Seagate Lowers Warranty Period from 5 to 3 Years!

Seagate, the biggest hard drive manufacturer, has announced today that effective January 3, 2009, the company will be making some important changes to its limited warranty terms for selected drives.

The warranty period for consumer electronics (Seagate Barracuda 7200 included), notebook (Momentus 7200 and Momentus 5400 included) and personal storage bare drives sold to Seagate Authorized Distributors will be changed from 5 years to 3 years.

Seagate believes that the new warranty period and terms better reflect current industry standards. Seagate enterprise class drives and Seagate and Maxtor external retail products that have 5-year warranty periods will not be affected by this change.

http://www.techpowerup.com/78659/Se...5_to_3_Years_on_Some_Desktop_Hard_Drives.html

 

That tells me they are not as confident in their products anymore.

Probably will just reduce their sales, bad move.

 

Bad move? The global climate is in a bad move. Don't blame Seagate for trying to adapt to the new situations.

 

Wishmaker,

The global climate? The quality of the Seagate product is completely under the control of Seagate.

If Seagate wants to maintain high quality it can purchase goot parts and pay qualified people to make sure the product warrants a 5-year warranty.

What they are saying is we want to cut corners and still sell things at the same price. Don't give them a pass for a bad decision.

 

I second what Greg said.
Very, very bad move. If they lowered the warranty, they might as well lower the price too, else people who bought their drives due to the 5-year warranty, will be looking at the competition now.

 

I don't think it is that bad of a move. Western Digital switched several of their drives over to three years from five and this is just the same move. Most people are too stupid to figure out their warrantees and are used to one year warrantees. They will still be very pleased with a warrantee three times longer than they expect. Also, do that many people use their drives for much past 3 years? I would expect 2-4 years is the average lifetime outside of enterprise activities, and the hard drive won't just explode the day your warrantee ends.

 

There were/are people who said, I ONLY buy Seagate because of the 5-year warranty.

Now, those people are saying, I will look at all 3-year warranty drives.

Seagate obviously determined they are willing to risk those 5-year ONLY buyers.

 

I think Seagate shoot themselves by doing this kind of move

I also agree with Greg.

 

Bad move. I agree with Greg.

 

Exactly!

Especially in the notebook market, WD will now have a great advantage with the 2,5'' black scorpios and their 5 year guarantee over Seagate.

 

i agree. this is bad move.

i dont really get my HDD replaced under warranty (coz they like to give you a refurb one). by the time it reach more than 30 days (maybe less) the drives will be repaired or replaced with refurb one. i just dont think this is worth the hassle.

this is just saying seagate is not confident about their product anymore.
WD is now moving up their warranty on more and more product to 5 years. ironic really.

 

The question is: do we still use harddrives in 3 years or do we use ssd drives?

 

I think this is also a bad move psychologically speaking. Like another poster pointed out, how many people worry about their harddrive after 3 years and how many will actually know enough or take the time to send the drive in to get it replaced. Probably not too many in my opinion, but the extra 2 years helped Seagate when people are comparison shopping. If I saw a drive that had a 3 years warranty and another one with a 5 years, I would look at the 5 year one more closely. But companies are becoming desperate and that can bring rash decisions....

 

...actually... it appears that Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 series for desktops has been crapping out a bit frequently lately... compared to WD's equivalents. Hearing this just makes me want to go buy WD's 1TB drives over Seagate's despite the price difference. :S

Though... I'm still not sure which to get for my laptop/PS3. The Momentus 7200.3 or the WD 7200 320GB... or should I pray that the 7200.4 is a good quality drive?

 

Could someone tell me about HD RPM generations for Seagates? Do they only go up to 7200.11? I just ordered a new 7200.1 for my new desktop and I'm wondering why they didn't have 7200.3?

Thanks

PS. 3 years is a long time for me, by then everyone should upgrade their HDD hardware.

 

3 years is plenty for me. Didn't Seagate just go to five years about...um... 3 or 4 years ago??? As a marketing ploy? Not that they made them any differently, just changed the warranty. Or was it WD?

I see it as some sort of fancy accounting move rather than a direct reflection of quality. I have been buying WD lately anyways, regardless of warranty length.

 

I have an 80 GB Samsung from 2003. Perfect condition and according to HDTune it is not dead yet.

Also, WD is cheaper than Seagate. I just bought a WDC Green 1 TB SATA 3Gb/s HDD 16 MB cache for 70 euros. Seagate used to be my brand but since I got that momentus in my first u6 and the clicks and noises were louder and louder every day, I gave up on them. I did not even know they offer 5 years. For me, 5 years or less is the same thing. When my HDD breaks I will buy a new one and not spend time sending it to Seagate to fix it.

I've never had an HDD fail on me. My Prescott has disks from 2003 and they work. I got two 1 TB on Sata disks and 1x80 (samsung I mentioned) +1x 250 Caviar both on IDE. The IDE Caviar is older than 3 years too.


P.S: I collect HD rips and store my 1000 audio CDs on my computer. When Braveheart@1080p quality is 17GB you need the space .

 

i think in 3 years time we will still use HDD.
in 3 years, i think i will be buying new computer. but will still uses the old sytem ocassionally, especially if its a laptop.

 

definitely a bad move on their end.
Their move means, either:
1) they lost confidence in their products lasting 5 years
2) they are losing money by replacing/fixing all of the drives they get through RMA.
So cutting the warranty terms back will decrease the amount of drives eligible for RMA, thus saving them money

After my brother going through 7 bad seagate barracuda's its no wonder why they did this. Seagates desktop line of harddrives have been continually failing for the past few years. Their products used to be good like 6 years ago, but in the last 3 years or so I have never came across a seagate drive which lasted over a year.

K-TRON

 

:|

My 500 GB Seagate's still running... the one I got last year... oh please don't die on me when I get home... T_T

Most of my friends bought a WD HDD batch some time ago... and most if not all of their drives just died recently... So I'm assuming WD fixed those issues in their current on the market drives, whereas Seagate, which didn't experience huge failures last year, got a bit cocky, and are now eating dirt.

All speculation of course.

 

hmm in 3 years I will be using HDD's in my Desktop but in 6months or less I would like to get a 80GB intel SSD in my T500. assuming I can get one for less than 500$CAD (ideally 400 or so).

 

Great idea Seagate.

If I had to guess, maybe it's because they have no confidence in the current line of desktop drives (the ones with huge numbers of problems, usually the 750GB ones). They want to minimize the time they are on the hook for those particular drives. They dropped the warrenty on all of them so they were not focusing on one drive. Also, I wonder if the massive numbers of sales of bare OEM drives are eating into their profits so they had less money they could justify on replacements

 

Right. So this year, I'm personally not buying a Seagate HDD. I'm kinda guessing the higher frequency of drive failures attributes a bit to why Seagate drives are getting all the sales this year, whereas, I don't see any WD equivalents running at the same prices. Last year, it was pretty much the opposite.

 

IIRC, the last 2 years of the seagate warranty were more limited or prorated anyway. I may be wrong, but I thought that the 5 year warranty overall ended up being only marginally better than other companies 3 year warranties. Anyone have any experience with seagate warranties in the 4th and 5th years?

 

I have read a Seagate press release saying that 95% of the failures occur in the first 3 years.

I don't know why they had such a move... I presume the 5% failure would cost them much less than the loss of reputation by decreasing the warranty...

Worse yet, they will not be able to benefit financially from the cut-off in warranty immediately however this will reflect to their sales immediately...



--

 

Well HDD technology moves faster and faster. Seagate is entering the SSD market, too.
To give 5 years warranty does also mean to still keep or produce 5 year old HDD's. That's impossible nowadays.
Even if your drive gets damaged after 4.5 years the replacement drive will be 4 years old already.
In two years the majority will use SSD's, especially in the mobile market. In 3 years HDD's got replaced with SSD's in the mobile market. SSD's are faster, smaller (1.8" possible without problems), get cheaper and cheaper and the capacity limit is not so low. So in five years it's possible that 80% of the production are SSD's.

I admit, it's a bit sad, because my next drive will be the Momentus 7200.4 and this step looks like they decreased the quality to lower the price for this drive (and this drive is really not expensive) and thus decreased the warranty period.
But well, my drive in my current notebook is 1.5 years old and I'll replace it in a few weeks. After I've bought the Momentus I'll keep it for about 2 years, then replace it with a much better and faster SSD and use the HDD as external drive. If it breaks after another 4 years then, who cares.

 

Probably not a smart move on Seagate's part. I've been buying a mix of hard drives but I've got eight Seagate 1TB drives in my desktop. I was planning on using their 2TB drives when they come out, but we'll see how they stand up in the real world. However, in my production servers I go with WD.

 

atbnet, seems like you've got a lot of HDDs of both brands. Are the 1TB Seagates you're using the Barracuda 7200.11s? What WD drives are you using?

How would you rate each brand thus far? Any drive failures? If so, which are more common, WD or Seagate?

 

Yeah the 1TB drives are the 7200.11s. I had three WD 1TB GreenPower drives but I opted for the Seagates since the GreenPower doesn't play well in RAID5 which is what I am using.

The only one acting up right now is a Seagate 300GB. I took it out of my server, tested it with SeaTools and it was fine. So I took it back to the DC and see that it is not being seen again. So I'll probably just replace it with a WD Caviar 640GB. I have another in that box already and it works great.

 

Hmm... good to know.

I was looking into 1TB HDDs for my PC since I've only got 1 500GB HDD installed, and ZERO backup drives. >_>
Also looking into notebook drives, which both seem about on par. However, with the new Momentus 7200.4 just days away + boxing day/week here in Canada, I was wondering if I should take my chances with it, or go with a tried and true 2.5" 320GB 7200RPM drive for my PS3 and Vaio.

 

Now is a great time to buy the 1TB drives. When I bought them early this summer they were $179, now they are around $100. Plus with the 2TB drives coming out in February they should drop even more.

 

What are using all that space for?

 

I use it mostly for media storage. Eventually I'd like all the TVs in the house to be hooked up so I can just stream anything to them. For now it serves mostly just me.