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When Seagate et al reduced the warranty periods for HDDs after the Thailand flood, I wondered if it reflected a concern over reduced MTBFs as they brought damaged factories back on line. (component quality/reliability/yields generally increase over time as a factory line/new product matures).

I have concerns over this.
I did not support the merger or makers such as Samsung and Hitachi into Seagate and WD I think it is bad for competition in the industry.

How much cheaper can disk drives get? Considering the advances in solid state technology, the long term viability of the disk drive business is questionable. It's already a commodity business.

SSD's are still quite expensive and low capacity.
I do not see them taking the mainstream for some time yet..years down the road.

Since the floods prices are not down to levels prior to that. But despite all of this I do not feel it is in the customer's interest to have reduce warranty periods.
Wake me up when a 1Tb SSD cost is something that is approaching reasonable..until that point even SSD fans will have to rely on magnetic discs for storage of files.

SSD just isn't affordable enough nor big enough capacity wise at the moment.
I'm sure they will get there, just not yet.

I clearly said "long term" in my post above. But because the transition is likely to happen at some point, and the transition to Pad and Notebook computers is also happening (many of which don't use traditional hard drives), you can't expect a lot of companies to remain in the business, in fierce competition with each other, making desktop drives until the bitter end and then just drop dead--there are going to be mergers and consolidations (which has already happened).

The current cost of hard drives is incredibly cheap, and very reliable, and some of the above just sounds like a lot of whining.

I believe the points made about warranties are very valid.
I also think that the point I made about SSD costs and capacities are reasonable too.

I see no reason to call it a "whine"
I've been involved/interested in computers for a long time now since the very first home computers came out. Whilst I'm not an expert I do have a bit of a grasp on how things have panned out over time.

People tend to make predictions that simply don't happen. The desktop PC was evidently going to die a painful and complete death when the notebook computer because genuinely affordable (for most) that has not happened..and the old desktop continues to this day. The same applies to tablet computers which are not going to replace either desktops or notebooks, they are simply too limited to do that both in terms or functionality (no keyboard) or price (they are quite expensive for what you get)

The PC market continues to develop new gadgets that are useful and add to the needs of some users. If you are looking for a magic bullet a one kills all solution you will be left with a legacy of bad predictions

At some point SSD's are likely to replace tradition hard drives but not for a long time. Capacity of normal HDD's has gone over 4Tb and will continue to incease. Yet even a 512Gb SSD is very expensive. They have to get the prices down quite a lot and the capacity up to better levels..as well as nail some reliability concerns.

This is going a bit afield from the original post. But, it's not disruptive, yet.

HDD vs SSD: Yes, $/GB of HDDs will always be less than SSDs. It really comes down to how much storage space do you need for your system? If you need Terabytes, then you'll be using HDDs for a long while. If you need GBs, then it becomes a cost decision.

My current system uses a 128GB SSD for the OS/Apps/primary game and a 640GB HDD to store media and lesser played games. The SSD cost ~$200, the HDD ~$75. As I plan my next system, I'm tempted to go with a 256GB SSD and move iTunes library onto it. I'd have a Scorpio Blue 500GB 2.5" drive to store lesser played games, pictures, etc. In most cases, the HDD would never spin up. Current pricing: $210 for the SSD, $75 for the HDD. Same price, more solid state storage, faster performance, less noise.

Flash SSDs are a transitional technology. They won't be able to go down the lithography curve much longer due to the lessened read/write cycles. It'll come to a point where the overhead needed to keep the read/write cycles at an acceptable level will negate the benefits of smaller memory cells. Memristor based SSDs will end up replacing Flash SSDs.

Longer warranties sounds good to me. Anything less than 5 years is just shameful for an HDD, really; most expect to use the unit at least that long. The one year warranties were basically ridiculous, even if the drives could reasonably be expected to last long if the first year went without issue. I haven't minded paying extra for longer warranties, and have always gotten the extensions when available and reasonably priced (laptops). I would especially not mind when it's the device holding my precious data.

A warranty may not guarantee anything, but at least I know the manufacturer worked that much harder to prevent RMAs.

I just bought a "Samsung" F4 2TB drive. It was on sale and was a bit of an impulse buy.

The drive still has a Samsung logo on the label, but it's marked "Barracuda Green" and has a hybrid Seagate/Samsung model number of ST2000DL004-HD204UI. The drive has only has a one year warranty. Checking the warranty expiry on Seagate's web site, it expires less than 10 months from the date that I received the drive.