Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

3 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Well this is disturbing. by gellenburg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I rarely have ever run into a hard drive go bad within a year (24" iMac though was a very expensive and notable exception).

    I HAVE however run into my fair share of HDDs go bad within 3 years and definitely 5 years.

    So -

    Does anybody know which manufacturers offer the BEST warranties? Here I was just getting ready to order some 3TB SATA 7200RPM drives for my Drobos.

  2. Single Hard Drives Are Unsafe At Any Cost by ausoleil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The failure rate for hard drives has been quite well known for some time now: it is precisely 100% +/- 0.0%.

    Truly, it is not a matter of IF a given hard drive will fail, it is a matter of WHEN.

    That means that having a mirrored pair as a minimum -- even on a home machine -- is not an optional frill, it is a necessity. Even better, offsite cloud storage offer replication globally of vital data that are irreplaceable.

    If warranties are dropping, so is reliability, and that means it is more vital than ever to CYA and have solid redundancies all the way from the data center to the family laptop.

  3. Anyone else... by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Remember back oh 12-13 years ago when drive manufactures did this? All drive warranties dropped from 5 years to 1 year. This went on for about a year, then got hit with a massive collusion suit. It drove Fujitsu right out of the market. I get the suspicion that this is the same thing, I do not think this has anything to do with debugging the lines, or anything else.

    I really expect the same thing to happen, it smells and feels exactly the same.

    --
    Om, nomnomnom...