Hard drive warranties reduced by Seagate and Western Digital

I really can't remember the last time I actually had an HDD fail. Typicaly I outgrow them faster than they can decay and the data gets copied off to another drive and the old one goes on the shelf as last resort backup.

Overall I think WD's approach. Limited warranty with extendable term for those who want or need it is a reasonable approach.

B

balamw said:

I really can't remember the last time I actually had an HDD fail. Typicaly I outgrow them faster than they can decay and the data gets copied off to another drive and the old one goes on the shelf as last resort backup.

Overall I think WD's approach. Limited warranty with extendable term for those who want or need it is a reasonable approach.

B

Click to expand...

I had a 250gb 3.5" WD fail on me this year. A 500gb 2.5" WD fail on me a year ago. And an 80gb HD (cant recall the make) fail on me about 10 years ago. About 5 years ago a Seagate MicroDrive CF card died on me, and before that, my first, last and only iPod died on me due to both the Hard Drive AND battery.

I baby the hell out of my equipment, and even with the most delicate care for my devices they still managed to fail, a few of them being internal drives on a desktop computer that was never moved around.

I've learned from my near mistakes, keeping a direct clone of my storage drive in my computer and a second backup of my personal photographs on DVDs separated by year, thus should anything happen to any particular disc, I still have the other years of events as well as another copy on my backup drive.

Devices fail all the time, be it at the users fault or the manufacturers own fault.

I don't see a real issue here. The WD Black's will still retain their 5 year warranties. Also, the Greens and Blues are only cutting back by one year from three years to two. Only a few years ago WD retail packaged drives only had 1 year warranties. The OEM drives had longer warranties, usually 3 years.

Harddrive manufacturing is a cutthroat business with extremely low profit margins, so I'm not surprised they're doing this. Low margins is why all but two drive manufacturers have died out. In the 1980s there were literally a score of them on the market, names that most people haven't even heard of today.

Anyone here remember Wren, for example? They made some of the fastest SCSI harddrives at the time, and were purchased by Seagate in the early 1990s. Seagate was sort of the Ford Pinto equivalent back then; cheap and unsafe, and the purchase was what enabled them to modernize their whole product line-up. Most Seagate drives still used stepper motors to move the heads back then; very primitive stuff.

wikus said:

Devices fail all the time, be it at the users fault or the manufacturers own fault.

Click to expand...

Definitely so, and yet these devices will fail (or not) regardless of the length of their manufacturer's warranty. My last "failure" was a 250 GB WD external ~5 years ago. I bought it cheap. It corrupted data but still works and tests OK when removed from the enclosure?

It's not that on 12/31 the MTTF of the devices will get shorter, it's just that they won't absorb the cost of replacement units so readily (passed on to the customer of course).

B