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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."
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.
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
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"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.
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.
"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!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.