Seagate drops warranty from 5 to 3 years on bare drives

2008-12-10 04:50 PM | 5 comments

Just got an email from Seagate's reseller partner alias. (They like to send out a number of emails once you've returned a drive or two.) Effective January 3/09, warranties for 'bare' drives - mostly available from resellers such as NCIX and Canada Computers - will shrink from 5 years to three. Existing purchases and purchases before this date will maintain five years of coverage. As a consultant, I've purchased this type of Seagate hard drive for myself and clients exclusively over the past seven years.

This warranty reduction is a drastic change. (You can see Seagate's new table of coverage on their site.) A 5 year warranty on a drive is a statement of quality - that the manufacturer recognizes a potential 1-2% yearly failure rate and is willing to account for it. Replacing the drive for no cost won't help get your data back, but having to pay for another drive on top of losing files is an insult following injury. (Most new systems I configure have a RAID-1 setup, which gives an additional level of security in the event of drive failure.)

Unless this policy changes, come January 2009, I'll begin recommending Western Digital Caviar Black bare drives for new systems and any upgrades to my sufficiently-large RAID setup. These drives continue to have a 5-year warranty and currently sell for less money than the Seagate equivalent.

Comments

DaveLahn on 2008-12-11 02:10 AM (#)

In my experience, the Western Digital drives have been similar in quality to the Seagate drives anyway.

ev98 on 2008-12-11 04:14 AM (#)

Yeah, I've had a good experience with my Western Digital 1TB external unit that I picked up from Costco. It's got FireWire, USB2 and eSATA connectors and performs pretty well. I just hope Seagate doesn't start blaming the economy for this.

wmonroy on 2008-12-13 12:11 PM (#)

message from Seagate: Seagate’s leadership in product quality and reliability has given it an edge in offering customers better value when they need it. Seagate’s current 5-year limited warranty will remain in place for consumer retail products as well as for enterprise-class hard drives, and we will now provide our distributor customers with a 3-year limited warranty for all other hard drives. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by offering a 3-year warranty (which Seagate believes is more in line with the rest of the industry), we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs. The 3-year limited warranty on notebook, desktop and consumer electronics bare drives offers new advantages and enhancements to the business proposition for our channel customers while improving cost efficiencies for Seagate. We expect little, if any change for consumers – since hard drives used in computer systems other devices are covered by the individual manufacturer’s warranty.

Jake on 2008-12-16 09:25 AM (#)

Unfortunately, Seagate's policy change directly affects me as a consultant and reseller. My clients had the peace of mind that their drives were covered with the best warranty around. This is why I'm so displeased; frankly, all hard drives these days are very similar and the warranty is probably the most differentiating factor.

I also have an 8-drive RAID5 array in my server using exclusively Seagate 500GB SATA2 drives. When these drives die, I'll likely replace them with comparable Western Digital ones in light of the new policy.

andreas lee on 2009-06-23 03:17 PM (#)

In terms of quality, its better to choose Western Digital. I bought WD My Book Essential 1 year ago and used it up to 10 hours / day. It works well until now, very quiet while working, and it is not easily get hot.

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