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Seagate slashes warranties for HDDs
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The following comments relate to this news article:
article published on 4 August, 2011
Seagate has noted today that it will shorten the warranty on most of its consumer series HDDs.
In an effort to reduce costs, the warranties will be reduced from 5 years to just 2 years.
Included in the list are Seagate's most popular drives, the Barracuda 7200.12 and Momentus Green product series.
Barracudas are 3.5-inch form factor and used for desktop builds while the slimmer ... [ read the full article ]
Please read the original article before posting your comments.
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bigfamei
Junior Member
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4. August 2011 @ 19:23 |
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seagate has a love/hate relationship with its hard drive products. I can't see this helping.
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Mysttic
Senior Member
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4. August 2011 @ 20:09 |
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seagate used to be on top, this news just makes it sadder.
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snake2
Junior Member
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4. August 2011 @ 20:50 |
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maybe seagate should just build better hard drives then warranties would not cost them so much
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Senior Member
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4. August 2011 @ 20:54 |
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I guess all those drives failing in the 2 - 3 year mark made this happen. Lord knows I had plenty of them. Built a bunch of NAS type boxes for storage with about 60 1TB Drives and had so many fail it was not even funny. Got some RMA'd but then those started failing. Finally started replacing them with WD Black drives which were about $20 more a drive and those are still kicking. Still have seagates fail but we have been using the 20 or so we pulled from one of the boxes to replace those.
Based on my experience with their drives these past few years I will not buy them anymore.
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Ragnarok8
Member
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4. August 2011 @ 21:32 |
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My friend swears by seagate, but the only one I've bought and tried was not even recognized by Windows, returned it and went straight back to WD.
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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4. August 2011 @ 22:28 |
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I've had a lot of good luck with Seagates, but that is only because I keep them nice and cool...toss one in a closed up 3.5" bay with no fan and you are lucky if it lasts 2 years...and that is what most people do.
Still, my relationship with them is over when/if this takes effect...if they don't trust their drives to last 5 years, why should I?
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Mr_Bill06
Member
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4. August 2011 @ 22:47 |
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I have had 2 Seagate hard drives and both particularity the one that came in an external drive I purchased ran extremely hot. I have several WD drives both from the Black and Green lines I have no issue at all with them so far and they don't run as hot. I don't think I will ever buy a Seagate unless they are really cheap or I get one for free. Next to WD I would go Samsung the same manufacturer of the external drive that had the Seagate hard drive in it now uses Samsung drives and again they run just as good as the WD drives. They to must have had a lot of failures and possibly people complaining about how hot the external drive got.
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llongtheD
Suspended due to non-functional email address
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4. August 2011 @ 22:50 |
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I have few of their drives that have never given me any trouble, all have seen about 3 years of use. This shift in their warranty policy doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I'll look a little more closely next time I'm in the market for a hard drive.
If your fish seems sick, put it back in the water.
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xtend
Newbie
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4. August 2011 @ 23:03 |
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that ought to help them go out of business faster . wd is the best hdd around though lately the samsung drives are doing very well for me also .
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david100k
Junior Member
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4. August 2011 @ 23:05 |
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If any drive needs a 5 year warranty it's seagate. Most of the seagate drive i have or installed crap out withing 5 years.
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Senior Member
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4. August 2011 @ 23:28 |
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Originally posted by david100k:
If any drive needs a 5 year warranty it's seagate. Most of the seagate drive i have or installed crap out withing 5 years.
Which is exactly why they are shortening the warranty in my opinion.
Another poster above has a point about the heat issue. Seagates of late run very hot and heat and power issues will kill a drive faster than anything. I found I rather pay $10 - $20 on average for a brand that has always been reliable to me like Western Digital. I have not had a western digital I personally used fail on me in almost 10 years. My current build has a 300GB WD Raptor and a 500GB WD black and then I got a 1TB Seagate from a friend and guess which drive is giving me issues. Even though it is a secondary data drive my computer would stall and run slower and as soon as I unplugged that seagate it runs smooth. I am glad I recently built a Windows Home server so now I store that data on the 10TB of space stored on WD Green Drives in the server so I do not need that seagate anymore. That drive is only 2 years old. I ran diagnostics on it and it gives possible failure codes but nothing definite so I think it is on its way out but not totally yet.
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AfterDawn Addict
1 product review
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5. August 2011 @ 05:04 |
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I would use wd if not for the firmwares...their sas drives have great firmware but small capacity and high price...their sata models are big and cheap, but the firmware makes raid buggy and unrelaible...and I don't trust any one drive to store anything no matter how expensive it is...all of my drives have some form of redundancy. Thus, I put up with the higher energy consumption, heat, and noise of seagate drives.
Since wd still claims that block raid is a feature, I can't switch...now that I can't trust new seagate drives, I might as well use Hitachi drives.
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Newbie
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5. August 2011 @ 06:52 |
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My local shop gave public notice to all their customers of this back around the beginning of June. I have been quite disappointed with the quality of Seagate's drives over the past 3 years or so with upwards of a dozen,(yes 12+) fail within the 5 year warranty period. I still have at least a dozen but am slowly migrating them to Western Digital as cash allows. I still have 3 Hitachi drives and a single solitary Samsung, all of which have3 given no problems.
In the interests of completeness I still have a Maxtor 120 that works. Any who remember how unreliable the Maxtors were just before Seagate bought them out must understand this drive is nearly 10 years old.
Calvin: Sometimes, when Im talking, my words cant keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we can speak.
Hobbes: Probably so we can think twice.
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Junior Member
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5. August 2011 @ 07:02 |
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I have a 2.5" Seagate in my PVR and I am worried by this through the constant use it will have.
Will existing customers will be affected by the severe reduction in warranty cover or new customers?
In my home server I have five Western Digital 2TB Caviar Greens that reassuringly come with a 3-year warranty. An extra year certainly makes a difference to me in the next upgrade cycle.
||Intel 2600K @4.7GHz|Asus P8P67-D B3-Rev|5970 2GB B.E.+ GT440(PhysX)|16GB DDR3 1866MHZ|X-Fi Fatality|Win7 x64|120GB SataII SSD|2TB WD C.B|LG GGW-H20L Super Multi Blu-Ray/HD-DVD||
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RichardvonBacon
Junior Member
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5. August 2011 @ 07:50 |
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So, no more Seagate drives for me then. I've had nothing but trouble with Samsung so thats not an option either. I guess that leaves WD and Hitachi. I have 1 WD drive and it works great. 4 Seagate drives with minor problems and 2 old Maxtor drives which should be replaced rather sooner than later. One thing I have noticed is that cheap external USB harddrives usually have Seagate inside and those drives have not worked that great either.
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ST2006
Member
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5. August 2011 @ 08:30 |
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Why do CEOS make these dumbarse business moves in the tech industry?
I think KillerBug's line just sums it up:
"If they don't trust their drives to last 5 years, why should I?"
They have jumped inside their hard drive shaped coffin and are slowly putting in the nails.
SmokeThis2006
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 5. August 2011 @ 08:44
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Clam_Up
Junior Member
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5. August 2011 @ 08:57 |
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I bought my first hard drive, a Quantum 20MB drive, in 1986 and have since gathered quite a large number of drives through upgrades and such. In all that time I've had exactly two drives fail. Both were Seagate drives. All of those old drives still work today...except the two Seagates.
A week ago I bought a new desktop system which came with a Seagate drive. The drive died after less than a day, making the third dead hard drive I've had; another Seagate.
I just dismissed it as coincidence, but this article hints that something is wrong with the manufacturing process with Seagate drives.
When laws allow unlimited ownership of ideas, it is to a society as iron fusion is to the core of a star.
When verified realities lead us to anger, we must learn to reevaluate our beliefs.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 5. August 2011 @ 09:00
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mangurian
Newbie
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5. August 2011 @ 09:05 |
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As with all on-line personal use reviews, 100 complaints about a product are meaningless. Few people take the time to say "They are working great for me!" There are tens of millions of users of each major HD brand and the masses have not been heard from. My experience is mixed. I keep getting alerts that my WD system drive is about to fail. I clear the alert and the msg comes back. That has been happening for a year (I do back up).
What is needed is side by side testing using some sort of accelerated aging process. You cant do tests which last 3 years and then pronounce that a model no longer being sold was superior.
The best thing would be a controlledsurvey. Not easy to do.
It would be like the computer surveys they do "Do you like your computers operating system?" You KNOW the results ahead of time. The Apple fanboys come out of the woodwork, have an orgasm, and vote yes. The Windows folks are too busy with their spreadsheets to answer.
In sum: Always have up-to-date disk images !
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pmshah
Member
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5. August 2011 @ 09:05 |
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Originally posted by snake2:
maybe seagate should just build better hard drives then warranties would not cost them so much
A few years back they bought Conner and its manufacturing facility in Singapore. This was shifted to China which proved to be a disaster. In the Indian market this gave chance to Samsung to enter and take majority share.
I see same scenario repeating. This time around WD is likely to be the beneficiary.
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Mez
AfterDawn Addict
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5. August 2011 @ 09:10 |
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Quote:
maybe seagate should just build better hard drives then warranties would not cost them so much
Easy for you to say but they are forced to sell them for less so they are forced to sell them cheaper. What they could do is have a cheaper line with a cheaper warranty.
This is a most informative thread. I usually buy WD and think I will keep it that way.
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Senior Member
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5. August 2011 @ 09:35 |
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This hurt Seagate years ago changing the warranty and it will do the smae this time.
Seagate has way too many failures and they don't last as long as WD's which seems to be the best drive out right now. I've never been a fan of WD but that is all I buy right now for Desktops and Servers. And no there are no problems with WD's and any RAID setup. WD's have been used in business style RAID without issues for more years that I can remember, and that is a lot of years.
This is a prime example of poor management, they never seem to learn. Again this will hurt Seagate and it won't be long and they will change back to reasonable warranty periods.
@Mez
They already have a multitear warranty structure, OEM's 90 days to 1+ years, Blue drives 3 years, Black drives 5 years.....
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Junior Member
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5. August 2011 @ 09:42 |
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Originally posted by RichardvonBacon:
So, no more Seagate drives for me then. I've had nothing but trouble with Samsung so thats not an option either. I guess that leaves WD and Hitachi. I have 1 WD drive and it works great. 4 Seagate drives with minor problems and 2 old Maxtor drives which should be replaced rather sooner than later. One thing I have noticed is that cheap external USB harddrives usually have Seagate inside and those drives have not worked that great either.
Some Hitachi HDDs (Google product code) have been known to have issues bar the enterprise editions, that leaves WD as the reliable bet on warranties for normal desktop use (my 2x Caviar Blacks come with 5-year warranty and very reliable with 7000-hours use).
To clarify, amongst the 50-odd HDDs I've owned over the past 15 years I've not had issues to date with Seagate. I've also owned 4 Maxtor HDDs (2x 300GB + 2x 500GB) but had complete drive failure on external USB 2.0 Maxtor 2x 500GBs with all my music gone - recovery was impossible unless I paid data recovery company my life savings! With external storage choose RAID-1 or NAS/DAS go RAID-5 with manufacturer offering best management software. Go for two drive redundancy if you want complete peace of mind.
To summarise; don't place your data in just one HDD. If you can afford to buy a new HDD, buy another to image the data to the spare drive and keep that spare drive in a fireproof/waterproof safe - can you really afford to lose a HDD worth of data!? Try to maintain long-life HDD by ensuring adequate case ventilation with a 120mm fan (near-silence) on each HDD cage so temps are below 35c.
||Intel 2600K @4.7GHz|Asus P8P67-D B3-Rev|5970 2GB B.E.+ GT440(PhysX)|16GB DDR3 1866MHZ|X-Fi Fatality|Win7 x64|120GB SataII SSD|2TB WD C.B|LG GGW-H20L Super Multi Blu-Ray/HD-DVD||
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Mez
AfterDawn Addict
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5. August 2011 @ 11:09 |
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Yes, I forgot to mention that WD has the multi tier line which is more obvious than Seagate which appears muddled. I normally buy the cheap line of WD but my C: is black. I do keep backups on the shelf for the green drives. My music I have also set back ups to a few buddies. I can get back my music if my house burns down. I have already filled up a drive for one of those buddies who's music drive did die. He has since gone to a raid.
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Senior Member
2 product reviews
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5. August 2011 @ 12:06 |
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I wonder if vendors will reconsider their options for HDDs for their computer lineup, for those that use seagate.
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Senior Member
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5. August 2011 @ 12:41 |
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Resellers won't change what they are doing with exception to they may sell more extended warranties now.
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