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."

Comments

LOL

[Captain Splendid]

"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?

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."

Right, because differentiating yourself as a premium provider with a better than industry norm warranty wouldn't work. They would rather be "the same" as everyone else. Funny how I always hear car manufacturers claiming their "drive train" warranty is longer than the other guy. I guess that won't work in the drive market though. Not being sarcastic here - I'm sure these folks understand their market better than a random AC, so it must make sense.

Re:LOL

[dotancohen]

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?

Re:LOL

[ackthpt]

"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."

Right, because differentiating yourself as a premium provider with a better than industry norm warranty wouldn't work. They would rather be "the same" as everyone else. Funny how I always hear car manufacturers claiming their "drive train" warranty is longer than the other guy. I guess that won't work in the drive market though. Not being sarcastic here - I'm sure these folks understand their market better than a random AC, so it must make sense.

This smells like the sort of move a company makes when it is run by bean-counters, rather than a leader with vision, seizing the high ground and pointing a finger back at spineless competition, while laughing out loud - "See, they are rubbish and we are the best!"

Next: Enter the marketing wizards to put some sort of bombasitic and completely unfathomable positive spin on this - "Really, it's good for the market! Honest!"

Re:LOL

[poetmatt]

because people are too shortsighted to realize that a: you're buying a consumer grade drive and b: people think that if they get the "bad one" that fails early, that all drives of that brand are bad.

Re:LOL

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:LOL

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In such a brutally commodified market as HDDs, I suspect that all the companies are run by bean counters and the visionaries are dead.

Because they are so cheap, per GB, mechanical HDDs aren't going anywhere for a decent chunk of the future; but they've been boxed in such that there isn't any noticeable room for 'visonary' development:

1. Performance? If you want that, you'll be talking to a totally different company with a background in semiconductors, either Flash or DRAM, depending on how much money you are made of. Nothing stopping the HDD people from selling rebadges; but rebadging is not exactly a visionary(or terribly high margin) business.

2. Reliability? Because servicing a warranty request isn't inexpensive(phone drones, fedex, etc.) anybody who can't deliver drives with a low failure rate during standard PC OEM warranty periods is going to find their sales limited; but reliability at the drive level isn't actually worth very much: The value of the world's spinny disks is peanuts compared to the value of the data on them. Most of the reliability money and R&D is going into RAID, advanced filesystems, various automated redundancy and backup solutions, etc. Again, nothing stops the HDD guys from selling rebadge RAID controllers or cloud backup services; but rebadging is not exciting.

3. Features? If it doesn't just drop in and play nice with the SATA/SAS controllers of the world, including the legacy and currently shipping ones, it's a dud. If it has some cool feature that is supported only by your proprietary utility, on controllers that directly pass the necessary nonstandard commands, it isn't going to be wildly useful. If it achieves sufficiently broad adoption that OS and HDD controller support starts coming standard, it is no longer a unique competitive advantage...

Cynically, there is also the fact that even people buying on the basis of desire for mechanical reliability don't have access to very good information: hardware and firmware revs change constantly, sometimes with a change in model designation, often not, some designs turn out to be workhorses, some are deathstars, some batches are bad, some aren't. Everybody has an emotional position on reliability, based largely on which brands failed them in the recent past; but unless they are buying in serious volume and somewhat behind the tech curve, data about the past are largely obsolete.

Re:LOL

[EdZ]

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.

Re:LOL

[kcbnac]

I always seek out and buy the 5-year warranty drives. Even if it costs more (which about half the time I end up paying a few extra bucks for it) - it means they "trust" the hardware a bit more.

Re:LOL

[ackthpt]

This smells like the sort of move a company makes when it is run by bean-counters...

Just so you know, warranty decisions are always made by "bean counters" (accountants) and actuaries. Doesn't matter what company it is, they're the ones that have to assess the impact it would have on the company, and what the company can reasonably take on. Engineers and similar would at most provide information to help them make that decision.

As a Certified Management Accountant once told me - Accountants are there to advise, not run a company. The decision to go with the accountant's advice is, as stated above, a decision to not stand out as a company under the banner of "Quality"

Raid10 is in my future. When the drive prices return to "normal" that is.

Re:LOL

[hairyfeet]

You are forgetting one friend:

4. Size and Price. Most people frankly aren't gonna give a second thought to anything but size and price, you can trumpet your warranty to the high heavens but if the other guys offers a 2Tb for $50 even if it has a 30% failure rate after 1 years the average users are gonna run right over you to get to the cheap fatty.

You are right though that in a commodity market frankly nobody really gives a shit. all the OEMs care about is the majority survive past the OEM warranty and honestly with the exception of the occasional bad batches most drives easily make 5 years whereas most folks are upgrading or replacing after 3 so again warranty doesn't really matter.

I tell my customers to either have me get or pick up on their own a USB drive and backup often, and data they consider "must never lose" like family pictures have backed up in multiple locations including the cloud. I personally keep a 1Tb USB for OS images and keep my pics backed up there and in the cloud, the rest? meh its replaceable. All my games come from steam or GOG so no problems there, my tunes are on multiple drives AND DVDs, so frankly if a drive died tomorrow it really wouldn't affect me.

I can see though why they've stopped having long warranties, i mean what was the size 5 years ago? something like 160gb? How many of the OEMs want to keep a pallet of those things in a warehouse for replacements? And dealing with customers i can tell you its NEVER the drive they care about, its all the data that went tits up that they aren't getting back and nothing the drive manufacturers are gonna do is gonna change that.

So I don't really see a problem here. I again haven't seen any other than the occasional bad batch (like the current Seagate 1Tb Plus 7200RPMs which are shit) that won't make 5 years and most will be looking at a new machine or new drive before that. Once they get the flood mess cleaned up we'll be seeing $35 1Tb drives and $65 2Tb drives again and frankly nobody will give a shit about warranty again.

Re:LOL

[Spoke]

Or, it means that with the extra money they make on the drive (since it cost you more), they expect to be able to at least break even on warranty costs.

For example, take 2 otherwise identical appearing drives - one costs $100 with a 3 year warranty, the other costs $120 with a 5 year warranty.

Does the $120 necessarily mean that it's more likely to make it to 5 years before failing? Not at all - the two drives could be exactly the same. It just means that with the $20 they expect to be able to cover the extra warranty costs on those 5 year warranty drives on average.

Re:LOL

[Joce640k]

Yep, the only lesson to be learned here is backup, backup, BACKUP.

Re:LOL

[Xest]

Yes, but the last company to slash their drives from 3 years, to 1 year warranty was Maxtor about 6 or 7 years ago, and they did so at the same time that I had 6 Maxtor drives fail personally in a 3 month period and all of different models, and I haven't bought a Crapstor drive ever since.

In contrast the 5 year warranty Seagates and Western Digitals have always done be well, I know it's just an anecdote but I firmly believe a warranty most definitely is an indication of the quality of a company's product, and if a company is dropping warranty from 5 years to 1 year it implies they no longer have faith in the majority of their products being realistically able to last 5 years.

Suspicious timing

[vadim_t]

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?

Re:Suspicious timing

[hawguy]

Have you really just blamed manufacturing plant floods on wall street ? really ?

Sounded like he's saying that the hard drive manufacturers are blaming the floods for an excuse to boost their profit.

Re:Suspicious timing

[Captain Hook]

Have you really just blamed manufacturing plant floods on wall street ? really ?

Umm, no, he hasn't just blamed manufacturing plant floods on wall street. Where did you even get that from?

He's saying the drive to maintain/increase short term profitability is to blame.

That would have happened with or without floods.

Re:Suspicious timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, alternatively, people are so desperate to get hard drive supplies at this time that they are willing to pay for both A) higher prices (I'm seeing double or more prices around here for popular ones), and B) shorter warranties. The latter will come in handy later even when prices are back to normal.

"Cut warranty now, while customers are desperate and happy to get anything."

Well this is disturbing.

[gellenburg]

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.

Re:Well this is disturbing.

[cruff]

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.

Re:Well this is disturbing.

[na1led]

It would be cheaper and safer to buy 2 Low Cost Hard Drives and Raid them, than buying an expensive Hard Drive wth extended warrantees!

Re:Well this is disturbing.

[timeOday]

Why would anyone rely on warranties for data? That's just a roulette wheel with a big house advantage. Backup. Backup.

Warranties aren't for data (they don't even try to reclaim data on broken drives) but for the drives themselves. The problem with shorter warranties is it removes the manufacturer's financial incentive to make a product that won't fall apart after 1 year.

Re:Well this is disturbing.

[Reverand Dave]

This. Drive reliability doesn't save data, backing up data saves data, nothing more and nothing less.

Re:Well this is disturbing.

[hawguy]

This. Drive reliability doesn't save data, backing up data saves data, nothing more and nothing less.

Except that for most home users who use large harddrives, disk drives are their only way to affordably back up their data. Therefore, it makes sense to purchase more reliable drives for safer backups.

Re:Well this is disturbing.

[hawguy]

honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually Seagate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted were only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Seagate drop their warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand by your product then I have no reason to either.

Jeebus. I think I could actually forgive the misspelling of Seagate (at least you were consistent), but your grammar/homophone abuse kills me: where/were, there/their, buy/by.

I once had a coworker that largely taught himself English from books, newspapers and TV in his home country before moving to the USA. Very smart guy, but made English mistakes like this due to a lack of formal English education (which is difficult to correct as an adult)

This post was quite intelligible despite the grammar/spelling errors, so cut him some slack, you don't know his native language.

Drives are cheap, data is expensive.

[Kenja]

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.

Re:um, er, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Therefore, what they're saying essentially amounts to: "We will no longer be able/willing to sell you a product which is superior to our competitors'."

Re:Who uses warranties?

[subreality]

once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue

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

MTBF

[rabenja]

Mean

Time

Bullshit

Factor

Re:Spinrite, for crying our loud

[fnj]

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

lots of experience with hdds

[v1]

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.

Re:lots of experience with hdds

[subreality]

best buy was even surprised by the sound when I returned it

This, right here, is why your experience is an anecdote, not data. You're sick of this brand because of this, but this experience is an outlier in the eyes of someone who has a much larger data set.

Not all drives are created equal, but the way people form their opinions on which ones are crap are highly nonscientific.

Single Hard Drives Are Unsafe At Any Cost

[ausoleil]

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.

Re:Who uses warranties?

[fnj]

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.

Who knew it was this easy?

[danpbrowning]

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.

Re:Who uses warranties?

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:There's a Fish in me hard drive!

[edmudama]

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.

Anyone else...

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:HD reliability is now crap so of course they di

[Intron]

You should be buying their new 1.5 TB drives. Those 1.5 gb drives must be at least 12 years old.