Seagate to Cut Bare Drive Warranties in January 2009
Posted 12/17/08 at 04:19:39 PM by Mark Edward Soper
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Bare (aka "OEM") hard disk drives have always been good deals for tech-savvy shoppers (aka the typical Maximum PC reader) - buy a drive in an anti-static bag, provide your own mounting screws, download a disk management utility from the vendor's website, and you can save a lot of greenbacks, without a sacrifice in warranty coverage.
That's about to change. Channel Register reports that Seagate's bare drives for desktop and laptop computers are about to take a 2-year cut in warranty coverage. Starting January 3, 2009, bare drives will have 3-year limited warranties, compared to the current 5-year limited warranty. Seagate says that they'll use the ship-to-dealers date of January 3, 2009 and beyond to calculate warranty terms, but I'd recommend holding on to your sales receipt, especially if you're buying a last-minute Christmas gift or grabbing an after-Christmas sale.
Why did Seagate make this change? According to its Bare Drive Warranty FAQ page, Seagate answers the question "Why is this change being made?' thus:
We have identified the opportunity to offer our customers warranty terms that we believe are in line with industry standard warranty offerings, and that better align to the requirements of our partners and customers.
How does Seagate's new, shorter limited warranty line up with its competitors? Western Digital's Caviar Blue and Caviar Green desktop drives and Scorpio Blue notebook drives in bulk (aka OEM) or retail pack also have 3-year limited warranties, but the higher-performance Caviar Black and Scorpio Black drives have 5-year limited warranties. Most Hitachi and Samsung hard disk drives also have 3-year limited warranties. It looks as if Seagate's claim to be bringing its bare drive limited warranties into line with the industry is justified.
So, Seagate fans, how do you feel about this change? Are you going to lock in a 5-year limited warranty by buying now, or think about alternatives? Hit Comment and tell us what you think.
Install these drives in an ASUS Striker Extreme
Submitted by spplutchok on Fri, 12/19/2008 - 8:31pm
and have a very reliable "Kick Ass" system!!!!
The 5-year warranty is
Submitted by Jox on Thu, 12/18/2008 - 7:16pm
The 5-year warranty is really the only reason I ever bought Seagate over another brand.
All this has accomplished is to greatly increase their competition for my hard-earned dollar.
If the warranty period is reduced, so too should be the purchase price.
Jox.
Submitted by spplutchok on Thu, 12/18/2008 - 12:18pm
Reports that
Seagate is having “random freeze” problems on its new 1.5 TB drives may
be more serious than the company has admitted: 1 TB Seagate drives may
be affected as well.
The following are direct quotes from this article:
... But then I got a note from a senior engineer at a cloud storage company:
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mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}"What seagate doesn’t seem to be admitting is that their 7200.11 1.0 TB
drives have that same problem also. We’ve had to remove from service
and rebuild 2 expansion servers with overnighted Samsung drives in the
last 48 hours . . . ."Pulling servers and replacing all the drives is more than an “inconvenience.” It is a major operational problem.
It can kill your desktop RAID
A Tech Report commenter noted that this problem can kill a desktop RAID. How?. . . the problem may cause a RAID system to think the drive has died.
The RAID system automatically removes the drive and continues to run
degraded (as designed). 20 minutes later when another drive exhibits
the problem the RAID system drops the second drive and dies.Your data is in there somewhere, but good luck ever seeing it again.
Yet another reason to avoid desktop RAID unless you a) know what you
are doing and b) absolutely need it.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=369
Considering the seriousness of this issue, it is more likely that this "Kick Ass" graded company CAN'T afford to stand behind it's warranty. Moot point really when your data is gone...
Submitted by Phated1 on Thu, 12/18/2008 - 10:11am
I've used seagate drives for years and years. I still have the first IDE barracuda i ever got (about a year after xp came out) and i still use it fulltime today. Never even had windows fail on that drive.
I'll be sticking with seagate.
Submitted by GenericBob on Thu, 12/18/2008 - 7:56am
I don't mind the reduced warranty. But I completely mind Seagate's marketing BS. The quote listed above from the FAQ is nonsensical jibberish. Notice how this warranty reduction is listed as an "opportunity to offer our customers" something. Yeah, right. And what the hell does "better align to the requirements of our partners and customers" even mean? That their partners and customers have been clamoring for shorter warranties?
It would be refreshing to read the truth for a change. Here is my revised version of what the FAQ entry should say:
We're changing our warranty terms because times are tight, and we're simply losing money offering five-year warranties. Most other hard drive manufacturers offers three-year warranties on OEM and lower-end drives, so we're going that route, too.
Honest, straight-foward, rational, no BS. That's a company I want to do business with.
Submitted by gkaurin on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 8:34pm
I believe that you are write about the 1 year warranties but that was only for the retail drives and I do believe that this is still in effect today, Thus makking OEM a much swearter deal.
Submitted by Stockislander on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 7:40pm
Most drives are obsolete in 3 years anyhow, and they won't be big enough for what you will be working on.
Wow
Submitted by Tekzel on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 5:46pm
My mind reels. To put Samsung drives in the same category as.. well, anyone. Samsung drives are the worst drives in the history of drives. I would rather write my stuff out in binary on wax tablets than put it on a Samsung paperweight. Just... wow.
Oh but, as far as drives go, I personally prefer Western Digital. I rarely have problems with them, and when I do they are quick and easy to deal with.
Phenom 9500........Asus
Submitted by kowal on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 5:27pm
Phenom 9500........Asus M3A.......6GB corsair ram.....geforce 9800gt....windows vista/XP dual boot
I always considered WD,seagate,and samsung comparable in quality.........but, i would always lean towards seagate because of the 5 year warranty.
This makes the WD black editions a little more appealing to me now.
Submitted by archangelx on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 5:02pm
I think that Seagate drives have taken a nose dive as far as quality control is concerned. I prefer Western Digital.
Didn't they already do this
Submitted by jcollins on Wed, 12/17/2008 - 2:35pm
Didn't they already do this in the past? I seem to remember all the HD companies dropping their warranties to 1 year. The resulting impact being that people thought that this was because there was a quality drop in the drives and the companies no longer wanted to stand behind products that were going to die early.
Considering some of the anectdotal reports of higher than normal failure rates on new Seagate drives, it's possible they're having issues and want to avoid having to deal with warranty returns.
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