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Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years
swordboy writes "Seagate have just announced that they are going to standardize on a five year warranty for all of their hard drives, including desktop and notebook units. While this seems like amazing news, I'm certainly hoping that the company will be around to honor these warranties." The press release notes: "The new warranty applies retroactively to applicable hard drives shipped since June 1, 2004."
. . . hello, HDDBurn!
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Perhaps this is because their drives are more reliable? I seem to remember most companies lowering the warranty range on consumer level drives from 3 years to 1 year not so long ago, so this is a welcome change.
Who cares about the warranty anyways? The data on that drive is a whole lot more important. Losing $100K of data through a hole in your backup strategy is a injury that will not be healed by the replacement of a $175 disk drive.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Expect several other drive makers to do the same shortly.
Manufacturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the failure age of the unit.
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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.
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?
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This seems like it could hurt them financially in the long run, but maybe they're trying to increase short term sales?
...This warranty is void when the tape covering the drive connectors is removed... ;o
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
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.
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.
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.
Umm, if they knew they had a problem, they'd reduce the warranty to avoid paying. Not increase.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
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.
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.
Seagate is clearly saying to its competitiors:
We uped our standards - now up yours!
-Adam
I buy my hard drives at Costco. (They don't sell them online; only at local stores.)
A little known fact about stores like this is that their return policy is "unlimited". They have a sign posted that says "it is helpful if you return the product with original receipt, in 30 days", etc. "Helpful", but not required. Of course, it's likely that the product will drop in price by the time you return it so you'd better keep the receipt... but the timeline is only a suggestion. It is generally thought that this policy is only 6 months... but that's for COMPLETE COMPUTER SYSTEMS. ("Desktop and notebook computers".) Everything else in the store (including peripherals) can be returned as long as you keep your membership.
Recently, I picked up a Maxtor external USB 2.0/Firewire external 160GB 8MB Cache drive with all necessary cables for $109. It's not the largest drive on the planet, but the price is decent, and the "warranty" is second to none. If I decide I don't like the color four years from now, I can just bring it back. It was also nice that it shipped with both firewire and USB cables so it was ready to go, out of the box.
Granted, there's nothing that can give the peace of mind of a decent backup. Also, their selection is somewhat minimal. But data aside, I have yet to find a better guarantee for hardware than Costco's.
I've had my ST36451A 6.4 gig hard drive for over 5 years. I had bought it back in the day when I was running a 133 Mhz Pentium on Windows 95. I had upgraded my computer many times, switching from that to a 300 Mhz AMD K6-2 (Quake 2 on Windows 98!) Baby-AT mobo then to a 600 Mhz Athlon (Quake 2&3 on Linux!!) in a new ATX case. I'm still getting much use out of the same hard drive. I carried the thing to a friends house once to prove the Compaq tech support wrong when they had misdiagnosed a boot-sector virus as a "bad motherboard/disk controller". It held up during the trip there and back in my backpack. Within the past 2-3 years, it has started to run excessively hot to the point where I believed it was causing Windows 98 to crash. I was able fix this with a bay cooler. Nowadays, I run it in my linux box.
I've never had a Seagate drive fail on me.. Ever...
I bought my first computer dirt cheap at a "computer show" and it had a 2 gig IBM drive which failed within 2 weeks of bringing the system home. Not sure if I should blame IBM, myself, or the dude who sold me the system.
This is so great. I happily pay the premium every time for Seagate drives over anyone else. I've had two fail since I've started buying them, and they were taken care of with cross shipping, no questions asked. Great customer service, incredibly quiet drives, and very easy to deal with.
Ugh, I sound like an eBay response. A+++ DRIVE MANUFACTURER WOULD BUY FROM AGAIN.
Either way, that's great. One more reason to buy Seagate drives, as if I needed another one.
- oZ
// i am here.
"we 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?
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.
Didn't all the hard drive manufacturers get together a couple years ago and drop their warranty from three years to one? (Well at least it happened at the same time anyway).
So now they're ramping it up to 5? Good for them I suppose, but the collusion when they all dropped their warranty length to one wear was a real jizz in the eye...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I'd be more impressed if the warrenty started from the purchase date. Currently, it starts from the date that the drive is shipped from the factory to the store.
So if you go and buy a drive that has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years, oops, now you have a two year warrenty. I guess you are not losing much if you buy a 3 year old drive though.
So if I'm based in the Cayman Islands and I make $1,000 selling in the US, $1,000 selling in England, and $1,000 selling in Mexico I pay US taxes on the US part, English taxes on the English part, and Mexican taxes on the Mexican part.
However, if I'm based in the US, I pay US taxes on the FULL AMOUNT. So in the above example, I pay English taxes on $1,000, Mexican taxes on $1,000, and US taxes on $3,000. I've paid taxes on $5,000, even though I only made $3,000.
The bigger my presence in other countries, the more insane it becomes to stay in the US.
Let's fix this huge tax problem before we complain about companies getting a better deal elsewhere.
A replacement PCB would only work marginally with your drive, since each drive is run though the self-test and optimization process as a unit. The drive accounts for variations in manufacturing process (of every single part in the drive) at the time it is manufactured, and adjusts accordingly.
Your PCBA wouldn't sync with the HDA it was attached to, making reading and writing with the new drive unreliable.
If you send in the dead drive, they'll replace it with a functional one. That is how warranties work.
More data, damnit!
You must be getting old.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If you have 25,000 disk drives, one of them fails every five hours.
My insider's recommendation: if the older drives still work, don't upgrade.
Posted anonymously to protect my source, who's still looking for a job...
I 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.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
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.