Storage Solutions News: Seagate & Western Digital to cut warranty in 2012

M

Maestro

Adept
Two major hard drive manufacturers, Seagate and Western Digital, are cutting their warranties to as little as one year. Starting on December 31st, Seagate will cut protection for most standard desktop and notebook drives from five years to one, and other drives, including its hybrid Momentus XT, will get three-year warranties instead of five-year ones. Meanwhile, Western Digital is reducing the warranties for three of its drives — the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green, and Scorpio Blue — from three years to two, starting January 2nd. None of these changes will affect Seagate enterprise drives, higher-end Western Digital models, or external hard drives. Western Digital will also be offering an extended warranty for an extra fee.
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Seagate and Western Digital cutting hard drive warranties in 2012 | The Verge

Rising failure rates and lesser warranty coverage, just what the consumer needs. :mad:
 
I think this might have something to do with the shortages also. There is a huge shortage of HDD right now because of the floods, if they cut back guarantees they can probably green light HDD units in the factories that would have never seen the light of day in the past.
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Seems like Thai flood is the root :(
 
Well, I think that this move made by them might be some temporary move to offload defective products manufactured using flood damaged components(They are business minded and facing pressure following decline in PC Share). They are manufacturing HDDs using the damaged components which may result in more warranty hassles. I think once they are back to normal, they might revise their warranty terms.

Also HDD manufacturers sans Samsung and Hitachi have no benefit from the SSD booms. The entry level SSD's have become close to INR 3k, though not so good are quite easy for many to lay their hands on. Waiting for the day when the data storage on the chip is cheaper than paper.
 
It's like WD and Seagate are playing poker at a table.

WD : I drop my warranty to two years.

Seagate: I see you and drop my warranty to one year. :eek:hyeah:
 
Sad news, but i think its cause in 5 years time, a 1TB drive (or whatever capacity) would be out of production and the company would be loosing more by giving out a higher capacity drive in return. This is a smart move if the manufacturer gets lots of faulty drives in a 5 year life-cycle of product as return. Basically they're cutting down on their losses by a bit.
 
Crazy_Eddy said:
Seagate has nothing to gain since they don't sell SSDs.
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They do make Hybrid drives Sire.

Don't they use the same type of chips, atleast for the huge cache ~4GB.
 
^ Hybrid drives still use magnetic platters as their main storage medium.

P.s.: No need for the sire, we've not been knighted :p
 
this is really SAD & i was planning to go HDD shopping once the price come down but with this kind of warranty its really SAD!!!! :|
 
Aah well will need to delete a lot more often in 2012, as I am certainly not buying over-priced HDD with 1 year warranties..
 
Wow this really sucks! From 5 yrs to 3 and now to 1 yr! I wish SSD manufacturers like Corsair, OCZ, intel, etc. takes note of this move and releases higher capacity drives that are affordable. Well at least a bit more expensive over hard drives but it doesn't hurt. No mechanical drives, overheating issues and a smaller form factor is a big plus!

On a related note, I hope the data in my backup drives are intact - haven't bothered plugging them and checking it. It's a pain to do the RMA these days. :|

Crazy_Eddy said:
Seagate has nothing to gain since they don't sell SSDs.
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Well actually Seagate doesn't manufacture RAM based SSDs but they do fabricate Flash based SSDs with the Pulsar branding. :p

Pulsar® Solid State Drives | Seagate
 
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