# Hard Drive Warranty Chnages



## dustyjay (Jan 24, 2003)

"Hard drive manufacturers slash warranty periods"

" Seagate and Western Digital are cutting back on hard drive warranties, in some instances from five years to one, in order to save money or redirect it to product development."

More: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222760/Hard_drive_manufacturers_slash_warranty_periods


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## win2kpro (Jul 19, 2005)

So what's new; As I see it the manufacturers are just saying they have cut so many corners on quality you can expect the junk they now throw out the door to reflect on their cuts.

Everyday at this site and other sites I go to their are many more posts on failed hard drives (both internal and external) than there were 5 years ago. It's going to get to a point if you have a single machine you will need two externals and an imaging program to protect your data. 

I knew there was some reason I have Acronis on my three machines and six externals for backups.


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## dustyjay (Jan 24, 2003)

I do not buy Seagate Drives any more. The last 3 drives I had fail were all Seagate. And the Factory made externals I have had fail were either Seagate or Maxtor. I have been lucky and never had a WD drive fail, though I have never owned a WD External. I use Antec Easy Sata bays in my desktop computers and keep a herd of Internal drives for all of my back ups and images. 

I have one Desktop computer that I mostly keep in storage. I built it in 1986, It has a Conner 40Mb MFM drive in it and it still works to this day. Yes this is an IBM 286 Clone with a whopping 32MB ram and MSDos2.0 on it.


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## win2kpro (Jul 19, 2005)

The old Maxtor drives were good before Seagate purchased the company in 2006. The two oldest externals I have are Maxtor 80GB vintage 2002 which are also the only two that were factory assembled. When I use them they are still absolutely quiet and never had a problem with them. 

The other four externals are CoolMax enclosures (USB & 1394) with a 40mm fan using 320GB WD drives.I still have two CoolMax enclosures brand new in the box that I haven't put drives in as yet simply because at present I don't need any more storage.


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## dustyjay (Jan 24, 2003)

Actually the Maxtor I had was a 250Gb PC3000, I got it in 2007 so it was after the aqusition. I agree, Maxtor drives used to be good. I only had a problem with one of them, a 115Gb Diamond Max IDE. Died just days shy of 1 year old. Filed an RMA Claim on line and had a new drive delivered to my house by UPS 2 days later, Maxtor didn't even make me send the bad drive back. That was in 2000. I have used CoolMax External Cases (the ones with fans). They are great as far as I am concerned. Ex-wife traded them for drinking money with her cronies (part of why she is ex).


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

Yes, it seems that drive failures are a lot more common now. But many of those are externals, the most unreliable of any form of backup. I've seen externals fail most often from being dropped or even bumped hard. But I've also seen them fail twice due to insufficient power from the cheap enclosures. When externals fail, I think most people possibly don't even realize that they banged it against something, or just don't want to admit it. The only external I ever had fail was a WD - it hit the cement, hardly its fault.

But even removing all the externals from the mix, there are still a lot more drive failures than there used to be.

I've got one WD external that has run pretty much non-stop for 4 years with no problems. If secured and cooled, there's no reason they shouldn't last as well as internals.


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## win2kpro (Jul 19, 2005)

Although many of the drive failures you see in posts are in external drives, if you will notice most are from drive manufacturers pre-assembled drives. In the past two or three years I've built quite a few externals for customers using the CoolMax enclosures with fans (the ones I used are no longer available) and also Vantec enclosures without fans. I may have been lucky, however so far there have been 0 failures.

At least by building your own there are no surprises if you have an adapter failure and have to remove a drive, like the surprise people got that purchased the WD Passport drives and when removing the drive found the interface was proprietary.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

> WD is reducing the warranties on its Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three years to two.
> WD will continue to maintain five-year warranties on its premium desktop/notebook products, including the WD Caviar Black, WD Scorpio Black


The WD Blacks have dual platter supports which is one reason why they have a longer warranty ..
Less chance of platter wobble with age/wear .. (reading difficulties)
No reason to get anything else unless you're worried about a few more dollars.


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