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Hard Drive Makers Slash Warranties

Posted by samzenpus on from the they-don't-make-them-like-they-used-to dept.

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."

7 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well this is disturbing. by cruff · · Score: 5, Informative
    Apparently you will just need to buy the higher-end drive models that continue to offer longer warranties. From the article:

    "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.

  2. Re:Who uses warranties? by subreality · · Score: 5, Informative

    once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue

    That's one of many good reasons for whole-disk encryption.

  3. Re:Spinrite, for crying our loud by fnj · · Score: 4, Informative

    Bullshit. Spinrite doesn't do shit for present drive technology. In the ancient era of MFM and RLL it actually did contribute a benefit.

  4. Re:LOL by dotancohen · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  5. Re:There's a Fish in me hard drive! by edmudama · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  6. Re:LOL by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...
  7. Re:LOL by EdZ · · Score: 5, Informative
    Not quite that simple. For the first 2 years of HDD life, that is only true above 45C. Below that, there was a correlation of failure with cooler temperatures, with the most reliable temperature being 45C! Above this, there was a rapid rise in the failure rate, though at the maximum temperature of 50C, the failure rate was similar to 25-30C. With older (3-4 yr old) drives, temperature than became a factor. The report itself concluded:

    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.