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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?"
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.
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!
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!
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.
> How we doing on warranties and longevity of SSD?
The electronics themselves, or the data on them? Big, huge difference. Sandforce2 (1200 series) drives in particular are going through a data holocaust at the moment. The problem isn't the electronics failing, the problem is that Sandforce's braindamaged firmware gets the drive into a state that causes the firmware itself to crash after a few minutes, or causes the drive to go into "panic" mode and intentionally brick itself (taking your data with it) for your "protection" (nobody at OCZ has ever been able to give a good explanation about how, exactly, having your drive brick itself into "panic" mode as a "precautionary" measure so you have to send it in and get a replacement with your data gone forever is somehow a desirable feature).
Don't believe me? Go to ocz.com's support forum, find the one for Vertex2/Agility2 drives, and read the daily tales of woe with no solution besides "wipe the drive and try again" (assuming it's not in Panic Mode & has to be returned for official reflashing). Apparently, other brands using the same controller (Patriot, etc) are no better. Sandforce makes vendors treat their chipset like a black box, they dropped the ball, and just kind of left everyone unfortunate enough to own a drive based on one of their controller chips hanging like a corpse from the gallows of a wild-west town.
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.