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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."
"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
Yeah, the Maxtor buyout wasn't such a good idea after all, eh?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Maybe it's that with the overhaul the plants needed, the new production isn't fully debugged yet, so the expected failure rate has increased?
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.
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.
Hard drive quality sucks, and almost all of them fail by 5 years so we are cutting back to avoid having to honor the warranty.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since the warranties dont cover lost data, I've never really cared. When a drive fails, its the data that was on it I care about, not the 100$ worth of metal and electronics.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Sorry, the moment you took delivery the warranty expired. All due to flooding in Thailand factory.
How we doing on warranties and longevity of SSD?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yeah something is funky
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm replying on chromium right now. What are you talking about?
If I were suspicious I'd think they're calling up their old stock and selling them as new (3yr warranty in 2009, 1yr in 2011).
If I were cynical I'd think they're calling up their refurb stock and selling them as new.
If I were reasonable I'd think they probably already don't have enough to sell, much less replace for free.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue
That's one of many good reasons for whole-disk encryption.
Mean
Time
Bullshit
Factor
Bullshit. Spinrite doesn't do shit for present drive technology. In the ancient era of MFM and RLL it actually did contribute a benefit.
I've bought several dozen hard drives personally over the years, starting with scsi, and I work in a computer repair shop where I've replaced hundreds of failing and dead drives over my time, so I've got a pretty good sample size to work with.
Long ago I used to buy quantum and seagate because I didn't have the money for backups and so I needed to rely on quality and warranty. Quantum was one of the best quality going, and seagate ruled the roost with its 5 year warranties.
But as the years passed, lots of HDD manufacturers got bought out. Quantum went with IBM and quality absolutely flushed down the toilet about the time of the "IBM Deskstar/Deathstar debacle. Seagate also got bought out, and their quality went south as expected, but their warranties remained at 5 yr for most models.
I continued to buy seagates, until I got so sick of dealing with failing drives and RMA hassles. I bought my last seagate about 2 years ago. (a pair of them) Two weeks after purchase, one of them suffered one of the loudest catastrophic head crashes I have ever heard - the drive sounded like an operating circular handsaw. (best buy was even surprised by the sound when I returned it) They offered me an immediate new replacement, and I instead got my money and bought a different brand. Now I see they're finally dropping their warranties, probably after an extended period of losing their shirts due to a never-ending flood of RMAs.
So at this point I'm down to looking for quality, and only expecting a 1 or 2 yr warranty. Western Digital used to be crap, but while other brands went down in quality, WD seems to have come up. I'm still seeing a lot of samsung drives failing but they've improved. Haven't seen enough toshibas to really have an opinion on them, but I generally haven't had good experiences, especially with their externals. Right now I'm buying WD greens, they're cheap and fairly reliable. I try to avoid buying drives already in enclosures, because it's been my experience that they put the cheapest thing they can find in them, especially the USB-only enclosures, those are generally junk and slow to boot.
May as well throw in my 2c on enclosures also. You get what you pay for when buying a single drive enclosure. A cheap usb-only case is going to be slow and I would be very surprised if the AC adapter lasts more than 2 yrs. My personal favorite at this time is made by OWC, their Mercury Elite Pro, it's got esata, dual fw800, fw400, and usb. USB speed can get up near 38mb/sec, fw400 and 800 top at theoretical maxes of 39 and 79, and esata I have yet to discover the speed limit on, it maxes the drives I have attached. $80 seems like a lot for an empty case, but it's worth it. Two at home and two at work, here I use them for data recovery because they're also tolerant of failing drives.
If you need more storage, go with a Drobo. One at home and one here at work, I know a dozen people that have them and nobody has any complaints, they work as advertised, are easy for even a newbie to maintain, and so far have proven very safe. Stuff a drobo full of WD greens for cheap, reliable, large storage.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
There was nothing like turning in an 4 1/2 year old (drop tested :) ) hard drive and getting one back that was twice (+) the size for replacement.
In 5 years many of the drives manufactured today will be obsolete and impossible to find (new).
...and they ended up relenting and increasing the warranty periods again because people stopped buying as many drives, etc. Apparently they didn't learn their lesson, or so it would seem to me.
An excellent point with which I agree, but there is still a problem. If you only warranty a drive for one year, you will see to it that absolutely no engineering or quality control effort is expending to make them LAST for more than one year. This is fully in line with fiduciary responsibility, as well as being common sense.
I have always seen the warranty period as a measure of the confidence the manufacturer has in their quality, which is the ceiling for the confidence *I* have in the manufacturer's quality.
How does it actually repair the drive? I googled around but found no clear explanation.
"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
Yeah, because standing out as a "quality and support leader" would be a bad thing! If the competition lowers its quality and standards, it's always best to follow them down.
This continued mentality sickens me.
It seems to be fixed, I'm posting this from Safari.
"...For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
Way to go there Seagate. Thanks for offering the exact same shitty warranty that your competitors offer to differentiate yourself. Nothing like lowering the bar in order to remain "competitive".
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.
But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up, now that prices have jumped I might consider it but previously drives were so cheap why bother.
Depends. I got into a vicious cycle with Maxtor, they'd replace a drive under warranty, then THAT drive would fail within warranty, and eventually I had to stop the madness.
For a Lacie external drive, I sent it in to replace the controller card, came back with all data intact. That was a $400 unit so "so cheap" is relative.
Simple fact is, these are supposed to be professionals, and I'm sure they see data much more valuable than mine. But yes I also mark which drives I should destroy myself.
HDD manufacturers never realized that they had everyone over a barrel. When the Thailand flooding happened, they figured it was a nice opportunity to try some price collusion (triple prices after a 25% drop in production). They never thought it would go so well, and now they're scrambling to roll out similar changes everywhere else, such as dropping the warranty five-fold. Next they will discontinue all the low-end and low-capacity models to "be more consistent with the consumer electronics and technology industries". After that will be to demand a seat on the security council with veto power. Finally, the world. :D I, for one, welcome our hard drive manufacturing overlords. /tinfoil hat.
Daniel
But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up, now that prices have jumped I might consider it but previously drives were so cheap why bother.
You can have drives that are in an "almost failed" state where you can nuke most of the data. Those are the ones I send back. If we have a lot of desktop drives die, and the people in question can confirm there was no important data on them (because they never work with such), we store up the drives and wait until we change the desktop admin passwords again before doing a warranty replacement en masse.
Slashdot seems almost unusable without noscript, what is going on?
Right now, slashdot is unusable with noscript, there's some sort of 503 server error over and over again.
It's those damned hard drives again. Can't get good ones anymore. Back in my day when Slashdot was run off of 10 megabyte MFM drives, we didn't have this problem.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
drive thats gonna crap out in a year? you should have a reasonable expectation that things are going to work. hard drives crashing/getting locked up/stalling/blowing up should be the rare exception and the reason for warranties. if they built good quality hard drives then they could make warranties be a lifetime with a reasonable expectation that they would be replacing a very small percentage of them within a lifetime. Maybe this problem will correct itself as Solid State drives start to become more mainstream.
"In the study of economics and market competition, collusion takes place within an industry when rival companies cooperate for their mutual benefit."
dreaded scurrilous bit-twiddler from Oklahoma
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...
I'm posting this with Chrome, seems to work.
Worked yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, and the day before. (that's back to thursday)
I randomly used replied before that, never saw any issues.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
They have extremely high fail rates on their "Green" and "Blue" lines of drives. Most "Green" drives are lucky to last 2 years without failing. I personally own 4 of their 2tb "Green" drives, and have had 9 failures and counting (in other words, I have had failures of replacements for replacements...).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Maybe someday the Slashdot guys will realize... oh, I dunno... maybe they should actually TEST their site coding changes on multiple browsers before pushing them to the main site? (Hint: use a test server that connects to the same database back-end) At least they finally got that stupid "working" thingy to go away with Mozilla-based browsers.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
ie9 and opera both working.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
You should be buying their new 1.5 TB drives. Those 1.5 gb drives must be at least 12 years old.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
So that when the government analyses your HD it doesn't make a noise. A good way to check your computer for malware/spyware/viruses is to leave it alone and put your ear near the HD. If it makes a sound something you didn't tell it to do is going on.
Like scheduled backup or updates, you mean?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/12/10/0111234/pc-makers-run-short-of-popular-drives PC manufactures are running short on drives because of lack of supply. Supply shortage is expected to last till 2013. Now the drive manufactures are cutting warranties. What's going to happen next?
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
I no longer trust Seagate since I lost a lot of data from using their drives as far back as a decade ago. My 2.5" 500GB external WD seems to be having no problem but I had their MyBookProEdition2 fail within a year, the damn thing was very noisy and overheated easily.
Lots of comments about bad Seagate and Western Digital HDDs.
So, what brand do you recommend, as of 2011-2012? What other companies is there? Toshiba? Samsung? Anyone care to comment on those?
And if you have a comment about drives failing, please mention if it's 3.5" or 2.5" drives, capacity, 4200/5400/7200/etc RPM and all.
What if it's a memory resident malware/spyware/virus that scans keys?
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
What's your backup system like?
How difficult is it to recover from a hardware failure?
How will you know a hardware failure has occurred?
Consumers in the EU still have a two-years warranty anyway, no matter what the manufacturers say.
And the push begins - get the ball rolling in earnest towards removing spindles.
Wake me up when I can buy a 3TB SSD for $250.
However, while general reliability may be the same, warranty support often is not.
Some manufacturers make you go through some pretty major hoops to *prove* the drive is dead before issuing an RMA. Often it's "run our tool" which may or may not show real issues despite obvious symptoms (SMART errors, and the click of death, etc).
Some manufacturers have a tendency to replace your equipment with crappy refurbished equipment which was not well-repaired.
Most though, have stages where they range from good to suck. During the "good" periods all is well. During the "suck" periods they start a bell curve of customer loss until they approve, go under, or are bought out etc.
They are probably just trying to employ fewer tech support people, by reducing the total number of products that need to be supported. Considering how awful their tech support already is, this isn't a surprise move at all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How I read this, is that they are just being opportunistic due to the low supply and high demand.
They know that people make decisions on what to buy based on HD warranty length. Now with prices at two and three times the norm, they are just looking at making even more of a killing, by reducing the amount they have to pay out on warranties. They can do this now, because the consumer has very little choice in the matter (I think it is interesting both WD and Seagate did it at the same time).
Likely once things settle down again, and either prices start to fall, or they just stop selling HD, the warranties will increase again in lieu of price differences, to differentiate between HD and companies.
In Europe, they must at least give the 2 years minimum for warranties, dont know if there are already countries with higher minimum limit... so not all is lost :)
Higuita
chkdsk fixes data at filesystem level.
I was wrong. The name of the tool I was referring to is not "chkdsk". It used to be called "Surface Scan" as part of ScanDisk. Under Windows XP, the name of the tool is "My Computer > right-click drive > Properties > Tools > Check Now > Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors".
Sledge hammers are cheaper, and far more satisfying when a disc full of data has just failed.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Western Digital - Caviar Green
Since we're trading anecdotes about hard drives I personally like the Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive line and use them for external storage and had only 2-failures (one-predicted) out of ~12-drives of various sizes throughout a 5-year period or so. None of this should mean anything to anyone because this is all anecdotal evidence and Google's research paper about hard drive failures is what you should be judging failures by not Slashdot posts.
I like these slow 5400RPM or (IntelliPower Variable RPM) speed drives since I use them as floppies in my external caddies (i.e. cradles) connected with eSATA to my motherboard SATA controller. I plop them in, turn on the caddy, let the OS hot-detect the drive and mount it, I use it transfer stuff to them, then dismount them, and turn off the caddy the remove the drive sometimes while the platters are still spinning since I feel the gyroscopic effect.
The slower rotational speeds and power-saving technology prevents them from heating up so much and I still get ~75 MB/s peak transfer rates for large multi-GB files with ~50 MB/s nominal and ~30 MB/s slow rates for small files. Awesome drives and Western Digital's online Warranty check and RMA process is simple and efficient.
My drives all still have the 3-year warrant and that is fine. If the warrant suddenly drops to 1-year I'll still buy these drives for the performance and features that they offer and because they have been good to me.
The reason could also be a simple accounting one. Companies need to hold out reserves for warranties and have to book an expense for the estimated payout related to them. Shortening the warranty period has a dramatic effect on the bottom line, which keeps the shareholders happy.
Spinrite doesn't "repair" a drive in the classical sense. Rather, Spinrite will identify failing sectors, recover the data, then swap out the failed sector for a reserved sector. Data recovery is achieved by trying, trying again and trying yet some more using various strategies. For instance, hit a certain failing sector from various originating points on the drive in hopes that such subtle differences will allow enough unreadable bits to be read that ECC can take over.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Would you care to explain? Recovering data from failing sectors seems just as important today as it was in days of old.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Attempting to get a replacement or a 5 year old drive is just not worth my time.
Most drives once they are a year old are not worth my time to RMA.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
What's your backup system like?
How difficult is it to recover from a hardware failure?
How will you know a hardware failure has occurred?
I do a full disk backup to an external drive with Acronis, every day. I exclude the steamapps folder and *.bt! files.
Acronis does a full backup, and then differential backups. Every 2 weeks, a new full backup is done.
To restore I stick a USB stick or CD into my PC and boot to it, tell it to restore the latest backup, and then in less than 20 minutes I'm back to 6 PM the previous evening.
I will know a hardware failure has occurred when SMART starts bitching, or, more likely, my system simply doesn't boot from my 2x256 GB Crucial M4 SSDs in RAID 0.
Any other brain busters?
Dear Muppet, why do you want your warez/pirate vids on solid state drive when even the slowest spinning platter can deliver more than enough bandwidth for full blu-ray rips?
Dear Anonymous Coward, please try reading the thread before responding.
Companies need to include potential costs from warranties in their balance sheets, i.e. they're a liability that must be offset. As such, reducing the warranties reduces some of their liabilities. With the sales droP because of the supply chain issues, they need to do something to improve their numbers and it sounds like this is a part of it..
This is also why Apple charges for updates.
It's because they don't want to list "$X over $Y years" for support and continued development of a product. If they did that, people could look at the investor reports and figure out when the next iThing was going to come out.
. While Western Digital wouldn't explain why
The reason why is very simple. Seagate and Western Digital want to sell you extended warranties. In order to do so, they had to make the original warranty period so short that customers would want to buy the extended warranty.
Don't remember that but when I hosted images.slashdot.org I was using a 2GB Toshiba on a Pentium 90 running slackware. That was about '97 IIRC.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
My experience is that drives are getting worse and they just don't last like they used to. Getting 5 years out of a new drive, bought at my local Computer shop, would be great!, but not something that I expect.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
You and I aren't the consumer that matters. HP, Dell, Apple and Acer are. And computer sales remain.. how to say.. robust.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I have always seen the warranty period as a measure of the confidence the manufacturer has in their quality, which is the ceiling for the confidence *I* have in the manufacturer's quality.
This. It is the same with use-by dates on food.
This is why I shun freshly-baked bread and cakes (where they couldn't even afford a few preservatives!) in favour of their plastic, wrapped, last-a-month-on-the-shelf processed equivalents. You just know that stuff's got to be better because of their use-by dates!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
They would have to have enough quality to make money with 5 year warranties to be able to provide 5 year warranties. Maybe they know something we don't.
Not surprised. After all, who better than the manufacturers to predict how long their crap will last. One year is generous.
You should tell that to Sun. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
Data Integrity is a high priority in ZFS because recent research shows that none of the currently widespread file systems — such as Ext, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, or NTFS — nor Hardware RAID provide sufficient protection against such problems.[10][11][12][13][14] It is well known that Hardware RAID has some issues with data integrity. Initial research indicates that ZFS clearly protects data better than earlier solutions.
If it works for USB hard drives I'd like to get a pcap capture of the USB traffic.
I HAVE however run into my fair share of HDDs go bad within 3 years and definitely 5 years.
Right, I think almost all of the drives I've bought in the past 5 years have died within 5 years. But a 1-year warranty might as well be a 90-day warranty, in my experience. I keep everything on RAID, so I just accept that every couple months I need to send a few drives off to WD, or Seagate for repair. The anticipated cost of a drive for me is retail-price + $10, roughly the cost of postage for a return (to be accurate: plus the cost of one onsite spare per capacity of drives in use). I've never had to send one to Hitachi, though I only switched to them a year ago - to get away from Seagate. Now that Seagate and WD are approaching cartel status, I guess this policy change isn't too surprising.
Normally I buy the newest biggest drives for my backup system (aside: howto upgrade on the fly) and then trickle down the drives to other volumes/systems. At this point I don't really have any use for 160GB 3.5" drives but 300GB+ are still good. I have a small cache of 300,500,750GB drives for use when I build 1-off systems.
Now, though, with this change, instead of n+$10 for the cost of a drive, it's going to be $1.5n going forward (I'm being generous here - it's really $2n for a given unit but with larger capacities I can often consolidate). That's a huge increase in product price, in a way that's hidden at first glance. Their warranty claims will fall, I'd guess, by 80%.
Hidden price inflation is really nasty, whether it's WD, Seagate, or the Fed that's doing it.
Generally, my hard drive buying priorities are: stability, warranty, capacity, price, heat, sound, performance*, in that order. A vendor that offers a good warranty on a stable drive is going to get my business if their prices are under the $1.5n mark of these now-1-year-warranty bozos. Somebody else mentioned Samsung - I need to look into that.
* I put SSD in front of anything where performance matters
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Monty Python's Meaning Of Life: Crimson Permanent Assurance
Bean Counters there have a life!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX61PUZ3xkI
When Crimson Permanent Assurance takes over warranties will be a thing of the past!
Ross Youngblood
Yea, what crap. I have been buying Seagate for years, and it became my first choice in drives primarily because they offered a five year warranty. My philosophy was that if they offered a five year warranty while other drive makers were saying "we would go broke if we offered a five year warranty" then the Seagate drive was pretty likely more reliable than the other drives.
And yes, one time (and only one time) I have taken advantage of the Seagate warranty on a drive. I called then sent in the old drive and they replaced the drive promptly and without balking.
So now they say that they are getting rid of the reason that I and I expect many others have preferred Seagate drives over other drives. And they claim the reason is to be more like the other manufacturers???? Maybe if you are the idiot they think their customers are you would believe that, but I take it as an indication that the product just isn't going to be up to previous standards. Next time I buy drives I'll not only not give Seagate preference, but I'll remember that they lower the warranty and wanted to be more aligned with the bad parts of the industry. If I have to choose between two manufacturers and other factors including price and performance are comparable, I'll choose the non-Seagate drive. (Not Western Digital, of course, those are junk.)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Make sure you whitelist fsdn.com in noscript or notscripts. (or just use classic)
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up
Even if it's spinning you can't erase everything because of automatic bad sector re-allocation, unless your drive supports SMART extended Secure Erase. And that's if you trust Secure Erase, and at least Seagate won't even give you a list of their drives that support it.
When I send a failed drive in for repair, they can see my /boot partition - LUKS takes care of everything else for me.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Earlier versions of Spinrite would talk to drives at a level below how DOS would access them. It would sometimes recover data that regular drive access calls wouldn't, by knowing tricks related to how MFM and RLL drives actually stored data.
Nowadays, this cannot work. Drives abstract away access to their low-level internals. This allows them to do things like quietly remap bad sectors in a way the user doesn't even see. The work Spinrite used to do--find questionable sectors, read multiple times to get a good copy, then relocate to a better area of the drive--is being done in drive firmware. You can't see it, can't modify it; your only access to it are SMART statistics and calls to request various types of deeper checks. If you do a read of a bad sector, the drive is going to decide how many times to retry that read, and if it gets a good read after a bad one it will move that data somewhere else. That all happens without the software doing the read even realizing what happened.
Spinrite started out as a great product, but it stopped being useful for anything a long time ago. The fact that it's still sold anyway makes me sad, as I used to have a lot of respect for its author.
this last round of buyouts in the hdd business has left the industry with too few global players... just two in most market segments: seagate and western digital (toshiba does make 3.5in drives via their fujitsu acquisition but market share is tiny)
no competition means the companies can get away with whatever they want. the last time the industry went down to 1 year warranties, it didn't stay that way for very long.. it was pressure from competition that got warranties back up on consumer drives.. no such competition now.
just another example of how big buyouts and mergers hurt consumers.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were a side effect of Europes (not-so) recent Restriction of Hazardous Substances laws, which mean manufacturers need to use unleaded solder, which leads to tin whiskers.
The whiskers grow slowly and cause no harm, until they do cause harm (maybe a couple years down the line) -- and when they do, it is often catastrophic.
That's a bit of a haughty Socratic tone to explain basic cost/benefit bereft of leverage. As soon as you add volatility to production quality, the warranty liability creates a huge incentive to shift the dubious batch into USB drive appliances at Walmart or Costco.
Without the warranty liability, there's little incentive for the drive manufacturer to bother with the complex logistics of sorting the better grades into the usage patterns less tolerant of failure.
And you're also forgetting how good Detroit became at building cars able to last until the day the warranty expired with hardly any buffer. I know someone who did electronics design work at a major auto components company in the Great Lakes area and was given a stiff rebuke for choosing a part that cost pennies more (our of several dollars) with double the life expectancy. If the cheaper component is already rated to the warranty period, not one penny more. It turns out this is stupid economics. Eventually the consuming public figures it out. Many fat executive bonuses were paid before America nationalized the auto industry.
Here's what enlightenment looks like: In recent design iterations, Intel has a rule that if a feature increases the power budget by 1%, it has to increase performance by 2%.
I think the shorter warranties are a vote by the Seagate executive team to have a business model more like Detroit, and to collect as many performance bonuses as possible, before exiting their careers as the disk industry declines to Kodak levels of relevance.
In iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, exp(caveat_emptor) as the number of iterations remaining declines.
The vast majority of the drives I own fail within the warranty period. You can then either throw it out, or go through a pita warranty return process that includes downloading and running diagnostics that dont work part of the time, printing out their results, strenuous packaging and shipping requirements, etc. If you manage all of that, they send you back a used 'recertified' drive of basically unknown origin. Are you really going to put that drive into regular service as a replacement? Yeah, me neither. I stick them in external cases and use them for extra backup or travel drives for non critical information.
After my last three multi-hour procedures to get a replacement for a failed hard drive, I've decided to just throw them out when they fail. So warranty terms no longer have meaning to me.
Earlier versions of Spinrite would talk to drives at a level below how DOS would access them.
Actually, no. SpinRite uses INT13. Plain, old ordinary INT13, that's been in the IBM-PC BIOS since hard drives were introduced on the platform. The docs are quite clear on this: If the drive interface doesn't support INT13, it won't work.
SpinRite mainly appears to just read and write blocks over and over again. If a read fails, it will keep trying until it does, which is useful on a failing drive.
To read a bad block, SpinRite will try tricks like seeking to adjacent cylinders/heads/sectors and back again, in various directions. This is plausible for ancient drives, but everything made in the past 20 years or so had abstracted the real disk geometry away from the host, even when presenting "CHS".
SpinRite claims to use various bit patterns to test/exercise/renew/whatever blocks. While this may have had some relevance in the days of MFM, when hard drives were started by hand-crank, these days it's bunk. It makes as much sense as "revitalizing, vitamin-infused shampoo" (tip: hair is dead matter).
And, of course, SpinRite is from Steve Gibson, who always talks like an infomercial host. Billy Mays could have taken lessons from Gibson.
While SpinRite is not a total scam, it's highly overrated, mostly obsolete, and all of it's useful functionality is available in free programs elsewhere.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Though, they might not appreciate you crushing the drive before you send it in for warranty repair/replacement.
Gibson talks out of his ass a lot. Sometimes he just makes stuff up. I don't take what he says at face value.
I have never seen any evidence of SpinRite actually "talking directly to the mass storage system hardware".
Reading between the lines of release history, I think Gibson just added support for the regular standard calls that were there all along, but he didn't know how to use before.
Take "direct hardware register level awareness of IDE and SCSI drives". SCSI drives *don't have hardware registers*. The SCSI spec is quite abstract and hides all that stuff. Further, you don't talk to a SCSI drive, you talk to a host adapter. You literally *cannot* talk directly to the drive.
You can, however, request additional sense data and mode pages, which provide a wealth of useful information about the drive. This is done through the regular BIOS calls (ASPI). It's a useful capability, and I expect it's what SpinRite does, but it isn't the Amazing Scientific Breakthrough!!!1! Gibson claims it is. He just Read The Fucking Manual and learned how to use ASPI.
I do think SpinRite did things other software wasn't doing, at least at the time and in that place. Even something as simple as pattern testing wasn't common in the dark ages of DOS. (Other platforms had it, but the IBM-PC was the ghetto of the computer world.) I acknowledge that. It was valuable at the time, and even today, a nicely-presented, integrated package might still have value.
But that doesn't mean Gibson's bullshit doesn't stink.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Er, slight self-correction: ASPI is technically not part of the BIOS. It was usually provided by a device driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS. It provides a separate interrupt vector, called by the same mechanism as the BIOS calls, but not implemented by the BIOS. It's been awhile.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up
I bought a USB disk as a temporary backup while an LTO autoloader was being replaced. It ran the backup just fine but was dead by the next morning. Returning a disk with 1.5TB of customer accounting data on it just isn't an option, so we wrote off the $150 or whatever it cost then.
FWIW, Australia has recently reviewed it's warranty laws so that they are actually sensible. If you buy a product it is expected to last a reasonable amount of time, despite what the bundled warranty might offer. It probably isn't worth pursuing for a $150 harddisk, but they do specifically make allowances for phones. If you buy a phone on a 2 year contract that comes with a 1 year warranty, the phone is reasonably expected to last for the duration of the contract and so the warranty must be honoured for at least that period.
I used to have a lot of respect for Peter Norton too.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
massive amounts of rusty hard drives? :p
RAID has little merit for desktops. The concept of RAID is useful for servers, because it is an availability measure (and as everyone will point out, does not substitute for backups).
Also, conventional RAID (no matter how expensive your fancy controller) does not offer end-to-end integrity and can be corrupted as simply as a power cut, hardware fault, or flipped bit anywhere (mirror sides out of sync with no way to know which side is valid). ZFS is a far superior design if you want integrity: copy-on-write, block and tree checksumming, self healing, snapshots, etc...
you had me at #!
If my drive breaks, I'm certainly not sending it and all its data to some random...who the hell knows where actually. So I don't care if it has a warranty past about 3 days. BUT, if I'm building a computer, I'd go with a drive that has a 5 year warranty over one with a 1 year because my thought process is they'd be losing their asses in warranty claims if these drives failed in large numbers during that 5 years. So now that they're tied, who knows? I still think Seagate is the best but if they're cheapening their drives to the point that it causes failures and is slashing their warranties to match, I'll just buy whatever is the fastest, quietest, and cheapest.
For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers.
That is exactly why 99% of my drives are made by Seagate. Now you are just another HD manufacturer with a shitty warranty.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
And this is not collusion somehow? Seriously, there's a lot about business and law I just don't understand.
"...data about the past are largely obsolete."
So nice to see someone who knows that "data 'r plural".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
LOL Hilarious.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
...SSDs and THE CLOUD will soon overtake the need for metal platters with little arms that read and write and are more prone to failures...
And on what do you suppose THE CLOUD stores data?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"If not when" doesn't mean squat if the odds of failing during the customer-expected lifetime is low enough.
Let's say "when" = 0.01% failure in the first 9 years and a slowly rising failure rate after that so after 50 years you are at 90% failure and 500 years practically all of the drives have failed.
Let's say I as a customer know I'll be retiring the computer and the drive inside it in about 8 years.
For me, it's irrelevant that if I use the drive long enough, it's all but guaranteed to fail.
On the other hand, if the failure rate is 0.01% the first 9 days, with a slowly rising failure rate after that and a 90% failure rate after 50 days and a near-guaranteed failure by 500 days, and I expect to use the computer for 8 years, then I am very concerned about the drive's not-so-eventual demise and I should plan on putting it in a RAID environment and swapping out drives every week, much like many companies swap out batteries in their UPS devices every couple of years whether they need to or not.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Or whole-disk destruction.
Pass the thermite, please.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That won't work if you want to make use of the warranty, which is what this thread was about. :)