Slashdot Mirror
Seagate Ups Drive Warranties To 5 Years
swordboy writes "Seagate have just announced that they are going to standardize on a five year warranty for all of their hard drives, including desktop and notebook units. While this seems like amazing news, I'm certainly hoping that the company will be around to honor these warranties." The press release notes: "The new warranty applies retroactively to applicable hard drives shipped since June 1, 2004."
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.
Fight Spammers!
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.
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.
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
If you have 25,000 disk drives, one of them fails every five hours.