ie8 fix

Laptops & Desktops

John Morris & Sean Portnoy
Home / News & Blogs / Laptops & Desktops

With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties

By | December 20, 2011, 4:20am PST

Summary: With hard drive shortages owing to recent flooding in Thailand affecting the PC industry, what should disk manufacturers do in addition to profit from higher prices? Why, cut warranty lengths, too. Taking full advantage of the supply/demand imbalance, Seagate and Western Digital have announced that warranties for new drives are being reduced. In Seagate’s case, [...]

With hard drive shortages owing to recent flooding in Thailand affecting the PC industry, what should disk manufacturers do in addition to profit from higher prices? Why, cut warranty lengths, too.

Taking full advantage of the supply/demand imbalance, Seagate and Western Digital have announced that warranties for new drives are being reduced. In Seagate’s case, Barracuda XT and Momentus XT drives will now come with 3-year warranties, instead of 5-year ones, and non-XT Barracuda and Momentus drives will now be covered for just a year instead of 3 years. The company says the shift will start on drives shipped starting on December 31 and will not impact retail products.

As for Western Digital, it will be slashing warranties for Caviar Blue and Green drives and Scorpio Blue drives from three years to two. This change will go into affect with shipments starting January 2, and apparently will not impact external drives or Caviar and Scorpio Black drives. WD says it will start offering extended warranty options for drives in the future — for an additional price, of course.

[Via The Register]

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

More from “Laptops & Desktops”

Topics

Hard Drive, Western Digital Corp., Seagate Technology LLC, Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist.

Disclosure

Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy is a freelance technology journalist; currently, all work that Sean does is on a contractural basis. Sean has also written corporate communications documents for CA.

Sean does not accept gifts from companies he covers. All hardware products he writes about are purchased with his own funds or are review units covered under formal loan agreements and are returned after the review is complete.

Biography

Sean Portnoy

Sean Portnoy started his tech writing career at ZDNet nearly a decade ago. He then spent several years as an editor at Computer Shopper magazine, most recently serving as online executive editor. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. from the University of Southern California.
37
Comments
Add Your Opinion

Join the conversation!

Just In

RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Alfie AF 6th Feb
@corton ...and when a RLLed 110M drive was $500. Yep, been there, done that, got the t-shirt to prove it. Used to dumpster dive in Denver for drives. Bought 'untested' drives at 1st Saturday in Dallas.... I used to have the most problems with WDs and Miniscribes.
View in thread
0 Votes
+ -
This also means that they are going to cut the quality in the drives
Snooki_smoosh_smoosh Updated - 20th Dec
Although I can't say Seagate has had a good track record as of late, their product has been getting quite shoddy. The Hard Disk failures I have seen as of late have all been Seagate drives, and all the failures have been within 2 years. The OEM covers the drive for 3 years, so we would still be covered, but personally, I don't buy Seagate anymore.

Now days I purchase Hitachi drives which have been very good drives for me, although I believe Western Digital bought them out. Although I see that Western Digital is still operating the brand.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
thetwonkey 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh I remember way back when, the quality and reliability was so bad we referred to them as "Sleazegate". They subsequently improved to the level of the competition, but it now appears that they and their competitors are simultaneously going down the same sleazy path. Solid state is looking better and better, except, of course, for the horror of the cost.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Bates_ 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh I guess Hitachi has gotten better, because I remember when all they did was get bashed over their "Deathstar" HDD line.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Champ_Kind 20th Dec
@Bates_ That was back before IBM sold their storage division to Hitachi.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
paulfx1 20th Dec
@Bates_ Deskstars were IBM's HDDs which they sold to Hitachi. I have some real DeskStar HDDs, they were, and still are great! Bit small by today's standards though.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Champ_Kind 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh I don't think Hitachi was bought out. If they were, I'm pretty sure I'll be switching to Samsung, since I haven't had a WD drive worth two squirts ever.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Snooki_smoosh_smoosh 20th Dec
@Champ_Kind...http://wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases.aspx?release=ba433e4b-bff8-4d99-b60f-7f02aa42f444

Announced in March, not sure if the acquisition is complete or not.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
TweetyPacer 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh
I would never buy Seagate again. My last external drive lasted well less than a year.
0 Votes
+ -
And there are people who will never buy a Hitachi drive.
ye Updated - 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh: You'll find people who swear by any given manufacturer. And others who will swear off that same manufacturer.
0 Votes
+ -
All it takes of course
klumper Updated - 20th Dec
is to have one drive go belly up prematurely (oh, you didn't back up?) or arrive DOA, and the given maker becomes good as garbage. Anyone who goes back far enough with pooters, or handles enough drive units, knows there is little discernible difference between any of them when it comes to dependability, short-term or long-term. It's basically a crapshoot.

Each and every maker, without exception, has had a few black marks in their storied pasts. It's something of a miracle as many arrive as perfectly functional as they do considering the sheer numbers cranked out, and how many third party gorillas handle the goods after they leave the factory (freighters, street carriers, distributors, retailers, pc noobs, etc).
0 Votes
+ -
how do you clean mud out of a clean room??
sparkle farkle Updated - 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh
quality was already down, 3 drives recently purchased from seagate DOA, changed to a higher priced model and got one that worked (I still have 10 year old seagate drives that are fine). I have a feeling that they need to build new factories, and with solid state coming on, may spell the end for platter based HD's. Only problem is that the solid state ones will start dropping like flies next year. Apple is already on top of it with their recent purchase of Anobit to fix the problems with software, but eventually drives will lose so much capacity as to be useless.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
noibs 20th Dec
I've purchased a lot of hard drives for me and my family over the past 20 years. Today, hard drives are basically cheap, crappy devices that, on the whole, don't last nearly as long as they used to, and which have a much higher failure rate even during the first few months of use. I think this change in warranties is simply a reflection of that.

When you step back and look at what a hard drive does--one or more magnetic platters spinning at several thousands of RPMs with a delicate read/write head a fraction of a millimeter above the spinning platter--you realize that in another quarter of century people will look back and think how bizarre the product was. It's kind of like looking back at phonograph records and wondering the same thing.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Champ_Kind 20th Dec
@noibs Except that some people appreciate phonographs. Once SSD is the norm and the rotational hard disk only lives on for backup purposes, everyone will question why we didn't push solid state development back in the 1960s and 1970s harder than we did.
0 Votes
+ -
What a bunch of noobs...
corton 20th Dec
Yes, I'm talking to you.

All hard drives fail. It it not a matter of if, but when. You need to prepare for this eventuality. No drives are perfect, no manufacturer is perfect.

Sometimes the drive fails within the warranty period, most of the time not.

Drives today from any of the major manufacturers are very reliable taken as a whole. Yes, there are isolated issues with certain drive models but as a whole, the mechanical drive is better now than it's ever been.

Do you remember the old days, when you had to deal with 80 ms access times (Seagate ST-225), low level formatting was common, you actually had to know the physical layout of your drive and enter that data into CMOS, used debug g=c800:5 to get to the external controller setup interface, and drives were made by folks like Connor, Corvus, Miniscribe, Quantum, Tandon, and Mitsubishi (the MR-535 was one of my performance favorites, but they died like Lemmings), when you actually knew the difference between MFM and RLL, you had to run a program called COMPSURF to prep a drive for server use. Do you remember these days? Do you realize how far we've come? I guess not.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
goingbust 20th Dec
@corton

Thanks for the info, old man. My first hard drive was an ST-251-1. My second was a NEC 180MB ESDI 5.25 HH. I remember all the configuration issues just fine. Funny thing though, I expect the hard drives to progress just like the rest of the industry has. Reliability is the most important attribute of persistant storage - not speed or amount but reliability. The hard drive manufacturers have been failing this lately. It is making me angry.
0 Votes
+ -
I have to disagree.
ye Updated - 20th Dec
@goingbust: Reliability is the most important attribute of persistant storage - not speed or amount but reliability.

Reliability should be the most important attribute but to the average consumer amount is. Everything else is almost irrelevant.
0 Votes
+ -
Yes, but when you order machines hundreds at a time
Snooki_smoosh_smoosh 20th Dec
@corton... and when during your replacement period the only drives that are failing is a single brand of drives within their warranty period, it is pretty easy to see a pattern. Overall our machines that we order come with a variety of Hard Drives that vary from Seagate, WD, and Hitachi. The WD and Hitachi drives rarely fail on me, the hard disk failures I encounter are more heavily on Seagate at a rate of 3:1 per year.

I also compare my results to what I see on product reviews. Look around on Newegg or TigerDirect, and more often I see poor ratings on the Seagate Drives than other brands.

I do expect the occasional failure, but when the failures are heavily weighted to a single brand I take notice. When I send a Seagate drive back to HP or Lenovo for warranty, I try to get them to send me back one that isn't Seagate.

I do have a few Seagate drives at home that are 5 years+ old, but I think I bought them before their quality started to run down hill.
0 Votes
+ -
Cyclical screw ups, just like cyclical warranties
klumper Updated - 20th Dec
@Snooki_smoosh_smoosh
... when during your replacement period the only drives that are failing is a single brand of drives within their warranty period, it is pretty easy to see a pattern.

All hard drive makers have had a few black marks of this sort. It's impossible over the long haul to advocate one brand over the other (lest you wanna be bitten in the butt later). At best you can try to avoid any given series or model runs that have known (documented) issues, but nothing suggests a clear-cut winner among the various players that remain today.

To each their own of course, only YMMV.
0 Votes
+ -
I Remember
CFWhitman 20th Dec
@corton
I also remember that 12 years ago Quantum drives were reliable and Western Digital were not. I remember Seagate drives being reliable, but that seems to be a thing of the past for the last several years. Western Digital drives, on the other hand, seem to have improved in recent years.

As the technology gets pushed to more and more capacity, of course it becomes more difficult to keep drives reliable at those capacities. I imagine that by today's standards it would be quite easy to make reliable 3 or 4 GB drives. That doesn't mean that 2 TB drives from now are more reliable than 4 GB drives from ten years ago. Recently I've seen Samsung and Western Digital drives holding up a bit better than Seagate (seems like they went down the tubes around the time they merged with Maxtor).
0 Votes
+ -
Yes they all fail, but not at the rate I???m currently seeing
TexasJetter 20th Dec
@corton
I purchase a lot of hard drives for our backup process. Two years ago I order ten 1Tb Seagate drives. Seven of the ten were DOA, one of the remaining three failed within a couple of months. I switched to Western Digital. They have generally been better (no 70% DOA) but they routinely fail as well. Over the last two years I have sent about 15 drives back to WD on warranty(out of ~100). Some were DOA, others failed within a month of service.

In the last twenty years of IT I have never experienced the level of failures I have seen in the last two years. Yes hard drives are much more plug and play than way back when, but back then once you had it formatted and working it continued to work, at least for more than a month???.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
BataTamata@... 20th Dec
@corton
That was a 25 Mb drive as I recall, with a 50% failure rate. We have come a long way and you and I are getting old!
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
flboffin 20th Dec
@BataTamata@... The ST-225 was a 20-MB hard disk. It was my first HD, too, and I distinctly recall wondering how I would ever fill up 20 MB (LOL). Mine didn't fail--it filled up. Over the years I've had 4 HD failures: a Seagate, a
Quantum, a Toshiba, and a WD (in that order). That's out of who knows how many HDs I've used over the past 26 years. (I use 'em 2 at a time in RAID 1.)
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
darylsonnier 21st Dec
@corton Goodness it's been ages since I had to get into the controller via debug for a low level format. Almost warms the heart thinking about it.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
Alfie AF 6th Feb
@corton ...and when a RLLed 110M drive was $500. Yep, been there, done that, got the t-shirt to prove it. Used to dumpster dive in Denver for drives. Bought 'untested' drives at 1st Saturday in Dallas.... I used to have the most problems with WDs and Miniscribes.
0 Votes
+ -
It seems like a leap to connect the flooding with reduced warranty coverage
ye 20th Dec
I see no reason to disbelieve the reason given by the drive manufacturers.

It's also been my experience the majority of hard disks outlast the life of the system they're installed in.
0 Votes
+ -
The flooding simply gives them a convenient pretext
klumper Updated - 20th Dec
for upping their ante. It's the reduction in competition that allows them to get away with ratcheting up these kinds of screws.

It's also been my experience the majority of hard disks outlast the life of the system they're installed in.

That hardly matters when you come upon one that leaves you prematurely high and dry, doubly so when it's through no fault of your own. Then you'll curse that reduced coverage something good.
0 Votes
+ -
I have about 25 2TB Western Digitals and have sent 5 back in the last year.
goingbust 20th Dec
I would lower the warranty too. Hard drive manufacturers are producing shoddy products these days. I'm not buying further drives until they fix the current problems. Every computer gets an SSD from now on.
0 Votes
+ -
Which drives?
itpro_z 20th Dec
@goingbust, are you buying the Green drives? You do realize that those are consumer grade drives and not intended for enterprise use? I have hundreds of WDs Black drives and rarely see a failure. I also just built a storage server using 50 WD Enterprise Server 2 TB drives, as my experience with those has been outstanding.
0 Votes
+ -
The moment you said profit from higher prices you lost all credibility
baggins_z 20th Dec
because you demonstrated your total ignorance of economics. A company must price its CURRENT inventory based on the cost of its REPLACEMENT inventory. Hard drive shortages mean higher prices because it's going to cost MORE MONEY to get production ramped up. Sheesh.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
paulfx1 20th Dec
You know with the old saying, here's mud in your drive, it can't be good for reliability ...

I think we can find some dry ground in the USA where we can put up a hard drive manufacturing facility.
0 Votes
+ -
Yeah, after ten years of environmental impact studies and lawsuits
baggins_z 20th Dec
from the NLRB when you pick the wrong state.
0 Votes
+ -
Not about profit
itpro_z 20th Dec
Seagate and WD must maintain inventory to serve as replacements for any drives that fail under warranty. With supplies very limited that becomes difficult. By reducing the warranty period, fewer drives are needed for warranty replacement, taking some of the pressure off of shrinking inventory.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
flboffin 20th Dec
"[Seagate] says the shift will start on drives shipped starting on December 31 and will not impact retail products." Ummm ... "retail products" = things you sell. I guess that means it doesn't apply to products that they sell. What products does it impact then?
0 Votes
+ -
Retail means sold to an end user. Wholesale means sell to a retailer.
baggins_z 20th Dec
Manufacturer means make the product. Seagate manufactures drive (manufacturer) who then sells to a distributor (wholesaler) who then sells to stores (retailers).
0 Votes
+ -
It's Easy People
rdfast 22nd Dec
Drive manufacturers go through phases. Right now, WD and Hitachi are absolute crap. Seagate and Samsung are the best. Just take the drive with the longest warranty you can find and make sure to buy proven technology. I still won't even touch 3.5" drives that are over 1TB. In a few years I'll feel comfortable with 2TB. But you've got to give them time to work out all the problems. The truth of the matter is, they release drives waaaaaaaay too early just to beat their competitors. No matter what drive you buy right now, if it's 3TB it's gonna die very quickly.

You also have to realize that there's a HUGE difference between OEM drives they put in crappy Dell's and HP's and the drives you buy directly from the manufacturer. Seagates in a Dell are awful (as are all other brands). Your best bet is to either build your own computer or replace the hard drive in your Dell/HP/whatever as soon as you get it and put the piece of crap OEM drive on eBay.
0 Votes
+ -
Misleading article
cupola Updated - 8th Jan
Seagate's recent changes to their warranty policies were more nuanced than this article claims. Their Dec 6, 2011 announcement pertained to hard disks packaged and sold as bare (OEM) drives.

In the same announcement, Seagate (briefly) mentioned that warranties on mission critical (e.g., certain enterprise drives) and retail products (e.g., retail boxed kits) would NOT be affected.

Case in point: the Seagate Barracuda XT model in its retail kit form still features a 5-year warranty at this time. It is the bare drive version that had its warranty slashed from five to three years. Western Digital also still offers a 5-year warranty on their Caviar Black series drives, at least in its retail boxed form. I am not sure if those sold as bare drives offer the same coverage.

Both Seagate and WD offer a range of storage solutions covering everything from low to high end. The performance, reliability, and quality of specific product lines tend to get reflected in their warranty lengths. But even with the upper end drives, you might still end up with a lemon. Some models and product runs from both Seagate and WD just turn out more unexpectedly problematic than others.

Regardless of the make and model, a hard disk is more likely to fail prematurely without proper cooling. You can also expect failures resulting from other forms of physical trauma that the disk suffered from after it left the factory. Such duress will sometimes prompt a gradual, rather than sudden and catastrophic, failure.

Bear in mind that historically, the slashing and raising of hard drive product warranties has been a cyclical event.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: With hard drives in short supply, Seagate and Western Digital slash warranties
marlorcomp 3rd Feb
No one needs Western Digital or Seagate Hard drives anymore. They have become the thing of the past. When a company reduces their warranty on a product, they know that their product no longer is being made with the quality they once had. Who cares anyhow? The new trend is solid state drives (SSD) they will last longer.

Join the conversation!

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

Blog Roll

Blog Archive

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
ie8 fix