Seagate warranty increased to FIVE YEARS

Linus · Post by **Linus** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 11:22 am

Apparently all Seagate drive purchases from July 1st onward will be covered by a 5-year warranty.

Too bad that doesn't make their laptop drives any quieter.

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 12:51 pm

This is great news. I just bough an 80GB drive 2 weeks ago from Wal-Mart. Thanks for posting.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 1:30 pm

To be quite frank I fail to understand how a 5 year warranty on a hard-drive is in any way useful. Five years ago I owned a 4GB hard-drive. If I owned it today and it failed... would I want a replacement? Not really.

I might be more interested in retrieving the data. Do they warrantyiseificate for that? I don't think so, that's expensive!

So what, pray tell, is the point? Sure it *looks* like Seagate showing confidence in their products. How many RMAs on 80GB drives are they going to get in 4, 5 years time when 1TB disc drives are cheap as chips?

Marketing gimmick. IMO.

Wedge · Post by **Wedge** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 1:45 pm

nutball, what if the drive goes out in 2 years? No doubt this is excellent for marketing, but it's still of value to the consumer. It beats the 1 year warranty that Maxtor and Western Digital adopted.

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 2:34 pm

A 1 year warranty is way too short. It sounds as if they do not expect their drives to last very long. 3 year warranties are probably all that is needed, but its sure nice to have the option to replace a failed old drive.

I like their idea, it makes my feel more able to buy with confidence. I'm hoping for bug things when they release the 7200.8. Hopefully the AAM issues will have been resolved, so once again we can enjoy the old style Seagate silence. A pair of 7200.8s would make a lovely Christmas present if these drives are as quiet as Seagates older ones.

Failing that I will have to take the plunge and go for Samsung. It looks like I will need 4 of their drives as the max capacity is only 160Gb atm

Harry Azol · Post by **Harry Azol** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 3:04 pm

nutball wrote:To be quite frank I fail to understand how a 5 year warranty on a hard-drive is in any way useful. Five years ago I owned a 4GB hard-drive. If I owned it today and it failed... would I want a replacement? Not really.

I might be more interested in retrieving the data. Do they warrantyiseificate for that? I don't think so, that's expensive!

So what, pray tell, is the point? Sure it *looks* like Seagate showing confidence in their products. How many RMAs on 80GB drives are they going to get in 4, 5 years time when 1TB disc drives are cheap as chips?

Marketing gimmick. IMO.

hd development has slowed recently.. faster and bigger drives are not being released as quickly as before..

If I were to buy one of the newer 200gb+ drives I'm fairly certain it will still be in use after 3 years

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 3:30 pm

Wedge wrote:nutball, what if the drive goes out in 2 years? No doubt this is excellent for marketing, but it's still of value to the consumer. It beats the 1 year warranty that Maxtor and Western Digital adopted.

Sure, 1 year was too short. 3 years is about the sweet spot IMO. Five is just ... fluff.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 3:33 pm

Harry Azol wrote:hd development has slowed recently.. faster and bigger drives are not being released as quickly as before..

If I were to buy one of the newer 200gb+ drives I'm fairly certain it will still be in use after 3 years

That is true, HD development (or rather *release*) has indeed slowed. Whether this is also just down to marketing I am uncertain. I would place money that the run-up to the launch of Mr Gates next resource hogging operating system will see renewed interest in the the 1TB PC.

BTW I'm not doubting the value of 3 year warranties, it's 5 years I think is nonsense.

Post by **Rusty075** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 4:19 pm

If you bought a 4gig drive 4.9 years ago, and it had a 5 year warranty, and you RMA'd it today....

They'd send you an 40gig 7200.7 as a replacement.

They'd replace it with whatever is the current "equivalent" drive. Right now 40gig is the closest they have to 4gig, so that'd be what you get, most likely.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 4:36 pm

Rusty075 wrote:They'd send you an 40gig 7200.7 as a replacement.

Still a waste of space (in my personal opinion). As I said above I'd much rather have free data recovery in the first year than two irrelevant years and the chance of a freebie straight-to-eBay hard drive when my cruddy old drive dies.

But... 5 years is like 3.6 GHz is like so many other numbers I guess. Big and therefore better.

Shad0 · Post by **Shad0** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 11:33 pm

Sure if your disk doesn't fail during the first 3 years then it will probably be ok for the next 2 as well,
But when you compare a 1 year warranty with a 5 years one, which drive do you trust more ?
Free data recovery would be great, but it's just too expensive, so I guess a warranty extension is all they can do to show they drives are reliable...
Anyway that "bigger is better" argument almost worked dor me there, if Samsung drives weren't the quietest I'd go for seagate, because an hdd's reliability is very important for me

nuttybing · Post by **nuttybing** » Mon Jul 26, 2004 11:59 pm

Well in the midst of all, isn't this still better than nothing?

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 6:20 am

Could this be just a marketing ploy, given the situation that Seagate's found itself in recently?

Post by **Rusty075** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 6:35 am

Ralf's on the right track...

Of course what he calls a "ploy" Seagate would likely call "value added customer support". But in reality extending the warranty to 5 years isn't likely to really cost Seagate much money more at all. The older a piece of hardware gets the less likely the end-user is to even attempt to RMA.

But on the front-end it stands to boost their sales. For 95% of buyers, HDD's are a commodity item. The only factors considered are size and price. Anything Seagate can do to differentiate themselves from the rest of the generic HDD marketplace will likely help them. (Although IBM did a good of diferentiating its "Deathstars" too

)

And given the public outcry not too long ago when most of the HDD makers cut warranties, this is probably a pretty good stunt.

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 6:52 am

There's an(other) interesting thread over at http://www.storagereview.com on this. The general consensus, for those that can't be bothered to read it, is that warranty length has virtually nothing to do with reliability of drives or confidence in drives, and everything to do with financial liability. Extending your warranty period ties up money, and Seagate hopes that the other manufacturers (being smaller, financially speaking) can't afford to make the same change, giving Seagate a perceived advantage.
This move is designed to inspire consumer confidence in Seagate's drives, but it doesn't imply any changes in the manufacturing of the drives.

Summary - reliability won't change, and probably won't be any better or worse than any other make of drive, but it's nice to have a free replacement if your drive breaks.

Data recovery will never be a standard inclusion on warranties, it's too expensive. Maybe you could get data insurance that would pay for data recovery if it was needed?

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 8:10 am

Laws protecting consumers in the European Union are very protective. But they protect the consumers from the people who sell, not from the manufacturers. Business owners aren't protected as well as consumers.

If you buy a product it is assumed to keep functioning a reasonable amount of time. For harddrives a one year warranty is too short. So if it fails in 14 months and there is a one year warranty from the manufacturer, then the shop where you bought it has to provide a new one at their own cost.

Before Seagate dropped their warranty too one year almost all online shops in the Netherlands sold Seagates, Maxtors and drives from one or two other manufacturers. When they dropped the warranty to one year 90% of those shops removed the Seagates from their product line. Just because the shopkeepers didn't want to take that liabillity.

Even now Maxtors are sold at four times as much different shops than Seagates. Raising the warranty to 5 years might regain them some market share. Just because more shops will be willing to sell them.

edcrane · Post by **edcrane** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 8:13 am

3 years is nice, but I do think that there is some value in the extra 2 that seagate is offering. I for one am still using a more than 2 year old wd1200jb as a primary drive for my workstation. In all likelihood I'll still be using it in another year, and it would be nice to not have to worry about forking over $75.00 to replace it when it inevitably dies. This consideration actually had me contemplating going with enterprise drives just to get the extra warranty period. Since seagate is going across the board with this, that's no longer an issue. I'm most likely going to go for a pair of seagate 160gb or 200gb drives to throw in a raid-1 array for data storage.

trinitrotoluene · Post by **trinitrotoluene** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 9:35 am

I'm still using a couple of 10 gig drives from '97. They are useful in that I can stick them into older computers to do some testing. One nice thing now, is the external hard drive enclosures. One of the drives is a 2.5" so I bought a small enclosure for $18 and I can carry around 10 gigs. So if you can get a new drive after 4 years and find something useful to do with it, then the warranty will be valuable.

Storage Review's thread is most likely right though.

POLIST8 · Post by **POLIST8** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 11:22 am

Hey, take it or leave it.

I just bought a 200GB Seagate this past weekend.

If it breaks, hopefully I'll get a 500GB drive 4 years from now.

Free data recovery? YEAH RIGHT. That is way too expensive vs. the price of the disk.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Tue Jul 27, 2004 4:37 pm

you are all being really harsh to seagate here.. your not going to get free data recovery, no one offers that (AFAIK).. a 5 year warranty is better than 3 years, they're not charging more for it are they.. so whats the problem?
why are you calling it a marketing ploy, they haven't said 'hey our drives are going to be twice as reliable now'?! people might buy seagate hardrives because of their good warranty.. but surely thats up to them if thats what they want?

also a lot of people who aren't PC enthusiasts use stuff more than 5 years. drives out today would certainly suffice for office/internet use in 5 years time, and a lot of other stuff too no doubt.

and if u dont want the replacement drive then yeah u can send it off to ebay.. so u can get a few $.. whats wrong with that?

Tibors; hm i wouldn't fancy your chances getting a replacement if it died after 14 months. define 'reasonable amount of time'. theres no law to say when that is for harddrives, and a year is a long time (generally).. wishfull thinking that. as for your argument about stores stores having them because of these reasons, seagate could still have made it a 3yr warranty.

'it doesn't imply any changes in the manufacturing of the drives. '
true, but having a longer warranty gives seagate a financial incentive to make as many of their drives as possible last 5years atleast. which means they are more likely to make them more reliable, right? they want to make/keep money afterall.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Wed Jul 28, 2004 1:00 pm

mb2 wrote: define 'reasonable amount of time'. theres no law to say when that is for harddrives, and a year is a long time (generally).. wishfull thinking that. as for your argument about stores stores having them because of these reasons, seagate could still have made it a 3yr warranty.

'reasonable amount of time' is not defined in the law, but left open for a judge to decide. I think a year is not a long time for the expected lifetime of a harddrive. I don't think any judge would think that a long time either. Apparently most dutch shop owners didn't want to take the risk and dumped Seagate.

zed939 · Post by **zed939** » Wed Jul 28, 2004 1:22 pm

Like when my Maxtor drive broke down, I did an RMA and got a faster one in return. Imho if they want to give us longer warranty why not - I still buy Seagate because they are quiet(at least compared to the Maxtor).

croddie · Post by **croddie** » Wed Jul 28, 2004 2:03 pm

Right on, mb2