Seagate Lowers Warranty Period from 5 to 3 Years on Some Desktop Hard Drives

[onethreehill]

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. Please take a look at the Seagate Warranty Matrix for more information.

Source: TechPowerup

[Stukov]

Well, I still buy WD HDs.

[SoulsCollective]

Wow. That's a real shame, their warranty was a big factor in their popularity.

[safan80]

I'm not buying seagate anymore!

[xsbb]

Seagate's standards are still higher than most companies. All my servers run Seagate Drives exclusively.

[Lestat]

"i'm never buying segate again". "what a bunch of ****" ..... blah blah blah,,,
you guys are HILARIOUS!!! grow up.
let's ask eash other, how long do we really own our hard drives?
i guarentee most of you dont own them past a year, maybe two... because you have outlived their capacity and bigger better drives have come out by then.

i think 3 years is PLENTY for a hard drive.

hell i have one that is going on 8 years old, but its an IBM 120gb ide drive that i put in a USB enclosure. and i rarely use it.

[Stanley Pain]

Is this going to be retroactive or only for new drives sold on or after the date?

[don_xvi]

Wow, I've got buddies that are so high on Seagate because of this warranty. They'll be crushed.

And Lestat, I keep my drives a lot longer than 3 years. I keep putting off recreating the RAID with my 120GBs, but I've got a 180 in use on a desktop. And let's not talk about what kind of stuff I've got on dedicated crunchers... They're usually in the 6-20GB range. Heck, I've got an 850 and a 1.2GB that I want to be able to use for a cruncher but couldn't fit a regular ubuntu install onto... Of course, except for used drives, I've only killed one drive (a Maxtor 6GB) and had a couple of Deathstars fail, but I don't claim those !

To answer further questions, this will not be retroactive, and drives shipped before 03Jan will still carry the 5 year warranty.

Also note that this only affects bare drives, if you go to the seagate warranty matrix, it's spelled out there.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...rranty_matrix/

[Nanometer]

What's the matter Segate? Your hard drives not living up to your original expectations? hahaha. I'm a WD guy, 5 year warranty ftw. If segate thinks lowering their warranty will improve their income, be my guest. I think it will bite them in the ass, but what do I know.. I'm no consultant or business adviser..

[Jim Morbid]

What's the matter Segate? Your hard drives not living up to your original expectations? hahaha. I'm a WD guy, 5 year warranty ftw. If segate thinks lowering their warranty will improve their income, be my guest. I think it will bite them in the ass, but what do I know.. I'm no consultant or business adviser..

Only Raptor and RE Western Digital drives have 5yr warranties.

[stevecs]

don't see an issue here most of the ones listed are desktop and laptop drives not the enterprise drive line. Which makes sense home users are more likely to buy based on just the $$ value and don't use their drives hard at all this lets them fit that market, whereas enterprise users are more concerned with much longer run times and more demanding applications.

If you want 5 year buy the enterprise line (though I'd argue to buy it anyway due to duty cycles, bit error rates, et al).

[donitsi]

Only Raptor and RE Western Digital drives have 5yr warranties.

Wrong. WD black series have 5 year warranty.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=551

[freeloader]

Typical for a company to do this. Lower the warranty to 3 years and charge the same amount of money for the 5 year warranty. If Seagate is lucky, they'd make an extra $1 a drive, but will loose customers in the process. How's that for forward thinking?

[Xcel]

"i'm never buying segate again". "what a bunch of ****" ..... blah blah blah,,,
you guys are HILARIOUS!!! grow up.
let's ask eash other, how long do we really own our hard drives?
i guarentee most of you dont own them past a year, maybe two... because you have outlived their capacity and bigger better drives have come out by then.

i think 3 years is PLENTY for a hard drive.

hell i have one that is going on 8 years old, but its an IBM 120gb ide drive that i put in a USB enclosure. and i rarely use it.

Hah, you can't really call today's HDs small. My most recent drive is 1 year old. Grow up, everybody can't afford new hardware every year.

5 year warranty means a lot to me at least, and one of the reasons I bought the specific HDs

[xsbb]

Just because Seagate lowers the warranty period from 5 to 3 years

Does not mean that their drives are going to spontaneously explode at the 3 year mark.

Seriously guys, come on.

[[XC] gomeler]

I've bought Seagate exclusively in the past because of their 5 year warranty. Guess this will be a good enough chance to try out other drives now that warranty won't be a reason to hold to Seagate.

[Turok]

"i'm never buying segate again". "what a bunch of ****" ..... blah blah blah,,,
you guys are HILARIOUS!!! grow up.
let's ask eash other, how long do we really own our hard drives?
i guarentee most of you dont own them past a year, maybe two... because you have outlived their capacity and bigger better drives have come out by then.

i think 3 years is PLENTY for a hard drive.

hell i have one that is going on 8 years old, but its an IBM 120gb ide drive that i put in a USB enclosure. and i rarely use it.

Well, I would think the main concern for enthusiast users would be when you pass that HDD down to older hardware or as an external backup drive and it fails on you. It's one less PC in use because of 1 hard drive, and If you're young (without rich parents) or in college where you're counting your pennies, this is significant.

Typical for a company to do this. Lower the warranty to 3 years and charge the same amount of money for the 5 year warranty. If Seagate is lucky, they'd make an extra $1 a drive, but will loose customers in the process. How's that for forward thinking?

Right, but how would they be saving money anyway? I really don't see how lowering the warranty from 5 to 3 years helps, UNLESS they have several drives that fail between 3 to 5 years. It hurts their brand regardless if its true or not that many of their drives fail in that span of time.

[jasonelmore]

yeah i'm really dissapointed in them for doing this. This pretty much affects all of the consumer/gamer hard drives. all of the 7200 series?? that was way to broad and most of us that own a Seagate either have a 7200.10 or 7200.11. It's like there saying they dont have as much faith in there products anymore. But on the other hand, Western Digital offers the same warranty on most of there Hard Drives. like the above person said, "Except there Black and Raptor Series"

[mstp2009]

And there goes the LAST reason I had to buy Seagate over Samsung. . .

[Gen]

Currently running 4 7200.10's in raid 5 for over a year. The only desktop hdd that died on me was a WD, that being said I would still definetly look at WD now. The main reason I went with Seagate over WD and Samsung was their warranty as performance was close to the same between the 3 models I chose from.

Q. What about products purchased before Jan. 3, 2009? Will Seagate still honor the warranty offered at time of time of original purchase?

A. Yes, any Seagate customers who purchase(d) products prior to Jan. 3 will be covered by the warranty in place at the time of purchase.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...rranty_matrix/

[Particle]

I'd been buying Seagate drives because of this. This change doesn't mean they don't have a good product, but I prefer someone willing to back up their products with support. Perhaps Samsung for me now for single drives or mirrors and I'll continue doing RE2s or RE3s for my arrays.

No, the change won't reflect retroactively. They can't do that without a lot of legal fuss.

[Kaldor]

Just because Seagate lowers the warranty period from 5 to 3 years

Does not mean that their drives are going to spontaneously explode at the 3 year mark.

Seriously guys, come on.

QFT

Be realistic. I have never lost either a Seagate or a Western Digital in the last 10 years. Right now I have 3 Seagates and 2 WDs in use. I have had a couple of Maxtors and IBMs blow up on me. 3 or 5 years, honestly HDs are so cheap now it really doesnt matter. I lose a HD, I pull it out, throw it away and run a image on from my server. 10 minutes to install Windows is a beautiful thing. People need to learn to keep backups of important stuff, whether its on another PC/server or external HD or on removable media.
Hardware will fail.

[highoctane]

5 years is a pretty long time to support a drive that becomes outdated in about 3 years time.

I mean how many people after say 4 years would want to really replace/reinstall a 4 year old drive technology and size. When you go to your favorite online etailer I would guess most are looking for the latest revision drives and not buying the 7200.9's when there is say a 7200.11 available.

I can see the need for raid setups where you really need/want another drive of the same design for replacement but for desktops where one drive is used I don't see this as a big deal personally.

[Sparky]

I'm a WD guy, 5 year warranty ftw.

I suppose but in my experience that 5 year warranty is needed, seems WD drives hate me

[Stanley Pain]

I'll ask again. Does anyone know if this is retroactive or not?