Seagate increasing drive warranties to 5 years

[sharkeeper]

Samsung follows now...

This is certainly good news. Perhaps the others will follow through and everyone will have 5 years!

Cheers!

 

[Imyourzero]

Sweet! I've heard good things about the Samsung Spinpoint drives as well. Now they are covered by a 5-year warranty...NICE!

 

[Texun]

Originally posted by: jffjff
wow, what's seagate's rma service like? quick and easy like WD?

It's first rate in my book. I had 2 of them go Tango Uniform and the RMA was painless. Do it online and get the RMA, Fed-X it and they send you a new one the day after receiving the old one. If you need to speak with a real human being it's not that difficult either. It took all of 3 minutes.

 

[Imyourzero]

Originally posted by: Texun

Originally posted by: jffjff
wow, what's seagate's rma service like? quick and easy like WD?

It's first rate in my book. I had 2 of them go Tango Uniform and the RMA was painless. Do it online and get the RMA, Fed-X it and they send you a new one the day after receiving the old one. If you need to speak with a real human being it's not that difficult either. It took all of 3 minutes.

That's not bad, although I've heard of other manufacturers doing advance replacements on failed hard drives. They go ahead and send you one and you send your broken one in after receiving the new drive. That would be better IMO since it stinks to go without a hard drive, especially if it's your primary drive.

When you say they send you a "new" drive, do you mean it's really new or do they send a refurb?

 

[Regs]

Favoritism over a warranty?

Hard drives that last 5 years? What's next, rockets to the moon?! 😉

What I think is that they're just buying your loyal support for the next hard drive standard that comes out in the next year or two so they can take your bank. I haven't seen too many people not upgrade their computer within 5 years. It's not so hard to figure out. Any warranty over 3 years for me is pointless. It's the ones only offering one year warranties I would be worried about.

5 years from now it would be more or less the equivalent of saying today: I'm going to upgrade my computer to a 700 dollar A64 939 FX, but keep the 50 dollar 5200 RPM ATA33 Hard drive. Just makes no damn sense.

 

[Vegito]

5yr warranty are great.. i had a few old wd that were on 3 year warranty, looked like they ran out of 120gbs and had to send me 200gb to replace my 120 hdd..

so hopefully in 5 years, my 200 seagate hdd will die, and 200 won't be in production and they'll have to send me the lowest model they got, which hopefully in 5 year would be a 400gb minimum.. so its like getting free storage upgrade..

I gotten larger drives back from Maxtor and WD

 

[thorin]

IMHO you'll see all the manufacturer's follow Seagate's lead. Just like you did a 1.5 to 2 years ago when they all up and dropped them back to 1 year. It's a game, oh damn we can't afford to do some many RMAs, oh crap we can't afford the lost revenue by not having good warranties.

It's just like the whole centeralized/decenteralized arguement, it comes and goes. Catch the wave 😀

In a few years it'll flop back the other way.

Thorin

 

[Sideswipe001]

Originally posted by: Regs
Favoritism over a warranty?

Hard drives that last 5 years? What's next, rockets to the moon?! 😉

What I think is that they're just buying your loyal support for the next hard drive standard that comes out in the next year or two so they can take your bank. I haven't seen too many people not upgrade their computer within 5 years. It's not so hard to figure out. Any warranty over 3 years for me is pointless. It's the ones only offering one year warranties I would be worried about.

5 years from now it would be more or less the equivalent of saying today: I'm going to upgrade my computer to a 700 dollar A64 939 FX, but keep the 50 dollar 5200 RPM ATA33 Hard drive. Just makes no damn sense.

Though I understand your point, I find HDs to be the part I use longest. Here at work, when I upgrade someone to a new computer, I pull the HD of the old one and add it as a secondary storage drive. So, if they want to give me a 5 yr warranty, that's great by me. I'll keep using it (just not as my boot drive) in 3 years. These 120+ GB ones will be wonderful for storage.

 

[Jeff7]

What I think is that they're just buying your loyal support for the next hard drive standard that comes out in the next year or two so they can take your bank. I haven't seen too many people not upgrade their computer within 5 years. It's not so hard to figure out. Any warranty over 3 years for me is pointless. It's the ones only offering one year warranties I would be worried about.

You think it's pointless until your hard drive fails one month after 3 years is up. I was glad to know that my old 60GB 120GXP IBM drive was covered by a 3 year warranty, and not only 1 year, even after Hitachi bought the storage division of IBM. I got a 90GB 180GXP as a replacement.
5 year warranties are a nice gesture, and good to have. It seems to say that the company is confident enough in its hardware that it'll replace the drive even after 5 years.
The reductions to 1 year prior to that seemed to say "Yeah, our quality is slipping, and we're not going to work to improve it. We'll just drop extended warranty protection, and make you buy another drive."

 

[Imyourzero]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

What I think is that they're just buying your loyal support for the next hard drive standard that comes out in the next year or two so they can take your bank. I haven't seen too many people not upgrade their computer within 5 years. It's not so hard to figure out. Any warranty over 3 years for me is pointless. It's the ones only offering one year warranties I would be worried about.

You think it's pointless until your hard drive fails one month after 3 years is up. I was glad to know that my old 60GB 120GXP IBM drive was covered by a 3 year warranty, and not only 1 year, even after Hitachi bought the storage division of IBM. I got a 90GB 180GXP as a replacement.
5 year warranties are a nice gesture, and good to have. It seems to say that the company is confident enough in its hardware that it'll replace the drive even after 5 years.
The reductions to 1 year prior to that seemed to say "Yeah, our quality is slipping, and we're not going to work to improve it. We'll just drop extended warranty protection, and make you buy another drive."

Exactly. What Regs doesn't seem to understand is that a 5 year warranty inspires confidence in the product. If Seagate made a sh1tty product and stuck a 5 year warranty on it, they'd constantly be up to their necks in RMA's and would lose money. What that 5 year warranty tells me is that they are confident enough in their product to guarantee it for that long, and if it happens to fail (there will be bad apples no matter what) they will take care of me. It's not just about getting a replacement for my 200 GB drive (which will be tiny 5 years from now) if it fails. It's about Seagate feeling confident that the vast majority of their drives will last that long without failing. 🙂

It'll be interesting to see how my Raptor is doing in 5 years. Thank God WD didn't stick a 1 or 3 year warranty on these high-speed beasts. 😛

 

[thorin]

Exactly. What Regs doesn't seem to understand is that a 5 year warranty inspires confidence in the product.

I completely agree. For example I just had to replace a submersible well pump. I called around asking for prices etc and all the "real plumbers" were all hot to trot that their top of the line model (~$650) had stainless steel impellers and had a 5year warranty on parts. I kept looking around and getting pricing. I go check a few local stores (Canadian Tire, HomeDepot, Rona, etc.....). In the end I went with a ~389 pump from Canadian Tire with plastic (or fiber) impellers. Because 1 it had the same 5 year warranty and 2 it was 12gpm not 10gpm like everything else I was being quoted. Now if the pumps I was getting quoted @ ~$650 were really all that with their stainless impellers why don't they carry better warranty then their plastic (fiber) counterparts? I would have gladly spent ~$650 if the manufacturers had stood behind their product with a 7 or 10 yr warranty.

Just my 2 cents.

Thorin

 

[Pariah]

Originally posted by: Regs
Favoritism over a warranty?

Hard drives that last 5 years? What's next, rockets to the moon?! 😉

What I think is that they're just buying your loyal support for the next hard drive standard that comes out in the next year or two so they can take your bank. I haven't seen too many people not upgrade their computer within 5 years. It's not so hard to figure out. Any warranty over 3 years for me is pointless. It's the ones only offering one year warranties I would be worried about.

5 years from now it would be more or less the equivalent of saying today: I'm going to upgrade my computer to a 700 dollar A64 939 FX, but keep the 50 dollar 5200 RPM ATA33 Hard drive. Just makes no damn sense.

I agree completely. ATA drives are throwaways to me. After 3 years they've outlived their usefulness and become doorstops, making any warranty past 3 years pretty worthless. SCSI drives on the other hand tend to have a longer useful lifespan. If you think that increasing a warranty to 5 years shows the company has increased confidence in their product, you couldn't be more wrong, and you've done exactly what they wanted you to do. Nothing changed in the manufacturing process when HD makers dropped their warranty to 1 year. They were simply trying to increase profits in a field that has practically none. Now that the warranties have gone back up, they still haven't changed anything. It's all psychological. Seagate took a gamble going to 5 years because being the largest hard drive maker by far they can absorb any additional costs longer than the other companies can. It would be like Intel offering a 20 year warranty on their CPU's tomorrow just to drive AMD out of business since they couldn't afford to do that. Intel's 20 year warranty wouldn't mean they've suddenly found out how to make an indestructible CPU, just that they are falsely giving the inpression that their product is more reliable while trying to bankrupt AMD.

 

[thorin]

I agree completely. ATA drives are throwaways to me. After 3 years they've outlived their usefulness and become doorstops, making any warranty past 3 years pretty worthless. SCSI drives on the other hand tend to have a longer useful lifespan. If you think that increasing a warranty to 5 years shows the company has increased confidence in their product, you couldn't be more wrong, and you've done exactly what they wanted you to do.

Exactly so now at the end of 3 years you can still get your doorstop replaced for the current model which is likely a better drive then you had in the first place. ie: Your 80 will be replaced with a 120 or whatever. Not to mention the fact that alot of nonbusiness users keep drives in use for more then 3 years. Most of my drives have been through at least 2 systems if not 3 or 4.

Thorin