New Hard Drive Warranty Policies for ATA Drives

[dstell]

Want to make a difference and have your displeasure with the new ATA/IDE hard drive one year warranties heard?

Now is your chance! - We are giving the THGC very unique chance to get your question answered.

Patrick and I are in the process of working on an article for next week on the hard drive warranty situation and we have been in contact with all of the usual suspects regarding the article and they have agreed to provide answers to specific questions. (They have imposed a limit on the number of questions we can ask, so we can't get them all answered!)


Please reply to this message in the thread with any question that you would like to ask the hard drive companies. - (Please keep the comments to a minimum as it will allow us to sort through them quicker.)

I will review the questions and choose at least one or two the best ones as questions that we will ask all of the companies in our questions and answer section of this article.

Now is your chance to get involved and have your voice heard!

Please keep the replies in this thread as short as possible and please make the questions in good taste. (Yeah, I really didn't want to say that, but I figured that I might as well knowing how mad some of you are about the situation.)

Thanks!

 

[Napoleon]

<i>Will the warranty slashing be followed up with significant price slashes as well?</i>

If there are "special edition" drives with three-year warranty available (like Western Digital's JB series):
<i>Will there be differences in mechanics and QA between "special edition" drives and their regular counterparts?</i>

Basically, quite simple questions with a yes/no answer. As an avowed sceptic, I'm curious about just how elaborately they will answer <i>no</i> and <i>no</i>...


<font color=red><b><i>You want WHAT on the [-peep-] CEILING?!</i></b></font color=red> -Michelangelo

 

[AMD_Man]

Personally, being a computer enthusiast, I couldn't care less about the warranty changes. I will only buy "special edition" drives anyway. The price difference is minimal and you can get a WD SE 8MB drive in as little as 40GB capacity. There's basically no reason to get a 2MB cache hard drive now.

Intelligence is not merely the wealth of knowledge but the sum of perception, wisdom, and knowledge.

 

[lhgpoobaa]

Try to keep this in good taste. well ill do my best. But i aint a happy camper, just for the record.

The reduction in warantee's seems to be a catch cry of the new millenium "less for more".
SDRAM for your P4. Powersupplies that barely last a month. You get the drift.
especially as i saw a statments saying that:

A. The majority of drives die within the first year.
B. The high end premium drives retain the 3 year warantee, namely the W.D. 'JB' range and the DiamondmaxII range from maxtor when they are released.
C. Additionally i found this little nasty nugget this morning. <A HREF="http://websupport.wdc.com/store/extwarranty/index.asp" target="_new">http://websupport.wdc.com/store/extwarranty/index.asp</A>. Basically if you buy your 1 year warantee drive (which was 3 a few days ago) you can get the 3 year warantee back... for 20 bucks. Gee Thanx!

My question to Drive manufacturers is:
<b>How Can the CEO ethically Justify charging $20 for something that was an accepted part of the purchace just last month? Especially as the only alternatives to get a long warantee are A) buy a more expensive JB drive or B) get SCSI</b>

P.S. yes i know big busness doesnt like the wordgroup "ethic", but it might do them good to see it once in a while.

Cheers, and thanx Dstell.




<b>I'm THE THGC Strumpet! Hear me Roar! *Squeak!* </b>

 

[AMD_Man]

In many cases, it's cheaper to get a WD JB drive of equivalent capacity than it is to extend the warranty on your BB drive. The way I see it, 2MB cache hard drives are obsolete, and so this is a non-issue. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of 2003, you won't be able to find a 2MB cache hard drive any more.

Intelligence is not merely the wealth of knowledge but the sum of perception, wisdom, and knowledge.

 

[HammerBot]

I have a destinct 'feeling' that harddrive crashes are becoming more common. Not just because of the recent bad IBM series, but I have read and heard about a lot of crashes recently.

My question is: <i>Are harddrive manufacturers being pushed ahead by the market demand too fast for the current technology to be reliable?</i>

 

[Scotty35]

Will IBM honour there warranty's now that it is sold?

Extended warranty for an extra cost, wtf is that! It says to me that the drive would last that long anyway but we the drive manufacturer wants to improve our bottom line by a: reducing warranty costs, b: increasing revenue from extended warranty's, with the idea that anyone who pays for such warranty is more than likely to look after it better anyway.

It now makes SCSI a very attractive alternative again, as far as I know all SCSI drives have 5 years warranty, and some IDE drives still have 3 years.

<A HREF="http://www.btvillarin.com/phpBB/index.php" target="_new">A better place to be</A>
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by scotty35 on 10/04/02 11:27 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[camieabz]

<b>How can OEM PC suppliers which use the 1 year warranty drives possibly get away with supplying 4 year warranties cost effectively and to no detrement to the end user?

How can drive manufacturers possibly expect users to pay for drives which have such a short life when they charge prices for these drives over and above the cost of a CPU or motherboard which will probably last 5 years?

What's next? 6 months? No warranty at all?

Do the Chairmans or CEOs of drive manufactuers expect an individual to pay 4 x the price of a next to useless drive for a redundant system, if all the drives are likely to go in the first 18 months?</b>

I've lots more questions, but I suppose I'll have to bite my tongue. :tongue:

<b><font color=blue>~ <A HREF="http://www.btvillarin.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=324" target="_new">My System Specs</A> ~<font color=blue></b>

 

[dhlucke]

This wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the 60gxp and 75gxp IBM drives being lemons. In IBM's case it seems that the real problem is their inability to produce reliable and long lasting drives, and they're covering their losses with the reduced warranty.

<i>Did one manufacturer start this and the rest just follow since they "could"? Are they phasing out the 2MB cache drives? Are they moving on to make the 8MB cache standard with higher cache drives to follow as special editions? Isn't the real problem, not the warranty, but their inability (in the case of IBM) to produce reliable and long lasting drives? Won't this raise the price of OEM systems?</i>

<font color=red>I'd like to dedicate this post to all my friends, family, and fans. Without them this post would never have been possible. Thank you!</font color=red>

 

[llewelyn]

It seems that IBM is hanging on to its three year warranty for the time being.

I'm still not going to buy one.

 

[Crashman]

LOL, the majority of my Western Digital drives have dies within the last 6 months of a 3-year warranty. And most of the replacements have died within 90 days following the end of the original drive's warranty. Died with no signs of anything wrong, refusing detection. Sounds like a firmware bug, or "Time Bomb" installed intentionally by Western Digital on their replacement drives. Which is why I normally don't buy new Western Digital drives.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

 

[4Ryan6]

My first Question: Is a warranty time decrease, also a direct indication of a decrease in the quality of the marketed product?

My second Question: Regarding my first question, if you actually responded to the question, do you expect the comsuming public to believe you now?

My third Question: What are your projected sales loss?

Ryan





Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

 

[lhgpoobaa]

I too get the feeling drives are becomming less Reliable, or to be mroe precise, less robust. Higher platter densities, closer head to drive surface distances, higher manufacturing tolerances required...

<b>I'm THE THGC Strumpet! Hear me Roar! *Squeak!* </b>

 

[dhlucke]

It's the same thing with TV's for example. They build TV's to be replaced every 3 years or so nowadays. My parents on the other hand had TV's that lasted 20 years and that simply doesn't happen anymore.

<font color=red>I'd like to dedicate this post to all my friends, family, and fans. Without them this post would never have been possible. Thank you!</font color=red>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

woo hoo :frown:

<b> I think :frown: I'm :redface: addicted to these ever so :tongue: cute smiley :lol: faces! </b>

 

[dstell]

Just wanted to let all of you know that I have selected the questions from your submissions to be used in the article and they have been submitted Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital and it all goes well, expect to see the new article this Friday.

Thanks for your input!

 

[camieabz]

Tum te tum.

Is it in yet?

<b><font color=blue>~ <A HREF="http://www.btvillarin.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=324" target="_new">My System Specs</A> ~<font color=blue></b>

 

[dstell]

Just an update, we were unable to get the article out the door for Friday. It is now finished and ready to go, expect to see it early next week as soon as we have space to post it. It came out quite well with Maxtor, Seagte, and Western Digital all answering the questions for the article. Some good stuff appears to come out of all of this, but the bottom line is that only Maxtor's & Western Digital's high end IDE drives are going to carry a 3 year warranty at no charge and only Western Digital is going to offer a warranty upgrade. The rest the info will have to wait till the article.

Thanks!