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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
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.
...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.
"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.
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.
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
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!
You are the part of the reason everything is so expensive.
"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...
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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
. 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.
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.
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.
SSD makers will notice a large increase in sales?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz