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Hardware

Tom's Investigates Hard Drive Warranty Changes 481

Posted by michael from the cutting-corners dept.
Sherloqq writes "Tom's Hardware recently ran a story about major hard drive manufacturers drastically reducing their warranties on many of their products. Effective Oct 1, 2002, many IDE hard disks from Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital will now come with just a 1-year warranty. This comes as a bit of a shock to me, as nobody seemed to have mentioned that previously (or I haven't been paying enough attention). Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure, need to cut costs to remain competitive, advancements in technology used in manufacture of drives ("they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway") as well as warranty period mismatch with OEM computer manufacturers (std. 1-year). Good news in all this: there are no plans for warranty period reductions for SCSI drives. For now... :)"
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Tom's Investigates Hard Drive Warranty Changes More

Tom's Investigates Hard Drive Warranty Changes

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  • Problems? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:25AM (#4468954)
    Does anyone really have that many problems with IDE HD's that any more than a 1-year warranty is necessary? I've had most of my drives for 4 years now without a problem!

    • Re:Problems? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara,hudson&barbara-hudson,com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:53AM (#4469274) Journal
      The problem isn't the older drives - they last 5 years before crapping out. The problem is the newer drives, which run much hotter.

      Add to this that about half the drives we've bought at the office have failed within 2 years ... sure, we got replacements from the manufacturers, but this doesn't obviate the need to restore everything on the replacement drive.

      It's not the cost of the replacement drive - it's the inconvenience, etc ... But now, it's going to cost us, not them.

      By reducing their warranty to 1 year, they're facing reality, and so should we - in a production environment, swap out your drives every year, before they crap out, and back up your shit as much as possible.

      • Re:Problems? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lord Apathy ( 584315 )

        I have to agree and disagree with you. While the loss of the drive is inconvenience that is not the real problem. The cost of the drive itself is nothing, what is of real value is the data on the drive.

        One thing for certain these manufactures rolling back the warrenty on there drives is going to affect the way I do backups. I'm going to do them more often and check them better. I would suggest that every one reading this do the same.

      • Newer Drives Hotter (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ackthpt ( 218170 )
        The problem is the newer drives, which run much hotter.

        Back in the day I bought my first drive, an 80 Meg (yeah, MEG.) Quantum Prodrive, which was mounted on what was commonly refered to as a HardCard. Being out of the airflow it soon cooked the bearings. The drive still works, as it's on my old Amiga 2000, I haven't replaced it as of yet (though a WD 424 Meg drive is ready and waiting) I leave it out and have to give it a few quick twists on the vertical axis to loosen up the bearings in order for it to spin up. It's gotta be 13 years old by now and works ok aside from that. It does, and has always run very hot, which is another reason I leave it out. I'm not sure hotter is the case with newer drives, so much as tolerances, since densities are up to 180G (which you can buy right now) and more critical factors are in play to achieve such.

      • QC problems (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 )


        If you live nearby the Seagate HD factory, like I used to, you'd know many people who worked in the plant, like I do.

        And talking with people from the plant, you'd hear many "stories". Mainly about QC, or rather, the lack of.

        For quite sometime now, I've quitely been waiting for this "cut the warranty period" bomb to drop, for I know that it's suicidal for _anyone_ to provide a 5 Year warranty for products that are SO LOUSILY MADE.

        The return rate for all those dead drives must've been really high, and costly, or the HD firms won't do such a stunt which must've cost them tons of BAD PUBLICITY.

  • IBM still going (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pave Low ( 566880 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:25AM (#4468955) Journal
    Seagate and Western Digital are both going to 1 yr warranties for the major potion of their product lines. WD will keep a 3yr on the Special Edition drives.

    As of now....IBM is the only company to not announce a change in drive warranty...my guess is that will change once they introduce their new drives.
    • that's because IBM isn't making HDD's anymore. they sold that part of the company to hitachi.

      • Re:IBM still going (Score:4, Funny)

        by Blkdeath ( 530393 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:37AM (#4469093) Homepage
        that's because IBM isn't making HDD's anymore. they sold that part of the company to hitachi.
        Maybe Big Blue actually learned a lesson from their DeathStar line of drives. I suppose there's a first time for everything, huh?

        Just a moment, I've been booted for more than 11 hours - I'll have to elaborate tomorrow when I can turn my computer on again ...

        • Maybe Big Blue actually learned a lesson from their DeathStar line of drives.

          don't count on it. IBM was in the midst of cutting costs in hardware & software sales in order to improve their profit & stock margins. the one thing that's seriously popular with them right now is their services branch, the part that hires out expensive consultants to go onsite at your workplace and implement servers & transaction systems.

          big blue wasn't doing it's customers a favor. it couldn't afford to. it was a result of PROPER capitalism happening: can't sell enough of something and it's a loss to the margins, so tank it. the fact that the hard-drives were a crummy deal in the first place due to their propensity to die due to overuse was just a co-incidence - PR doesn't make a company stop selling something. lack of profit does.

          CNN.com has a story today about the blue-chip stock rally yesterday, and IBM was one of the main stories in that headline. check it out for yourself.

        • Maybe Big Blue actually learned a lesson from their DeathStar line of drives.

          Actually, IBM make some of the most reliable drives I've ever used. Yes, they had a very high profile failure on one particular range of IDE drives, but I've never had any problems with their SCSI disks.

      • Re:IBM still going (Score:4, Informative)

        by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:59AM (#4469342) Homepage
        IBM just announced the 180GXP [ibm.com] with fluid bearings, working tagged queueing, optional 8MB buffer, etc.

  • This is stupid (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Penguinoflight ( 517245 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:25AM (#4468964) Journal
    If they really were more reliable, (and granted, I do think they are, at least segate), the companies wouldn't have to spend as much for warranty's so they wouldn't be loosing any money. This is truely sad, seems like every drive I get goes out before 3 years is up, and always last just over a year.

    • Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blkdeath ( 530393 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:31AM (#4469024) Homepage
      If they really were more reliable, (and granted, I do think they are, at least segate),
      Speaking as a person who's had to RMA hard drives from every major manufacturer in the past six months (several of each - no noticeable bias towards any particular one), I can tell you that hard drives are being produced far cheaper now than I've ever seen, and that if anything, this warranty change is a reflection of that fact, and of HDD makers trying to constantly push newer/faster/better on their customers, and because they realize that they can't afford to actually service the sheite they're pushing on their customers.

      I only wish it was decision makers like that who had to tell customer after customer that it would cost upwards of $3000 to retreive their data on top of the cost of replacing the defective drive.

      • Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:40AM (#4469144) Homepage Journal
        From what I've heard, Samsung drives are the most reliable ones around (.01% RMA rate, I've been told). They also don't seem to plan to reduce their warranty, which is currently three years.

      • I just wish the customers would exercise a little intelligence and backup their data before their drive goes south.

        I got lucky: I bought a CD-RW drive last Saturday; my five-year-old Quantum Bigfoot hard drive died last Sunday (as far as I can tell, the drive mechanism is still good; but the controller is shot). The first thing I did with my CD-RW drive was back up the stuff that I've had on my computer since I've owned a PC - stuff that, while not critical in any business sense, I've had for as long as ten years. CD-RW drives now sell cheaper than $100 and come stock with most PC's--there's just no reason, no excuse, not to backup important data anymore.

        • Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Blkdeath ( 530393 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:29AM (#4469637) Homepage
          I just wish the customers would exercise a little intelligence and backup their data before their drive goes south.
          The problem with that is as follows;

          Consumers buy a new computer. They expect it to 'work'. They don't want to have to be back every two months with another problem, and they certainly don't expect to lose the resumees they've typed and recipes they've collected. I mean, who would?

          So we're quoting out a new system. We throw in a CD-RW and a handful of CD-RW discs. They ask why. What do we tell them? "You should back up your data so that you're prepared for your hard drive failing miserably."?!? Sure, we could make up an excuse about power surges, water damage, etc. but they still pry, and they tend to determine that we're trying to sell them a lemon and then put them to work for it.

          We had one customer, a business owner, who experienced a bad hard drive (Western Digital 80GB ATA100 7200RPM). So I sold him a few CD-RWs to use in his 32x12x40 CD-RW drive to back up his important data. Some four months later he was in for a copy of his invoice for his insurance company because his computer was stolen. "Did they steal the CD-RWs?" I asked. Timidly, he informed me that he hadn't gotten around to backing up.

          See, even after catastrophic failure people can't be convinced that they have to back up their important files daily or weekly.

          Ideally, we'd sell atleast one computer to all of our business clients with a 20/40GB Travan drive in it, they'd allow us to configure a nightly backup routine, and we convince the receptionist to swap labelled tapes every night on her way out the door. But hey, that would make sense. Of course, customers see a potential $2k bill for such a setup and they balk.

          I'd love tell them "I told you so!", but that would lose us a client, rather than teach them a lesson. They'd just wind up spending money at another store and not backing up their data.

          At home I have a backup regimen that includes a 4AM cronjob, weekly, that archives all my variable data (home directories, mail spools, etc directories, my hosted websites, etc.), and I back all of these files up on to two CD-RW discs; one labelled "Current Week" and one labelled "Previous Week". When I get a chance, I'll be utilizing the Rsync incremental backup [mikerubel.org] solution and archiving the current weekly snapshot, and saving the previous week's burned snapshot, like I'm doing now but better. {smile}

          With a quick'n'dirty script and some discipline (store your files only in designated places, not all over your drive) and a weekly half-hour routine, anybody can keep their file loss to a minimum.

          We're starting to offer in-home tutoring to customers, perhaps this will be a special promotion. "How to mitigate data loss 101".

      • Reliability database? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Is there a user-filled database with hard disk reliability experiences?
        If enough people contribute to such a thing, and do it right, it meight be a good statistics tool.

    • Re:This is stupid (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jomynow ( 552972 )
      the reason they want to reduce the warrantee is that their liability ie insurance will go down too. with 3 year warrantee's a huge chunk of their money has to sit in the bank just in case. so by getting rid of the warrantee they essentially can free up cash for some more money making drive producing.

    • Re:This (thread) is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mnemotronic ( 586021 ) <mnemotronic@@@gmail...com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:52AM (#4469904) Homepage Journal

      Every drive I've had has outlasted the computer/OS into which it's installed, which becomes essentially unusable after 3 or 4 years. Since I work for one of those drive companies, I get the crappy pre-production "let's try this recipe" units.

      It's tough to make a profit in this biz. Zero to 20% profit margins and a 9 month product life would send most Harvard buusiness school grads screaming to join a monastary. HP gave up. IBM gave up. We have endless meetings about using a $0.41 part vs. a $0.40 part. We sometimes have to sell drives at a loss to keep from writing off a warehouse of ok-last-week/obsolete-this-week products.

      How many major drive companies have you seen startup in the last 20 years? And how many have gone belly up??? Disk drives are toasters -- a commodity product sold at Walmart next to the cheese-whiz and britney spears posters.

  • obvious (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BigBir3d ( 454486 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:26AM (#4468974) Journal
    If they reduce the warranty to 1 year, they have reduced their overhead, hence the cheaper cost to us to buy them.

    Fae it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.

    • Re:obvious (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If they reduce the warranty to 1 year, they have reduced their overhead, hence the cheaper cost to us to buy them.

      I don't think we'll see a reduction in cost at all, they are just trying to recover from the economic recession.
      • Poster hit it on the nose. Prices won't go down any. This was D-U-M dumb. They say it's to be more competitive, which is a lie - if everyone does it, there's no competitive advantage. All this allows them to do is pocket the money they'd otherwise squirrel away for replacements.

        Yes, they make a little more per drive, but this is like that frickin Pizza Hut/Dominos price increase - a hidden price increase.

        I think I'll be looking for a different manufacturer of drives (I've had 2 go bad in the past 3 years, none before that). I'm glad my mobo has a RAID controller in it.

    • Re:obvious (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Guido69 ( 513067 )
      Fa(c)e it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.

      Exactly...for now. Quality vs. quantity demand is cyclical along with the economy. When times are good, we'll pay whatever the cost for a quality product. Conversly, we want bargains when the economy is uncertain. Like now.

      Wait a year or so after things pick up and you'll see these same manufactures offering "premium" models with longer warranties and a much smaller offering of low-end product.

    • Re:obvious (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Blkdeath ( 530393 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:43AM (#4469162) Homepage
      Fae it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.
      When it comes to things like motherboards where we have a choice of cheap, middle of the road, high quality, and high-end boards, yes, I can see that. But when all consumer level hard drives being sold today come with the same defects, and fail after the same period of time (incidentally, we're seeing a LOT of RMAs of drives from a period early in the year 2001, which is just slightly over the new "one year" warranty period. Curious, no?) - what choice do consumers have? Purchase a drive that's five times as large as they actually need (don't let the manufacturers kid you; they're not pushing 20-40GB drives in their "special" series, they want you to buy the 120GB monsters with the 8MB caches, which means you're doubling your outlay already, plus the premium for the 'special edition' status), or purchase the crap that's being shoveled at us from every major manufacturer.

      I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.

      It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?" Let's see - the thing that all components of your entire computer, inside and out connects to, and you want it to be the CHEAPEST component? {SIGH!}

      That settles it. No warranties offered for stupidity.

      • Re:obvious (Score:3, Insightful)

        by swb ( 14022 )
        It pisses me off to no end when customers bitch and complain that the system they bought is having this problem and that problem, but when we priced it out for them they were looking to shave off every stray loonie they possibly could. "$115 for a motherboard? Don't you have anything cheaper, like, around the $75 range?"

        Right, you get what you pay for, however in lots of cases you don't get what you pay for. The top tiers are always way more expensive than what's just underneath them despite often only *moderate* increases in performance or slight increases in functionality.

        And this is an economic reality in every sphere, so every consumer is wise to it -- if you buy the top tier you pay a huge price differential for only a small performance differential, eroded in under six months, so why not save a few bucks?

        Most purchases are made by people who don't know all that much about what they're buying, and everyone has been "sold" on something more expensive. It only takes a few trips to the sheeny to realize you've been had, so people don't want to listen to what may be good sales advice.

    • Re:obvious (Score:5, Interesting)

      by chrysrobyn ( 106763 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:47AM (#4469220)

      If they reduce the warranty to 1 year, they have reduced their overhead, hence the cheaper cost to us to buy them.

      Fae it, we live in a throw away society. We want it cheap, and now.

      I don't know how many people I speak for, but I know I speak for my friends. I don't "want it cheap, and now", I want it inexpensive and when it's reliable. I'm the kind of person who would spend a few bucks more and buy the Apple computer, the Sony TV and compact fluorescent light bulbs for my home.

      Obviously, I'm not in the majority, but I don't particularly care for the heat of SCSI hard drives in lore, and all my current equipment has IDE (with longer warranties). I want a high end "prosumer" IDE hard drive with a 5 year warranty. It may or may not be in use the whole 5 years, but I certainly want it to be my choice. If that means I don't get terrabytes of storage, that's okay. I don't honestly have much of a use beyond 10GB anyway. If I wanted terrabytes of storage, I'd get a tape drive. If I wanted high speed, I'd get a SCSI drive and adapter. Cheap, low power, modest speeds and high reliability are what make IDE worthwhile. Isn't it IDE that puts the I in the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks?

      • Re:obvious (Score:5, Informative)

        by troc ( 3606 ) <troc@ma[ ]om ['c.c' in gap]> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:08AM (#4469416) Homepage Journal
        Nope It's SCSI that puts the I in RAID really.

        All mission critical RAID systems use some form of SCSI drive (UW, Fibrechannel etc).

        This might be partially because of the higher performance with SCSI in general (yeah yeah I know ATA/133 is nice and fast but my 15000 rpm fibrechanel drives are faster ;)

        If I toddle down to our server room I find a huge number of RAIDed 18Gb (total 50-60 Tb) SCSI drives and no IDE ones.

        Troc

        • Nope It's SCSI that puts the I in RAID really.

          I argue that SCSI is what's trying to change what RAID originally stood for -- Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks -- to something different -- Redundant Array of Independant Disks. Sure, high end servers will use RAID and SCSI, Fibre, etc., but when RAID came on the scene, it was to enable people to make servers more cheaply than more novel, more reliable technologies. Inexpensive meant that the disks themselves were fairly cheap, and you could get the performance and reliability of a larger more novel disk by using several cheaper ones.

          My whole point is this: RAID, as it was originally defined, no longer has value if drives are expected to last only a year (or warranties as short as 90 days as I've actually seen in some places). You'd spend so much time swapping out drives, you really SHOULD use more expensive disks. But what of the low end server people? Sure, if you want quality, you pay for quality, but RAID/IDE combinations once meant you could trade some "cheap" labor for some quality.

          As an aside, any conspiracy theorists want to tie XP licensing/fingerprinting to shorter IDE lifetimes?

    • That's probably true of society in general. But I've worked in the PC repair field. What you get is what you pay for. . . and warranties are one of the best investments you can make with computer hardware. Whether it's a whole system or just a critical component like a hard drive, spending an extra 2-5% on a three-year warranty plan makes sense.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:27AM (#4468984)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Not Buying It (Score:2, Insightful)

      by angryty ( 464324 )
      So a Hyundai with a 10 year warranty is seen as more reliable than a BMW with a 3?

      Logice and reason aren't marketing terms.

      As GM recently stated, consumers see lengthy warranties as a sign of weakness in quality, not a sign of confidence.

  • Right.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by new_breed ( 569862 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:27AM (#4468987)
    "they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"

    Well if they're so convinced about the drives being reliable, why not act in that faith and lengthen the warranty? This doesn't do their credibility any good IMHO..

    • Re:Right.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by inkfox ( 580440 )
      Well if they're so convinced about the drives being reliable, why not act in that faith and lengthen the warranty? This doesn't do their credibility any good IMHO..

      Two reasons.

      Firstly, the warranty service is actually a replacement service. This eats a ton of warehouse space. Keeping units on hand is a huge financial liability, and with models changing as quickly as they are now, it's entirely likely that a year from now, an equivalent then-current model won't exist.

      Secondly, by striking a future liability off the account sheets, the hard drive manufacturers can show a profit on paper in an exceptionally slow quarter. This will be better for the stock prices.

      They're not good reasons, but they're business reasons. :P

  • ... then how can this be used to justify reducing the warranty period? Logically, replacement is at least as cheap for the manufacturer as for the consumer.

  • Hrrm.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by qurob ( 543434 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:28AM (#4468994) Homepage

    I buy all the PC's at the office from vendor ______ anway, they give us the 3 year warranty with our lease, all our files are kept on the server, which is backed up every night, the server has a RAID 5 setup, those drives also have a 3 or 5 year warranty (came with the server), one blows, vendor fed ex's me one, I hot-swap, rebuild, all is well.

    The people this will hurt will be Johnny PC builder who's "clients" (friends, family, etc) get pissed when their 50GB Best Buy special takes a shit 5 months down the road.

    • Re:Hrrm.. (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Carbonite ( 183181 )
      The people this will hurt will be Johnny PC builder who's "clients" (friends, family, etc) get pissed when their 50GB Best Buy special takes a shit 5 months down the road.

      If the drive fails after 5 months, it's still covered. It's those drives that fail after 13 months that will be affected by this new policy.

  • Other manufacturers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:29AM (#4469002)
    If this is such a big deal, and if people really care, then some other savvy manufacturer will continue or begin to offer longer warranties and charge a premium for it. If it's not a big deal then noone will move to supply this niche. My expectation is that people who are buying cheap IDE drives aren't likely going to pay a price premium for a longer warranty, and I'm sure this is what the drive companies believe as well.

    Or, maybe these companies should look into selling their customers extended warranties with the drive, or maybe even a 3rd party could get into that. Everyone knows that the extended warranties offered at e.g. Circuit City and Best Buy are near sucker deals for the seller of the warranty, so this would be a great way for companies to recoup the cost of warranteeing products for longer. But IDE drives cost so little these days I wonder whether the administrative costs of maintaing such a plan are worth the small premiums chargeable on a small dollar item.

    Either way, if you want a longer warranty SOMEONE is going to have to pay for it, and (rightly, I believe) that someone is always going to be the consumer.

  • Warranty is a problem for them. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WittyName ( 615844 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:29AM (#4469005)
    Would you want your 3 year old drive replaced and or fixed? Why should they stock these? Maybe if they just sent me the cheapest one currently made..
    • Would you want your 3 year old drive replaced and or fixed? Why should they stock these? Maybe if they just sent me the cheapest one currently made..

      That's usually what they do. They replace the broken drive with the newest drive that has a comparable capacity. If your drive dies near the end of the warranty period, you might luck out and get a bit more capacity for a replacement.
    • They typically just replace the platters and possibly the head mechanism or the logic board if it was an electronic failure and turn that into a refurbished drive. I know the drive WD sent me as a replacement (refurb) had scratches all over the casing, so I'll bet it was someone else's failed drive.

    • Re:Warranty is a problem for them. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gruneun ( 261463 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:47AM (#4469219)
      I've replaced two WD drives in the past 10 years, or so. I've also witnessed several friends and family do the same, along with a huge amount while I was a teach. In every case, WD took the drive back, even after 3 years, usually with little explanation. I haven't noticed a higher failure rate, but I would buy based entirely on their support.

      In most instances, the older drives were replaced with a larger drive and they were sent for free, before I sent mine, so I could return it in the same box. A couple years ago they even had a return postage sticker for the return trip.
      • I had this WD hard drive that kept failing. It was installed as hdb, and I was using it as my Linux drive. It kept failing with corrupt file system after fsck was run. I was about to decide that it was totally hopeless, when I happened to reformat my system so that /boot was on hda. Since then it hasn't failed once.

        Now several things changed at that same time (new version of Linux, etc.), so I don't know exactly where the problem was. But it clearly wasn't the drive. So no matter how reliable the drive was, there would have been RMA expenses associated with it. (As it happened, I wasn't seriously thinking of returning it, as I got it at a bargain price.) But this is one case where a reliable drive wouldn't mean that a longer warranty period would be without expense.

  • Hard drives are becoming VERY poor in quality... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by qurob ( 543434 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:30AM (#4469016) Homepage

    I've got quite a few 400MB-4GB drives I've collected over there years which still run great.

    On the other hand, I've gone through so many 8GB-40GB drives...

    Yet another reason to like compact apps, and OS's.

  • Legal? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is it really legal for three (!) makers to lower their warranties simultaneously? I thought it may fall under some anti-trust law.
    • OK as long as they don't talk to each other to paln it. At least 1 millisecond must elape between MfrA reading a press release that MfrB has dropped its warranty and doing the same thing itself. I shouldn't think it was simultaneous, but I bet it was not many days between.

  • I blame the overclockers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hairy_Potter ( 219096 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:33AM (#4469047) Homepage
    Let's face it, Joe Sixpack Computer User isn't going out and buying new hard drives and upgrading their Dell, most of them are too afraid to open their case, let alone disconnect IDE cables, power lines and swap drives in and out. So, Joe's drive sit in their case, with specially engineered airflow and ventilation to keep the drives cool enough to last until King Billy decides to launch a new version of Windows and make Joe and Jane upgrade. So, there's little chance of the hard drive failing within the MS-driven three year upgrade cycle.

    The people going out and buying those new hard drives tend to be overclockers, film traders and other sketchy folks, who either are compensating for a lack of sexual experience or equipment by having more gigs than Joe Sixpack, or are filling up their hard drives with illegally downloaded movies. They take these new hard drives, stick them in an overcrowded case with inadequate cooling, and then act surprised when they die in a few years. (Professionals use SCSI, of course, and still get the long warranty).

    It's simple thermodynamics folks. If your generic white box case is engineered with an airflow to remove 700 BTUs/hour, and you stick a P4 or Athlon in, extra RAM and more hard drives, you're trying to remove 1400 BTUs, twice as much as your case was designed for. The only way to get rid of those is an external, water cooled radiator. Most overclockers don't do this, and fry components.

    There is a bright side to this, DRM. Once DRM is in place in hard drives and CPUs, overclocking and upgrading hard drives won't be as common, and we can get back to 3 year warranties.

    • The cost of the new drive is small compared... (Score:5, Informative)

      by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:00AM (#4469357)
      I would guess that temperature is probably a big factor - one of the manufacturers once showed me a graph of failures vs. case temp, and failures basically rose exponetially with case temp above 20C. But it isn't only overclockers who run hot - it is cheap PC builders who save a few dollars relative to the big boys by fitting small fans, or cheap fans which fail silently, leaving the disk to roast itself. Particularly the faster drives generate a lot of heat, and need help to get that out.

      If you value your data, it is *much* more important to cool your disks than your CPU. If your CPU kills itself with overheat (and one thing you can say about the Pentiums is that they seem to slow themselves down nicely, unlike Athlons), it is a few tens of dollars, or the low hundreds if you went for the best, to replace. If you cook your drive, not only are you down roughly the same number of dollars to replace the drive, but you have the major hassle of recovering from backups - if you have backups.

      I bet few people take image backups of a 40+ Gb drive every day or two: they only back up their crucial data regularly. So you are going to have to go back to your OS masters, clean install the OS. Then recover all the site-based configuration files which you backed up after you set up the system (you did, didn't you?). Then you are going to have to go to last night's backup of hot files and retrieve them. And I bet that, in between times, you installed something else which didn't get backed up, so you are going to have to dig out the install for that (if you remember where you put it). Thhe cost in hassle etc. and time is going to dwarf the cost of a new drive.

      Damn - I am talking myself into a Raid very fast.

  • Has anyone produced a dictionary (Score:3, Funny)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:33AM (#4469055) Journal
    One that transaltes marketing speak to relaity?

    e.g.

    Drives are so reliable that you don't need a long warrantee - Drives are so unreliable we can't afford to long warrentee.

    We need to stay competitive - This will allow our board of directors to take a nice holiday.

  • Bad Logic (Score:4, Insightful)

    by siskbc ( 598067 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:34AM (#4469066) Homepage
    They make basically two points, and both suck.

    1. They need to do this to remain competitive.
    Not likely. None of them gets an edge if they all do it. Whoever the "mover" on this idea was should have realized it.

    2. Returns cost them a ton, and anyway their products are SO reliable it doesn't matter
    These seem a bit contradictory. If products are SO reiable, then that would seem to mitigate the costs of returns, wouldn't it? And this doesn't help them on DOA at all - the warranty is still a year - only on long-term failure.

    Basically what they are saying is long-term failures aren't their fault, or that they get a lot of non-defcetive returns. But I would think that the non-defective returns are from the guy who couldn't figure out how to use it - not the guy who used it for four years before it broke.

    I think they've come to realize that all their engineering hasn't increased the half-life of hard drives, though perhaps it has reduced the DOA rate. So they maintain the part of the warranty that is probably the cheapest, and saying to hell with the rest of us.

    THanks a lot guys.

  • RAID (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mikeee ( 137160 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:35AM (#4469072)
    Now that low-end drives are dirt-cheap pieces of junk (even more than before, that is), RAID becomes imperative.

    Software mirroring (or RAID-5 or whatever) is just about a no-brainer on anything but the cheapest desktop now.

  • I Got It (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kenp2002 ( 545495 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:36AM (#4469082) Homepage Journal
    I know why they are dropping the warranty period to 1 year. Because they are all switching to the newer density products and re-tooling the assembly lines they do not want to stock the parts for the older drives (remember you are taxed at end of year on inventory. That includes replacement parts) this allows them to increase their profit margin in a disintegrating economy allow the board of directors to give them selves a higher pay increase so they don't have to cook the books to make big money! IT'S SO SIMPLE!

    Please, if any economic decision in a company could be explained in one sentence I'd be impressed to the point of uttering blatherscyte.
  • Check the Register for more info on drives (Hitachi, I think) dying by the thousands. Supposedly these duds only shipped in Europe, but I'm not sure.

  • Strange... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by silverhalide ( 584408 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:38AM (#4469115)
    Of all the peripherals in a PC, hard drives are the only ones that really cost me time when they fail. Even if your stuff is backed up, a failed hard drive can cost you days in getting your PC back up and running correctly. Anything else that fails is easy to replace and get you up and running in just a few minutes (provided you're not running Windows XP. :-)) When I shop for hard drives, I closely look at MTBF And warranty information over performance, because I much rather have my data stick around rather than being able to use it quicker then lose it in a year. I wish hard drive manufacturers put out a high-reliability line of drives or something. I understand that new fluid bearing technology is helping extend the life of drives. I wonder what the leading cause of failure in a drive is...

  • C|Net and most tech pubs picked it up in Sept... (Score:5, Informative)

    by lquam ( 250506 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:40AM (#4469138)
    Story from news.com:

    http://news.com.com/2100-1040-959831.html

    As the article points out (along with several posters above), the warranties on drives in PCs and other devices (the vast majority of HD sales) were already that of the device in which they came, which is generally one year or less anyway.

    Honestly, at today's prices I view hard drives as twinkies--they're cheap and they'll probably last 3 years anyway. There's plenty of worse things to get upset about than only getting a 1 year warranty with a $79 80GB 7200 RPM hard drive.

    --Len

  • Sad that you do not live in the EU (Score:5, Informative)

    by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <angelo,schneider&oomentor,de> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:40AM (#4469139) Journal
    In the EU we have a minimum warranty of minimum 2 years on all products.

    This is a new european law issued 2 years ago and effective since 2002, I think.

    angel'o'sphere

    • Not quite complete (Score:2, Interesting)

      by GeekDork ( 194851 )

      It's not the producer who has to give a 2yr warranty, it's the retailer. Notice something strange here?

    • What? How come almost all products have ONE year warranty? And I'm not just talking about computer stuff. Matrox hard drives are sold with a one year warranty here in Finland.
    • IANAL, but the EU directive doesn't mandate a 2 year warranty. It provides that if a consumer good suffers from "lack of conformity" (see Article 2 in link below for definition) the consumer has right of redress if said lack of conformity "becomes apparent" within 2 years (save some limits allowed for national laws).

      The sticky clause seems to be 2(d), where it defines conformity as:

      "show the quality and performance which are normal in goods of the same type and which the consumer can reasonably expect, given the nature of the goods and taking into account any public statements on the specific characteristics of the goods made about them by the seller, the producer or his representative, particularly in advertising or on labelling."

      This is so nebulous, it could be a U.S. law! The "reasonably expect" bit is the sort of language you can drive a truck through and I have no doubt that much court time will be wasted in Europe deciding what is reasonable for all manner of products. I would think the HD manufacturers simply need to be careful about how they promote and market their products so as to no create 'expectations' which exceed their desired warranty period.

      Full text here for those who just can't get enough American legalese and want to dive into some tasty fresh EU legalese:
      http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/ dat/1999/l_ 171/l_17119990707en00120016.pdf

      --Len

  • Other reasons for reducing warrantys... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by danger42 ( 302987 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:48AM (#4469224) Homepage
    Besides the obvious method of saving money, it's possible that drive manufacturers reduced their warranties under pressure from resellers... it helps OEMs and channel sales companies sell THEIR OWN service plans which are big money.

    Think of it in terms of Best Buy's attitude towards Apple/Macintosh computers. Apple used to have the best warranty in the computer business (3 years parts and labor, I believe). That meant that noone could sell an extended service plan (ESP) on a Mac. Because hardware margins are so low, Best Buy declined to carry Apples because they would never make any money on the ESPs.

  • Personal Experiences with Drive Replacement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Goldenhawk ( 242867 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:49AM (#4469240) Homepage
    I've had two drive failures in the last couple years on my home PC. Both were Maxtor drives. Both had 3-year warranties. Both failed in the last six months of the warranty. Both times, Maxtor replaced the drive with an identical unit. You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that. So I see this change (as a previous poster suggested) as primarily a way to reduce their stock of outdated drives. Why should they want to keep a stock of 10Gb drives around when all they make now are 40 and 80s?

    One other consideration. WE are pushing THEM for bigger storage, smaller form factor, faster drives. To make this happen, they have to make design compromises. You can only fit so many bits so tightly together. Seems to me that over time, the failure rate will tend to increase for this reason alone, regardless of the quality of the units.

    I believe the analysis above by another poster was correct - although it was marked "Funny" - it's the overclockers, or at least the hacker types - who probably experience the highest failure rates, as they push more and more hot equipment in to a small space. I had cooling issues with my drives and would not be surprised to find it was a contribution to the failures. Anyone with military or indudustrial experience in the Reliability field will tell you there's a direct correlation between heat and failure rates. Just a few degrees of temperature rise can double the component failure rate.

    One last thought... as prices fall, maybe our response should be "RAID". Pay the same net price, get redundancy.

    • Umm... yes... and no. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Gruneun ( 261463 )
      You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that.

      I don't expect Western Digital to give me a bigger drive. However, in two occassions with me, once with my brother, once with my father, and numerous times with past customers, that's exactly what they did. Sometimes, even past the warranty time. That alone, is the reason I have always paid a couple bucks more and bought the WD drives.

      * That may seem like a large number of failed drives, but considering the volume of drives we've bought, it's around 10% and they all happened after 2+ years of constant use.
    • I had cooling issues with my drives and would not be surprised to find it was a contribution to the failures. Anyone with military or indudustrial experience in the Reliability field will tell you there's a direct correlation between heat and failure rates. Just a few degrees of temperature rise can double the component failure rate.

      IBM released a document [ibm.com] a while ago showing a significant correleation with failure rate and operating temperature of some of their SCSI drives.

      Personally I plan on actively cooling all my drives now. They are a rather important component, after all..
      • Drive cooling is wonderful. IF you like noise. I bought one of the half-height drive cover fan units - three small fans side by side that blow over the drive. Sounded really neat at the store. Sounded like a leaf blower when I installed it.

        I leave my PC on full-time. I set the drives to sleep after a half hour or so. So they tend to cool down to ambient when I'm away from the machine. I didn't see any reason to cool a cool drive, and have to listen to it full time.

        So I built a temperature sensitive circuit to try and limit the noise. I figured that as the drive heated up, I could spool up the fans accordingly, and keep it quiet longer. There were two problems, one fixable, the other not. The fixable problem was that I pulled the supply voltage from the drive power connectors, but my circuit was not voltage regulated - so as the processor load increased (yep, cpu cycle load), the fan speed changed. I could tell how busy the CPU was by listening to the fan pitch. A simple voltage regulator might fix that, although I'm surprised the voltage changes that much. The unfixable problem was that the drive heats up so rapidly (maybe one minute from idle/cool to spinning/hot) that essentially as soon as I sat down and got the modem dialed up it was howling away.

        So I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of air-cooled drives. Maybe a high-volume low speed fan for the entire case, vented near the drive, would work better. But the simplest solution is probably to stop mounting the drive at the TOP of the case, where the heat accumulates, and instead put it at the bottom.

  • Does this not make sense to anyone else? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by beleg777 ( 551987 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:49AM (#4469241)
    Spokespeople for the big three cite disproportionate costs of in-warranty service vs. rate of failure

    "they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway"

    Aren't those mutually exclusive?

  • The Drives are That Good, Hunh? What a Smokescreen (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:52AM (#4469261)
    If drives are so good, people don't need a warranty, then why aren't they extending the warranty?

    Question: Why do companies offer extended warranties on any item?
    Answer: They make a profit on it.

    Question: How do they make a profit on extended warranties?
    Answer: They know what kind of failure rate to expect, and they know for the first few years any electrical item will not break.

    They're only offering you the warranty because they make money on it. They only make money on it if the item does not break. If drive makers were that sure of their products, and their failure rate for, say, 2 years use, were incredibly low, then a 2 year warranty should hardly cost them anything. The more drives that fail, the higher their cost! So if their drives are so good they don't need a warranty, the drives are so good the company won't have to replace them and a longer warranty won't cost them diddly.
  • So, let's see... They're having too many drives returned on their warranty plan, so the idea here is to shorten the warranty period and leave the customers with dead drives and no recourse.

    That's definitely progress in American corporate culture. Maybe soon they can start charging extra for drives that will go into multi=processor machines.

  • All hard drive suck, And all are good. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by puto ( 533470 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @10:55AM (#4469301) Homepage
    First all hard drive suck. They have all had bad runs. Conversley, they have all made good products as well.

    Most people tend to generally think what they have/sell/install is the best.

    IBM is getting some flack from the /. crowd(I bet it is the under 30 bunch) for the bad run of deskstars. And they were bad drives. But dollar for dollar, I think over the years IBM has consistently made some of the most solid hard drives on the market. Warranty issues are the best in the industry. They fix and replace. And what did IBM do? They replaced all the bad ones. And still warrantied the new ones for three years. No change made. Hitachi will carry the ball, they have a good core of engineers.

    Western Digital - They have always had a good middle of the road product. I have had good luck with them. Most of the problems I have had or early doas on new machines. And they always handled the warranty issues well. Nothing spectacular.

    Maxtor - Maxtor is a good drive now. For a good two year run in the late nineties they were absolutley the noiseiest prone to fail things I have ever ever seen.

    Seagate - Solid drive, great SCSI drive. They bought Connor out, which to me the Connor drive was the absolute worst in the market.

    There are a slew of others. Samsung, fujitsu, lg, quantum. And they all make decent products.

    The problem here is that most modders/hackers/enthusiasts buy the bargain drive with the most gimmees. So that barebone, oem, fell off the truck, pricewatch special has problems cause someone wanted to save a couple of extra bucks. As in the IBM bad run, they went cheap so we all bought them. Actually now is the time to grab some great IBM drives at a low price cause of the desktar issue, which has been fixed.

    So look at all these new drives with a grain of salt. We have no data that they will last 3,5,10 years. They are all new and new technology. And I will give up seek time and gigaybytes for realibility. But we all love the bells and whistles, and with them come the problems.

    Puto

  • they're so reliable and cheap, you won't need a warranty anyway

    Please! What do you think it is, a Hyundai?

  • Wake up... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:01AM (#4469362)
    This will hopefully push people to adopt a more serious approach to data backup.

    Joe consumer doesn't complain so much that their hard drive fails as the fact that their precious book report is gone.

    Physical data theft and physical damage to the computer itself are rarely causes for HD failure. HD failure usually happens to an stationary PC that hasn't been moved, the HD just fails...it does have moving parts after all.

    Active backup techniques will never succeed, tape/DVD are all too inconvenient.

    I think the low cost/per megabyte will lead to a widespread adoption of higher data fault tolerant consumer solutions...

    Passive data fault tolerance is the way to go.

    Think RAID-1 in every box...like one of the manufacturers says in the article, today you can buy double the storage for less money then a year ago. How long until people are putting dual 80 gig drives in consumer pcs with raid 1 config?

    Most clone boards do it today, give it another 6-12 months and Dell/HP/Gateway/IBM will be playing that game too.

  • IDE vs SCSI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:04AM (#4469384)

    If this really helps reduce IDE prices even further, the difference to SCSI will be so significant that SCSI drives will become a niche product for high end servers and that will be it.

    Memory prices are dropping, there is a tendence to store more information in RAM only (for obvious bandwidth reasons), hard drive manufacturers need to drop IDE prices one way or the other. The arguments they gave are b***t. They are just cutting costs in commodity hardware. But hey, this is PR :-)

  • Rule (Score:4, Insightful)

    by e8johan ( 605347 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:10AM (#4469437) Homepage Journal
    There is only one rule!

    You must always, under all circumstances have all your data on backup! There are no exception to this rule, there are no excuses!

    No matter how much (or little) warranty your drive has, you will never get your old data back (without paying loads of money).

    When disks are getting as cheap as they are today I suggest using a RAID system to make it more likely that your files will survive.

    Use a backup system to regulary backup your user area(s). CD writers are cheap, and so is webspace and bandwidth. I always mail myself my most important messages to have them on my ISP's server.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:24AM (#4469605)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • When you are making $1 profit on each drive, the shipping costs alone for a warranty replacement will eat up all of the profits for multiple drives.

      That statement is incorrect. Anybody that puts together a solid business model would have warrenty costs built into the product's original cost.

      It may be true that they are only making $1 one each drive at this moment, but now they will make $2 on each drive because they will have to build in less warrenty cost into the product's price.

      Also consider this. They have reduced the warrenty period from 3 years to 1 year ... don't you think that they are also going to increase their profit to $2.50 - $3.00 per drive by using less stringent testing methods and using a smaller sample size when testing their units since now they can be MUCH less reliable?? The other possiblity is that they use lesser parts in their drives since they now know they only need to make the drives last for one year instead of three ... the drives only have to last one third of the time they originally had to last!!!

      Now, they will make it so the drives only last 2 years (1 year less than their previous warrenty required and one more year than the current one requires). Any one that can't see the basic business behind this decision needs to make a stop to the eye doctor (and please stay off the roads!)

      I wish I was the V.P. that got credit for this lesser warrenty idea .... I'd be in Maui right now!

  • IDE vs. SCSI Warranty (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Puk ( 80503 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:24AM (#4469608)
    Can someone clear something up for me? I was under the impression that by far the main causes of hard drive failure are mechanical (head crashes, motor failure, etc). Aren't corresponding IDE and SCSI drives mechanically identical, with different electronic interfaces (which could account for the cost difference)? If so, why are there such disparities between the warranties on IDE and SCSI disks?

    So am I wrong in my assumption on causes of failure, or in the difference between IDE and SCSI drives? Or do SCSI drives get longer warranties because they are typically used more in the server environment, where admins actually care more about warranties than random end-users do?

    Thanks.

    -Puk

    • Re:IDE vs. SCSI Warranty (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pmz ( 462998 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:17PM (#4470142) Homepage
      Aren't corresponding IDE and SCSI drives mechanically identical, with different electronic interfaces...

      SCSI drives tend to be drives that push modern technological limits (SCSI drives currently go up to 15000RPM, much faster than IDE drives today). So, my hope is that SCSI drives are manufactured to higher standards and tolerances than their IDE counterparts. Alternatively, SCSI drives could be manufactured on the same line as IDE drives but are taken from the cream of the crop (i.e., sloppy but functioning drives get IDE interfaces).

      I would really like to know if this speculation is true or fantasy, because this could also account for higher prices of SCSI above and beyond the complexity of the electronic interface (the drives are just plain better all the way around).

  • I smell a rat. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by macdaddy357 ( 582412 ) <macdaddy357@hotmail.com> on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:25AM (#4469610)
    All three major Hard drive manufacturers are cutting back to a one year warranty at the same time. From here, that looks like collusion: a hard drive trust. There should be an anti-trust investigation of Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital. The only reason to cut back warranty is because the reliability of the product in question is taking a nosedive. Maybe this is by design. It looks like planned obsolescence. In the seventies, American car manufacturers wanted us to buy a new car every two years, so they designed cars that would fall apart after two years. When they didn't even last one, Toyota, Datsun, and Honda took over the market. Will Fujitsu now do that in hard drives?

  • Interesting to note... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nogami_Saeko ( 466595 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:31AM (#4469661)
    That in Tom's article, there wasn't a question (answered anyway), by the manufacturers on how the failure rate changes between 1 year and 3 years.

    Sure they gave low return numbers like 8 in 1000, but I'd really like to know how those numbers change toward the 3-year mark instead of just at the 1-year mark.

  • How about consumer fraud... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by opto ( 592314 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @11:32AM (#4469673)
    Here's a conspiracy theory for you. What if the companies are getting wise to the fact that users intentionally "crash" their drives every 2.5 years to get a new drive for "free". I've seen discussions of this type quite a bit. The other issue here is why aren't people backing up their data. I've never had the need for a data recovery service, because I make multiple backups at least once a day. Quit whining and use some common sense.

  • Presidential press conference anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @12:01PM (#4469988) Homepage
    Wow.. did anyone else get the feeling they were at a presidential press conference where the answers often had little connection with the questions? my favorites:
    THG - Due to the reduced warranty period, does your company expect to make significant changes to the construction and design of the hard drive products?

    Seagate - Seagate will continue to research and implement technologies that maintain and advance drive and data reliability -- these are critical attributes that our customers require.

    Western Digital - Western Digital continues to offer a three-year warranty on its products through its Special Edition product family and available optional warranty upgrades. WD designs and manufactures its hard drives at the highest quality in the industry, and has built a reputation throughout the industry for superior quality. Our products consistently meet or exceed strict OEM customer quality requirements.


    Another zinger:
    THG - Each company participating in this Q & A session has cited cost as a major factor in its decision to lessen the warranty period for its hard drives. Do you anticipate that any of this cost savings will be passed on to consumers?

    Maxtor - There have been a number of elements that have gone into our decision to adjust our warranty policy. In any case, customers will benefit from Maxtor's continued investment in new and innovative hard drive technologies such as new interfaces, increasing the areal density curve, and ongoing reliability improvements to name a few. For example, Maxtor is the only company currently shipping 80GB per platter hard drives.

    Seagate - Consumers who buy hard drives have benefited from continually improving value-for-capacity. For many years, capacities have doubled over each 12 to 18 month period while unit prices have declined. Again, Seagate's highly advanced technologies, expertise and commitment to R&D have helped the company develop cost-effective designs, and to provide this value to our customers. Efficiencies in business processes also contribute to our ability to provide this level of value.

    Western Digital - This new policy will allow the HDD industry to continue to be very competitive, which ultimately equates to increased end-user benefits. We anticipate consumers will continue to benefit from huge technological advances and manufacturing expertise that has resulted in surpassing Moore's Law in capacity offering one of the best values (cost-per-GB) in PC technology today.
    I feel like I'm reading that useless marketing crap on the insert in the packaging that no one reads. I find it kind of sad that Toms makes no mention of this doubletalk.

  • Thankfully... (Score:3)

    by orbital3 ( 153855 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @01:01PM (#4470514)
    Maxtor and WD do both offer lines of drives that will retain their 3-year warranty. Luckily for me, the high end line is where I buy my drives.

    That said, while this is no more than anecdotal evidence, I've never had more problems with my hard drives until recently. About two years ago, I bought a Maxtor 7200rpm 40 gig drive. About a year later, it had gotten so loud (a high pitched whine) that it was starting to give me headaches. So I called Maxtor, got it replaced, and sure enough about a year later, the replacement was doing the same exact thing. So I called again, got another replacement. Installed it, partitioned it, and when it reached the end of the format, I hear *kachunk, kachunk, kachunk*. Dead. So I call again, get _another_ replacement. This one's held up so far, but time will tell how long that lasts.

    Similarly, I decided to buy a WD 120gig 7200 rpm drive back in May. I buy it, take it home, use it for 3 days, and then my motherboard can no longer find the drive during boot. So I return it. Still needing space, I find a sale on the 1200JBs a few weeks later, so I buy one of those. It's been running ok, but just a few days ago, I noticed it's starting to make the same high-pitched whine the Maxtors did. Hopefully WD's support is as hassle-free as Maxtors (I haven't called them yet). I thankfully haven't lost any data yet, but I'm getting really fed up with having to replace my drives all the time.

  • IBM Harddisks (Score:3, Informative)

    by AdmV0rl0n ( 98366 ) on Thursday October 17, 2002 @01:29PM (#4470814) Homepage Journal
    Those of you who defend IBM do so wrongly. During the 'bad run' if IDE GXP based drives, which I believe from what I have read invloved GXP 60 and 75 ranges, IBM behaved irresponsibly, and should have come clean and advised customers as soon as it knew it had problems.

    After a considerable amount of time, they issued new doctrines, such as 'drives must not be used for more than 11 hours per day'.

    In addition, they did not handle warranty coverage correctly, nor customer advice correctly.

    Users who shipped bad drives got either the same drive back after IBM had used their utility on the drive, or a replacement.

    The joke was if you were a customer they advised you to wipe, using their downloadable tool, and by common account within 3 weeks the grinding noises and data loss returned.

    Many people got returned drives, and then lost data again when the new drives failed.

    Sending out bad batches is one thing. Sending out bad families of drives is a new scale altogether. Add to that the warranty handling, the multiple returns, the failure to make public the actual issues. The failure to withdraw a faulty product they knew damn well was loosing customers data. Resupplying the customer with said same drives with pretty clear knowledge the drive was a likely failure. Lastly the issue of new guidelines making the problem the customers (ie, daily no more use than 11 hours).

    I had 5 of these drives. 3 were replaced. Out of a total of 8 drives 7, that is 7, died, made grinding noises, lost data, etc etc.

    The bottom line is now this. I do NOT know if I can trust IBM disk again. I am neutral when it comes to brand. But given that IBM have not publicly accepted the problems, or given the true reasons for failure, OR SAID , on our new family of drives we cured the problem by X,Y,Z, that means until I know for an absolute FACT that IBM make IDE harddisk that are utterly bombproof, I doubt I or anyone I advise will buy an IBM IDE 3.5" harddisk in the future.

    I just do not dare to put my data on their drive, and that is the bottom line.

    It is a shame as they, looking at www.scan.co.uk come at a good price, good (speed) performance, and one huge gigantic stone round their neck care of the GXP issue in the past.

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