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Hard Drive Makers Slash Warranties
Lucas123 writes "Both Seagate and Western Digital have reduced their hard drive warranties, in some cases from five years to one year. While Western Digital wouldn't explain why, it did say it has nothing to do with the flooding of its manufacturing plants in Thailand, which has dramatically impacted its ability to turn out drives. For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
"Standard PC warranties are one year. Even so, WD will continue to maintain five-year warranties on its premium desktop/notebook products, including the WD Caviar Black, WD Scorpio Black and WD VelociRaptor products," a spokesperson wrote in an email reply.
If I recall correctly (and I may not), wasn't Seagate one of the first (if not *the* first) to up their warranty to 5 years in an attempt to stand out from other HD manufacturers a few years back?
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.
once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue
That's one of many good reasons for whole-disk encryption.
Bullshit. Spinrite doesn't do shit for present drive technology. In the ancient era of MFM and RLL it actually did contribute a benefit.
And it'll be a cold day in hell before I trust anything more important to my fetish porn collection to a WD drive...
Why is that? Of all the drive problems I've ever had, from failures to DOAs to Linux incompatibility issues, the one manufacturer that has stood out as being the most reliable is in fact Western Digital. Why do you distrust WD?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Based on how I understand the Wikipedia article, I believe SpinRite is just a stronger version of the CHKDSK "surface scan". It reads each sector a few times (or a lot of times if the sector starts to return uncorrectable errors) and writes it back. This way, the drive's controller gets a fresh look at each sector of the hard drive to determine which sectors are in need of remapping soon.
Intel has a 5 year warranty on their 320 SSDs, longevity/reliability seem pretty good if you believe the data being published by various 3rd parties.
More data, damnit!
Yep. The Great Google Hard Disk Study revealed that no brand was "more reliable" than any other.
Every single manufacturer had troublesome batches and/or models. No brand was immune to this.
FWIW the single biggest factor they found which correlated to failure was heat. If your drive runs hot then expect trouble.
No sig today...
In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that datacenter or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives. We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do.
Study available here.
RAID is so much for back-up (which I took the "safer" part to imply, but if I am wrong, my mistake). In my experience those who RAID for back-up come out sorely disappointed when something fails. Problems in the controller can mean corrupt data in all attached disks; the failure rates when [re]building data can be large... Depending on the level being used may be more or less useful for back-up, but really it's not back-up. RAID is data virtualization. I know it's trite to say ("...not back-up"), but really it could save your butt to observe it; where your comment is very valid, however (IMHO) is that done right the RAID should boost read and write times (making the extra expensive drives that are slightly faster superfluous).
Also remember to have versioning with whatever back-up system you use (copies of data at different times and dates) so that issues with corruption don't leave you with two copies of useless files. If you really want to use it as a back-up solution, though, at least go to RAID 6. On those systems multiple drives may fail and if set right the others will have data in redundancy and keep on functioning; it still doesn't get around the problem of failure points and hardware faults in hardware common to every drive however: unless you are running servers for the world or building important software with a deadline, or perhaps writing a PhD 24/7, I think that is likely overkill though.
A couple external drives, connected with SATA cables if your machine is current enough to support it (USB otherwise) and some software to duplicate important folders periodically to chronological folders, is good enough, cheap, and simple enough that most folks with average intelligence and access to Google can figure out from tutorials or from forum help.
And of course since my last dealings with RAIDers who couldn't get data back, things might have significantly improved...
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
You need to brush up on your disk drive history.
Quantum sold its disk drive division to Maxtor which was acquired by Seagate, which is still independent.
IBM sold its disk drive division to Hitachi which is in the process of being acquired by WD.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It doesn't even make sense at face value, and in fact, is just untrue. There are only 5 major HDD manufacturers these days, anyway: Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.
Samsung: 5 years.
Toshiba: 3 or 5 years, depending on product line.
Hitachi: all over the map (1-5 years), but most seem to be 3 years.
WD: Dropping some warranties from 3 to 2 years now.
So, Seagate, *which* other drive manufacturerS were you aligning with by dropping (some) HDD warranties to 1 year?? Or did you just mean "aligning" as in collusion?
I can see though why they've stopped having long warranties, i mean what was the size 5 years ago? something like 160gb? How many of the OEMs want to keep a pallet of those things in a warehouse for replacements?
For older drives, it's common practice for a warranty replacement to be a newer model than the broken one. I have a lot of drives with 5-year warranties and have gotten larger drives about half the time I sent in an RMA, and pretty much always got the latest equivalent in other specs, so cache might be higher, power use lower, etc.
Also, every drive manufacturer is still selling new 160GB drives. No, I don't understand it, either, but it shouldn't be a stock problem for the manufacturer to replace even a five year old drive.