Hard Drive Makers Slash Warranties 445
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."
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the Maxtor buyout wasn't such a good idea after all, eh?
Suspicious timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
In other words.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Drives are cheap, data is expensive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well this is disturbing. (Score:4, Insightful)
The blacks and velociraptors may or may not be better quality drives (I highly doubt that they are), but you will notice that they are vastly higher PRICED drives - grossly overpriced in fact.. I wouldn't want them even if they were priced the same as the 5400 rpm drives. They run hotter, waste more power, and give a very slight real world benefit to desktops or personal servers.
Re:Suspicious timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
"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:Suspicious timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh god... fuck Maxtor.
But yes, when our local utilities raise rates, it's to be more "competitive" and "in line" with other regions.
So instead of keeping the best warranty in the industry, Seagate is content to fall in line. Whatever, I don't truck with them anymore.
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Translation.. "We'll copy everyone else so when the bad press starts we can say we weren't first".
The real reason for the warranty reduction is that instead of sticking with Thailand they'll be sourcing lower quality components elsewhere to construct drives.
Re:Who uses warranties? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
More racing to the bottom I see (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:um, er, what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or maybe they are saying, "we offered a feature that led to higher costs for us but did not see a large increase in sales, and have no confidence that this apparently little-valued feature will convince people to buy our product when our competitors lower their prices due to less warranty overhead."
Re:Well this is disturbing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knew it was this easy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
"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:Well this is disturbing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Single Hard Drives Are Unsafe At Any Cost (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Uh, RAID is a very bad idea, unless you need 100% uptime (like on a server with hot swap). Broken drives can introduce data errors into the stream, which are eventually duplicated onto the other drive(s) as well. When the file system breaks due to this or some software bug, the file system on all disks is broken. For home use, the much better option is to use the second drive for frequent backups, ideally automated (so you can't forget to do it). The plus side is that the backup drive can be an external drive connected via USB/FireWire/eSATA/Thunderbolt, further decreasing the chance of blowing up both disks at once.
Re:NOOOOOOOOO!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well this is disturbing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Suspicious timing (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Western Digital slashed because of high fail rates (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well this is disturbing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:lots of experience with hdds (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well this is disturbing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the only lesson to be learned here is backup, backup, BACKUP.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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.