Hard drive manufacturers slash warranty periods
If you’re considering a hard-drive purchase in the next 6 months, here’s a pretty compelling reason to buy before the end of the year.
I must confess, this smells a little bit like anti-trust behavior to me. As a consumer, are you going to stop buying Seagate and WD drives based upon their warranty? I suspect they realized that price is the #1 driver of HD purchase decisions and this will allow them to undercut the second tier competitors at least until they follow suit.
It also reminds me of what happen to the Airlines. People demanded the lowest fare, hence the quality of service continued to drop to match customer demands. Perhaps the market is just getting what it’s asking for.
Seagate’s warranties on certain drives will be reduced as of Dec. 31, and WD will follow beginning Jan. 2. All drives shipped prior to those dates will continue to carry the current warranty term associated with the products.
Once production gets back
Once production gets back into full swing and prices drop back to pre-flood levels, the cost of replacing any current drive should fall below the original price paid for any given drive. I remember the days of paying $250 for a drive only to see it fall well below $100 while it was still under warranty. Some drive manufacturers make it painful enough to get a drive replaced that it’s almost worth it to ditch the warranty altogether and just buy a new drive. I’ve been fortunate with warranty replacements, but I’ve heard rumors about bad experiences. I’m actually surprised that drives carry a warranty as long as five years in this day and age, especially when a 1-year parts and 90-day labor warranty seems to be the norm for most consumer electronic devices.
I think its great that we now
I think its great that we now pay for ‘just barely acceptable quality of service’ for air travel because that means I can afford it. if you want to pay more for a better experience they sell those tickets, too.
If slashing the warranty makes HDDs cheaper I’m all for that too. If my drive dies on me 3-4 years down the line I would probably have just bought a newer, bigger one anyways.
Your assuming it will
Your assuming it will actually make drives cheaper. The drive prices will remain the same, so basically we are just going to be getting less for the same price. This is really disappointing. Things usually break right away or it takes several years for them to break.
gcw07 wrote:
Your assuming
[quote=gcw07]
Your assuming it will actually make drives cheaper. The drive prices will remain the same, so basically we are just going to be getting less for the same price. This is really disappointing. Things usually break right away or it takes several years for them to break.
[/quote]
really? because all i’ve ever known is a consistent negative slope in the $/GB v. time evolution for HDDs.
Reducing the warranty really
Reducing the warranty really doesn’t have anything to do with the $/GB v. time thing. Reducing the warranty isn’t going to make drives less expensive at all. Now advancement in how much they can fit on a platter will always reduce the cost over a long period of time.
gcw07 wrote:
Reducing the
[quote=gcw07]
Reducing the warranty really doesn’t have anything to do with the $/GB v. time thing. Reducing the warranty isn’t going to make drives less expensive at all. Now advancement in how much they can fit on a platter will always reduce the cost over a long period of time.
[/quote]
Its kind of bizarre that you dont think HDD manufacturers build in the cost of servicing their warranties into their prices.
DavidStein wrote:
If
[quote=DavidStein]
If slashing the warranty makes HDDs cheaper I’m all for that too. If my drive dies on me 3-4 years down the line I would probably have just bought a newer, bigger one anyways.
[/quote]
I agree, 3-4 years of life is sufficient, but now the average failure rate on your drive parts only need to be 2 years rather than 4, and as you’re cutting costs, you can probably get it lower than that, since some % of returns is going to be deemed acceptable…
Seeing as this will be the
Seeing as this will be the case.
What are the recommendations for a server class hard drive?
I have considered three WD RE4’s in RAID1 for my W2008 server.
According to the Register, WD
According to the Register, WD plans to offer extended warranties as an add on. Seems they are borrowing a page from Best Buy. As long as you use a good raid configuration, I suppose you can just buy the cheapest one and add on the warranty if you like, but as others have pointed out, it may make more sense to just replace them with the cheapest at that time, though I think we need one more advance in RAID technology to allow hot replacement of dissimilar size/manufacture disks.
mpatnode wrote:
According to
[quote=mpatnode]
According to the Register, WD plans to offer extended warranties as an add on. Seems they are borrowing a page from Best Buy. As long as you use a good raid configuration, I suppose you can just buy the cheapest one and add on the warranty if you like, but as others have pointed out, it may make more sense to just replace them with the cheapest at that time, though I think we need one more advance in RAID technology to allow hot replacement of dissimilar size/manufacture disks.
[/quote]
I can’t recall exactly if it was WD or Maxtor (I believe it was WD), but one of them has offered extended warranties on their drives for years. Every retail drive I’ve purchased from them in the past had a coupon inside with a link to a website that allowed me to extend the warranty for another couple of years for $14.95. I haven’t bought a retail drive kit in several years so I don’t know if they still offer it.
HD warranties have fluctuated from as little as one year to as much as five years. What I’ve always found to be strange is that OEM bare drives tend to come with longer warranties than their retail counterparts. You’d think that with the higher price of the retail drive kits they’d come with the longer warranty period. The only difference is that you get a couple of cables and a CD in a retail box.
UnRAID already allows you to use drives of different sizes in an array. In fact, you can also mix and match both IDE and SATA drives in the array. I’m not sure if it allows hot-swapping, but I tend to believe it doesn’t since you have to assign a drive to a specific slot. I always prefer to shut down my array when swapping hard drives even though the case I use has hot-swappable drive trays.