory...

[codemachine]

I've only had two drives bought in the last 3 years fail. One was a Seagate and the other an infamous IBM DeathStar.

Not that I trust any brand of hard drives that much right now. The fact they all went to 1 year warranties for a while there says loads about how confident they were in their own products. And from the amount of dead drives I've seen people accumulate in the last couple years, I can't blame them.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[rebelcool]

I bought one 6 months ago. It is silent, and I like silent. Even the click is faint.

Why would I want a harddrive to come preinstalled with an OS?

Re:Refresh my memory...

[Kyouryuu]

My primary computer came with a Seagate drive and out of the many brands I've owned (Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM, and Hitachi), I've come to like the Seagate the best. Even after 2 years of use, it's still completely silent and reliable, compared to the rattly Maxtor that is slaved to it. It strikes me as a drive of superior quality, and I'll be sure my next drive is a Seagate.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[Moraelin]

I have an 120 GB and a 60 GB, both 7200 RPM, in my current computer. They work like a charm so far, and the noise is _much_ lower than the IBM and WD drives I had before.

I also have a 20 GB Seagate drive from 1999 or thereabout, also 7200 RPM, and it still works like a charm, if in a different computer. Seems to me like Seagate could have afforded a 5 year warranty on that already.

By contrast, in the meantime I had two IBMs and a WD that crapped and lost all data. Admittedly, in an overheating case that originally wasn't designed to have any fans. (In 1999 case fans weren't the norm.) Still, can't help noticing that the Seagate drive had no problems whatsoever in the same case.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Coming from 5 years experience using only Seagates, I found that after the switch from a 3 year to 1 year warranty, the number of Seagates (from new) that I had to RMA went up *dramatically*.

Here's hoping they improve their quality with the improved warranty.

I still like Seagates, don't get me wrong, just not as much as I used to.

Re:Refresh my memory...

[slagish666]

I've purchased 3 120GB 8MB cache Seagate Barracuda's (7200RPM) 2 years ago and haven't had a single problem with any of them.

I'm at work, staring at 3 machines used for heavy data analysis that each have 2 120GB Seagate Barracudas (SATA models) and none have hiccupped.

They are fast, quiet, cheap and reliable, and now they have a 5 year warranty. What's not to like?

Let me be the fourth or fifth to say...

[Erpo]

Kudos Seagate!

Would this hurt SCSI sales?

[Fiz Ocelot]

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.

This seems like it could hurt them financially in the long run, but maybe they're trying to increase short term sales?

Re:Would this hurt SCSI sales?

[dougmc]

Well, the warranty on the SCSI drives would go up to five years as well.

I've not noticed IDE drives to be that much less reliable than SCSI drives lately -- I've had both fail on me in pretty large numbers. In fact, I'd say I've had more SCSI drives fail than IDE drives lately.

I just wish they'd put SCSI interfaces on IDE drives and sell them at IDE prices -- even if the quality is a little lower.

Re:Would this hurt SCSI sales?

[neafevoc]

Isn't warranty on SCSI drives at 5 years already? Now maybe if they upped it to 10 years or 7 years, that could be more of an incentive to do SCSI instead of IDE when it comes to reliability/warranty-length.

Re:Would this hurt SCSI sales?

[Zakabog]

SCSI interfaces on IDE drives? That's like taking a K6-2 and putting an adapter for a socket 953 (Athlon 64 FX-53, the 64 bit processor, 2.4 GHz, very fast heh.) It's not going to run any faster, same hardware just a different connection. Besides you can get Serial ATA, not perfect, but better than standard IDE (only slightly, but then again you can get 10K RPM I think that's very close to a "cheap" SCSI drive.) And think of the issues? Every motherboard comes with an IDE controller (and now SATA), how many come with SCSI? How easy is it to install your favorite OS on SCSI hardware? It's annoying since you need a driver. Anyway, SATA is faster than standard IDE and it costs just about the same (maybe a few dollars more) so just get that heh.

Re:Would this hurt SCSI sales?

[dougmc]

SCSI interfaces on IDE drives? That's like taking a K6-2 and putting an adapter for a socket 953 (Athlon 64 FX-53, the 64 bit processor, 2.4 GHz, very fast heh.)

SCSI and IDE drives generally aren't any different except for the interface. You may be able to find SCSI drives with faster rotational speeds, and some believe that the SCSI drives are just built better, but the differences are small.

But the interface makes a huge difference. A system that pounds on the disk will perform much better with SCSI drives than IDE drives, even if the drives themselves are identical otherwise.

IDE drives can handle raw throughputs very similar to that of SCSI drives, but while the drive is being hammered like this, the SCSI system will be able to do other things much better than the IDE system.

The tiny print...

[The Living Fractal]

...This warranty is void when the tape covering the drive connectors is removed... ;o

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:Smart idea!

[drinkypoo]

Most people who won't bother to RMA know someone that will. I currently have an 80GB drive in my system that was a donation from someone who didn't want to deal with RMA.

I would RMA even a 20GB drive that someone gave me, maybe it's just that I'm a hobbyist, but then almost everyone knows someone who is a hobbyist.

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:Smart idea!

[anethema]

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 ?

Re:Smart idea!

[adolf]

Depends on the application.

Suppose you've got a print server or firewall box which has been working maintenance-free for years. It spools faster than lickety-split, and/or saturates its connected interfaces with a load average of just 0.01. Of course, it's never had a moment of downtime.

For its application it is, in a word, perfect. Then one day hard drive starts logging errors (yay for SMART).

Do you:

a) Spend $x to replace its already way-too-big 30 gig drive with a proposterously-monstrous and unproven 300 gig unit, and then proceed to fight out BIOS bugs and filesystem issues? Of course, this new replacement drive is probably SATA, so it's suddenly time to start adding PCI cards, and/or swapping motherboards. Random upgrades are a great way to fuck up a perfectly functional system.

or

b) Get an advance replacement for free from Seagate, plug it in, move the data, and send back the failing drive for a few dollars in postage?

It's not like there's much effort involved in RMA'ing a hard drive, anyway. It takes but a few minutes. And since you're paying for the warranty up-front, whether you realize it or not, you might as well use it if the time comes (if for no other reason than to dump the refurbished replacement on Ebay).

Re:Smart idea!

[wobblie]

Because generally if they are out of the model you originally bought, they'll give you something somewhat better anyway.

Re:Smart idea!

[evilviper]

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.

You've got to be kidding me. I'm still using 10GB hard drives, 27GB hard drives, 40GB hard drives, etc.

And it's not as if that's all I've got. I also have a couple 100GB drives, and a 160GB drive.

Oddly enough, it was just recently that I finally decomissioned my 1GB Seagate drive. It was developing bad sectors, but they were few, and of little concern... The only reason I decomssioned that drive was because it was just so much louder than the 10GB drive I replaced it with... A few dollars just isn't worth my sanity, so I upgraded.

Additionally, the first 27GB Maxtor hard drive I bought (I have 3) went defective just as it was out of the warranty period, but I would love to be able to use it today. Drop it in a $5 HDD rack, and I'm ready to use it for testing the new FreeBSD release, backing-up dozens and dozens of videos, backing up data, or maybe put it in a USB/Firewire case and use it to carry large files. 27GB drives are over 5 years old now, and lots of people are still going out and buying systems with hard drives smaller than that!

available for the price of the original.

That's a very deceptive line... You make it sound like you can just exchange the defective one for a new higher-capacity one... No, if it's not under warranty, you have to pay full retail price to get a replacement. That may mean $200, when chances are, you won't even need that space...

I know I don't need 160GBs, it's just what was cheap. I certainly wouldn't want to spend several hundred dollars to replace it with something that will just have 10xs as much empty space.

Re:Smart idea!

[weiyuent]

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?

First of all, they might replace your 5 year old drive with the latest model that's substantially faster and larger. So the warranty repair might be worth the trouble.

Second, there are some situations where you want a replacement drive that is identical to the original, e.g. RAID.

Re:Smart idea!

[Reziac]

The smallest HD here that still sees some use is a lowly 850mb bearing Win98, which I use when I need a quick OS to check out some pile of random hardware. Why subject a newer drive, with realworld value, to being thumped around all the time, when I can use an old one of little worth, and not get too upset if I happen to accidentally drop and kill it? -- Otherwise, I figure 1GB and up are still useful for testing, for systems that are expected to only do limited jobs, etc. Why lay out for a new HD for that firewall or test box, when an old HD from the salvage box will do just as well?

Re:Smart idea!

[TheLink]

But Seagate may no longer have 30GB drives to give you, so you may still have to fight BIOS bugs and FS issues.

5 years is a very long time. I'm not complaining though, just pointing out you'd probably still have to migrate stuff off the hardware.

Could this mean...

[digitallystoned]

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..

Preparation for new drives?

[DocUK]

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.

Re:Suspicion?

[AuMatar]

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

small percentage

[www.sorehands.com]

Of course a small percentage will fail within the warranty period -- but the majority will not.

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.

Re:small percentage

[juhaz]

A hard drive that is out of production if effectively impossible to repair without HUGE expenses, so you'll get a new, larger, drive anyway instead of any refurbs, if it's old enough.

Yay!

[MacFury]

I just picked up 2 seagate drives a few days ago. For once, I get good news!

I had to replace 2 western digital drives that failed at the same time...so much for my mirrored RAID setup :-)

Re:Yay!

[chevybowtie]

That sounds like a power problem. I wouldn't hook those new ones back to the original power supply.

Re:Yay!

[MacFury]

It was. I had alot of noise...my house's wiring is terrible. A new APC UPS and everything is working smoothly.

Re:Yay!

[jimicus]

I had to replace 2 western digital drives that failed at the same time...so much for my mirrored RAID setup :-)

I heard of a case once where 2 drives in a RAID5 setup died almost simultaneously.

Turned out they had the same manufacture date & sequential serial numbers - make of that what you will....

I'm buying 2 disks to set up my own RAID. One Seagate and one WD.

Great News

[spacemky]

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!

Re:Great News

[real_smiff]

hehe, i just had a Maxtor drive fail at 2 years 11 months.. and be very efficiently replaced by Maxtor Ireland, only had to pay shipping (one way). no real point to make, i just wanted people to know it does happen, things do sometimes break just before the warranty ends :).

Also i had an IBM SCSI with a 5 year warranty fail, and they wouldn't replace it because it was OEM. and the supplier never told me. just watch out for that one. im still bitter. that 4GB drive cost over £700 (about $1500), embarrasingly enough. so i got a replacement on house insurance, but still - i never spend that much on things now, then whatever happens, i'm ok..

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.

wd raptor

[name773]

i recently purchased a western digital raptor, and it came with a 5 year warranty (link)
although mine was the 36gb model..

Seagate is thumbing its nose at competitors...

[stienman]

Seagate is clearly saying to its competitiors:

We uped our standards - now up yours!

-Adam

Re:Seagate is thumbing its nose at competitors...

[evilviper]

We uped our standards - now up yours!

I wish that was true... From looking at their FAQ, that doesn't seem to be the case at all:

Does the 5-year warranty on Seagate Personal Storage drives indicate that these drives are now equally reliable to Enterprise hard drives, and suitable to Enterprise application environments?
There are many different aspects of HDD design that define an enterprise drive. As always, our Personal Storage drives are optimized for a typical desktop or mobile environment, not for the classic 24/7 enterprise environment.

http://www.seagate.com/support/service/faq/5year _w arranty.html

They're being intentionally vague, but that quite obviously means their basic drives aren't as reliable as their enterprise drives.

This is likely a case where only 0.5% of their customers use their hard drives 24/7, so they can just eat the cost of one replacement for that fraction of a percent, and give the rest of the customers peace of mind.

Data loss is YOUR fault

[nurb432]

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.

More reliable

[dj245]

I have Five maxtor drives for personal use, and I havent experienced a failure since 1999. I suspect that improvements in drives such as the fluid bearings and fully sealed drives and higher shock tolerances have proven to make mean failure times much higher.

Of course none of it is any good if you have an accident.

Re:More reliable

[afxgrin]

Well, you should start expecting drive failures around now. I seem to be seeing Maxtor and Quantum drives dying all over the place these days ... (all 40 to 80 GB drives).

I hope the others follow Seagate

[halo1982]

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.

Re:Old IBM

[TummyX]

They'll either supply refurbished drives or ones with a larger capacity. Quantum used to have a 5 year warranty a wee while back.

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.

Re:Old IBM

[Cyberax]

1. Buy a new HD 2. Crash it after 3 years 3. Replace it under warranty 4. Profit! I distinctly remember I've still got a circuit burner somewhere....

I'm certainly not surprised!!!

[Sidicas]

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.

you are right on the money

[SethJohnson]

I think you are right on the money. I wouldn't try to get a replacement on a 4 gig HD from 1999. On the plus side for consumers, though, I doubt Seagate will continue to stock 5 year-old drives. They'll probably give out the current price-point match product as a replacement.

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)

Not bashing for that.

[www.sorehands.com]

I had a Quantum drive fail. They wanted me to call into a 900 number to speak to technical support before issuing an RMA.

Use a stargate.

[www.sorehands.com]

Stick your hard drive next to the stargate when you dial out -- that superconducting magnet will wipe your drive.

What about using the old style tape degauser?

Nice.May be I will switch to Seagate in the future

[danila]

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.

Re:Old IBM

[phrasebook]

Ain't that the truth. Why is this flamebait?

Seagate good, Quantum BAD

[mabu]

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.

false economy

[nusratt]

"Or perhaps they know that a 5 year old drive is not going to be useful enough to pay the postage ...
I have some older ... 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"

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.

Re:false economy

[glitch23]

I've had 3 maxtor drives and all 3 had head crashes and none were older than 2 years. I had a 15 gig and a 20 gig that failed within a month of each other. Maxtor I'm sure was suspicious and one of them might have been my fault but either way, they both had head crashes and I had to send both back.

Re:false economy

[Reziac]

In my observation, used HDs *offered for sale* have essentially zero reliability regardless of brand or type -- I've yet to see one last more than 90 days (whether IDE or SCSI). I suspect a lot of this is due to rough handling by used-HD brokers, because I have piles of far-older *salvaged* HDs that work fine and show no sign of impending death.

I don't buy Maxtor HDs myself, due to learning from others' mistakes. :) In my experience, W.D. are most likely to have a long lifespan (and concomitantly, are least likely to die young), followed by Seagate. Maxtor is at the other end of the scale. Everyone has occasional bad batches, but they have 'em all the time :/

BTW same observation about used CDROMs/CDRWs and their kin -- I've yet to see a used unit *offered for sale* that had any reasonable lifespan; random salvage is a better bet (tho they're still more likely to be dead than are older HDs).

Conversely, I've been buying used components -- video, sound, SCSI, NIC, and some mainboards -- for years, with close to 100% being good from any source. But they're a lot tougher than HDs.

Re:false economy

[TheLink]

"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."

If swap = swapfile, then you might still lose data.

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.

Seagate to hard drive industry:

[sparcnut]

We've just upped our warranties to 5 years. So up yours!

Re: "SATA 10k rpm Raptor drives from Seagate"?!

[nusratt]

"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?

Who makes most reliable drive?

[antispam_ben]

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.

Re:Who makes most reliable drive?

[antispam_ben]

I shoulda previewed and done plain old text so my formatting would have stayed, but also it's CMI (Computer Memories, Inc), not CNI, which made spinning platters for IBM AT's that sometimes stored data...

Re:Who makes most reliable drive?

[Dahan]

Is there a site with reliability/failure data on drives?

Storagereview.com has a drive reliability survey (free reg. required).

Maybe this is an attack against competitors prices

[Anonymous Coward]

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 why they called them Fireball.

[Beardo the Bearded]

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.

Re:That's why they called them Fireball.

[edmudama]

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.

(disclaimer: didn't RTFA)

[slittle]

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.

Hang on...

[rainman_bc]

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...

Warrenty starts from 'shipped date'

[merdark]

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.

Re:Warrenty starts from 'shipped date'

[Detritus]

Every time I buy or install a new drive, I look at the manufacturing date. Over the years, the supply chain has become considerably more efficient. It's kind of weird to look at the drive you just bought and discover that it came of the production line three weeks ago on the other side of the world.

International Taxation

[XanC]

Pretty much every other country in the world charges income taxes on income earned in that country.

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.

Re:Old IBM

[Regul8or]

According to my experience, 100%.

But why would they need it?

[gotr00t]

AFAIK, Seagate is one of the oldest and most widely known manufacturer of hard disk drives. Why would they suddenly introduce a long warrenty period _purely_ to establish reputation?

I prefer WD, but a 40mb Seagate drive I bought back in the late 80's still works fine even today.

Re:But why would they need it?

[ccmay]

I prefer WD

I don't. I've had two Caviars crap out after very light use. They suck shit.

-ccm

no surprise in this

[bakaINK]

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.

Re:no surprise in this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years

[MasterSLATE]

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

Re:Old IBM

[nolife]

If the drive lasts for 3 years, it will almost always last for 5

I've experienced something different. At work we have about 300 20GB drives in desktops. They pretty much failed at consistant rate up until our 3 year lease expired. Of course a large percentage of the failures were a certain model Fujitsu which has a class action going on it right now. So far I've recieved about 25 seperate copies of settlement paperwork claiming my company can get up to ~$40 for each one we've had to replace. Combine that with the 32MB USB flash drive HP/Compaq is giving out for every laptop we identify to have defective memory and the IT department slush fund can be spent on a beer bash and porn file swapout at a medium sized hotel. I don't see that happening anytime soon though so the paperwork for everything is still in my inbox.

Re:Old IBM

[LightningBolt!]

I ordered 2, and both arrived DOA. The replacements are still working though. So 50% is my experience.

Lost 3 drives in the space of 1 year

[matdodgson]

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'.

Re: Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years

[0racle]

You must be getting old.

Re: Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years

[tomhudson]

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)

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:What's the real MTBF curve?

[Anonymous Coward]

2-5% for SCSI (fibre channel) drives, 7-12% for SATA. - those numbers are for failures that take a drive out of a raid set. A large number are 'soft failures'. If you say 'total failure' - where the drive can not rebuild, etc it shifts to around 1.5-4% for fibre and around 4-5% for SATA.

Re:What's the real MTBF curve?

[antispam_ben]

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!

Re:What's the real MTBF curve?

[Animats]

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.

Re:What's the real MTBF curve?

[pclminion]

The people who run a large archival disk farm (petabytes) tell me that about 7% of the drives fail each year.

That's an MTBF of almost 10 years.

7% chance of failure per year is 93% chance of NOT failing per year. How many years until chance of not failing falls to 50% (in other words, MTBF)?

0.93^n = 0.5
n * log(0.93) = log(0.5)
n = log(0.5) / log(0.93) = 9.5 years.

Can that really be right?

Re:What's the real MTBF curve?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Can that really be right?

Yeah. This might not qualify as a "damn lie" but it's a statistic.

I bet none of the drives in the petabyte disk farm referred to is 9.5 years old. The drives are probably replaced by time they're three years old.

So you get the best three years out of the MTBF curve and you run them under ideal conditions (on all the time in a nicely air-conditioned space).

Sure, 7% sounds right.

Put that same drive in a budget home Windows XP PC with 128MB of RAM on the poor side of Tuscon and that 9.5 year curve is going to look very different.

Re:Maxtor Blows!

[tomhudson]

Anonymous trolled:

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've replaced several maxtors at the office under warranty, and it's never been a problem. Ship them the old one, a week later receive another one.

I'm not unique - one of the guys at the office replaced a maxtor for his home machine - same story.

Re:Old IBM

[ibmman85]

on 75 and 60 GXPs? you got majorly lucky.. ive had like 3 of them and everyone has had issues ive had about 6 replacements maybe more, finally got a 180gxp which seems to be holding up but it still makes interesting noises sometimes..

OEM Parts

[Detritus]

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.

Re:OEM Parts

[benzapp]

Well, you are wrong. That was once the case, but these days OEM prices are not radically different from retail prices.

Retail hard drives come with cables, a box, drive rails, and other fun stuff. OEM drives come with nothing. That is the only substantial difference.

With Western Digital these days, its the exact opposite. Retail drives have a 1 year warranty, and OEM drives have a 3 year warranty (they may sell special edition drives through the retail channels)

Re:OEM Parts

[Detritus]

From Seagate's Warranty Support FAQs:

Why do I have to go back to my place of purchase to return a drive that was sold as a system component?

Seagate sells many drives to direct customers who use them as a computer system component. In these cases, the Limited Warranty only extends to Seagate's direct customers and is not assignable or transferable. You must contact your place of purchase for warranty support.

I'm sorry, but it's your own fault.

[Large Green Mallard]

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.

Manufacturing Problems

[Detritus]

The problem is that over time, almost all manufacturers will produce bad batches or models of hard drives. I ran into that problem when I recommended the purchase of a group of IBM IDE disk drives. My timing was perfect. Everyone was saying that the IBM Deskstars were great drives. By the time we received the drives, IBM's drive quality had turned to crap, and I looked like an idiot.

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.

Re:Manufacturing Problems

[hughk]

The interesting thing is that IBM was also producing good SCSI drives at the same time as the DeathStar range of drives. They were great. The current generation of Barracudas also seem ok.

Seagate UPS Drive

[Kris_J]

I didn't know that Seagate were putting little backup batteries in their hard drives...

Re:Maxtor Blows!

[ErikZ]

I used to work for Maxtor support. I'd be very surprised if they told you if they got a shipment in, because the company just didn't tell us stuff like that.

We get the serial # from you, confirmed it's a dead drive, asked if you wanted to cross-ship, and typed in a bunch of info. That's it.

Also, maxtor drives have 1, 3 and 5 year warranties depending on the drive. Get this, if you get the cheapest drive possible, it's going to have a 1 year warranty! If you get their business SCSI drive, it comes with a 5.

Damage control?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have received unsolicited advice from a former Seagate employee that the failure rate on drives has been poor lately. Not just for Seagate, but for everybody in the business. In short, they've been pushing too hard to stay on the "trend lines" for capacity, price, and performance. Because of short product life cycles there is several product generations lag time to get things back under control. So the extended warranty appears to be a goodwill measure, using a better warranty coverage to encourage the big OEMs to use Seagate 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...

GetDataBack NTFS saved my butt

[KalvinB]

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

death throws

[vonkas]

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 ...

Re:death throws

[Rhys]

Are you living 10 years ago or something? I've had way more Quantum/Maxtor/IBM drives fail than seagates OTHER than in the period 10 years ago with stiction.

In any case I'll be able to comment on this soon enough as I'm about to run 600+ seagate 80 GB sata drives.

Re:Old IBM

[phrasebook]

The story has nothing to do with IBM

Yes it does, the story is about hard drive warranties, and IBM had a poor record a while ago which involved a lot of warranty repair/replacement.

a warranty wouldn't have helped him with the data loss

That's the point, genius.

25% failure rate

[Derf_X]

I read somewhere that the failure rate was arount 25%, which is gigantic. I think usually, a failure rate of 1% (at least in the low single digit) is acceptable.

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.

Re:25% failure rate

[QuinchUK]

Do yourself a favour and backup your college work to CD. The amount of calls I take to recover data from college students who have lost a years worth of work because of a failed small array is alarming. These RAID mobos should come with a health warning.

Re:25% failure rate

[Derf_X]

It's a regular BX motherboard with software RAID, smartd is runnning for the two drives and I have a permanent "tail -f" window open to look at messages. And everything is in two copies (my computer and my server).

Re:Old IBM

[Reziac]

My own experience is that among generally good-quality HDs (excluding certain ones that do tend to die after a year or two), the typical HD running 24/7 either dies within 30-60 days due to a factory defect, or else lasts a bit over 5 years in perfect condition (but becomes at risk to die without notice after that). Likewise, I've found if they last 3 years, they're gonna last 5 years.

A five year warranty gives me confidence that the manufacturer *expects* what I consider a *normal* lifespan from their HDs. And frankly I would much rather have any that plan to die, get it over with ASAP rather than waiting a year and giving me a false sense of security, so to speak.

So I agree with you entirely... woulda modded you up instead of playing echo (have points today), but stupid slashdot has developed a habit of logging me out on half the comment pages, including this one (and ignoring subsequent login attempts until I make a post) :(

Re:Old IBM

[ryanwright]

Seagate probably did a study on this and found that to be the case. I assume thats why they did this.

And it's one heck of a good idea, too. Considering other vendors dropped to 1 year warranties, I think this is a slick move on Seagate's part. I'm getting ready to upgrade the size of my archive here at home, and Seagate will almost certainly get my dollars based on this.

Re:Thank you, Seagate! (not in Australia)

[FrenZon]

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.

Re:Nice.May be I will switch to Seagate in the fut

[jimicus]

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.

Yeah and as of last night I lost 2 drives.. I'm...

[purduephotog]

... 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.

CD-R reliability, and taking every precaution

[jridley]

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.

Re:Yeah and as of last night I lost 2 drives.. I'm

[kzinti]

Two drives at once? I would suspect something else - a controller, a motherboard, or something like that.

Tape degaussers

[Wanker]

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...

Re:Thank you, Seagate! (not in Australia)

[outZider]

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. :(

Finally!

[^_^x]

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.

No, just keep the receipt.

[ezraekman]

However, I think there may be problems if they don't carry the item anymore.

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. :-)

Unlikely

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Good return policies make warranties a moot poi

[MindsEye]

But I assume that this does not cover software, music and videos?

Re:Good return policies make warranties a moot poi

[ezraekman]

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.

BMW "quality"

[lorcha]

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.