Seagate drops warranties to three years [News]
Seagate has made moves to reduce the warranty offered on consumer-grade products to three years from the current five, starting from 3rd January 2009.
They may well be the biggest hdd producer, but I don't use them. I've never got on with them, or maxtor who they bought out.
They are good for the industry because they tend to come up with the new stuff first. Perpendicular recording, sata drives, 15k rpm on the cheetah, hybrid hdds of platters and solid state and so on. They tend to come up with this stuff, then refine it far better than anyone else and charge too much for it. Good for us because people copy them and we get the cheaper results, good for them because large companies use them to supply the best drives.
They're good, but too much money, especially when samsung are putting out fucking outstanding drives for considerably less.
It's worth mentioning that samsung only do 3 year warranties too, but their 1TB drives are still about £13 cheaper than seagate's, which is over 10% less, which is significant.
I still heart WD, if only because they have a lot more in their range than most HDD makers, lets you have a bit of choice
+1, their prices never stray too high and out of a out of drives I've had only had one fail. A busted read arm and I blamed ebuyer for that. It arrived in a cacked up package and the guy was fucked off when I noted that on his delivery sheet. It fell over a day later and I let them pay for everything. The replacement drive is in my pc now, 4 years later and going strong.
Their 1Tb green drive is cheaper than the samsung at a lot of places, unfortunately it's rather slow.
HereComesPete wrote:+1, their prices never stray too high and out of a out of drives I've had only had one fail. A busted read arm and I blamed ebuyer for that. It arrived in a cacked up package and the guy was fucked off when I noted that on his delivery sheet. It fell over a day later and I let them pay for everything. The replacement drive is in my pc now, 4 years later and going strong.
Their 1Tb green drive is cheaper than the samsung at a lot of places, unfortunately it's rather slow.
I've had a 1TB green DOA from ocock, and both of my raptors died (one of power fail, one of cable bit breaking)
Oddly enough, I have 5 of the 1st gen 1TB GP drives, the 5400rpm ones, they actually seem to be slightly faster than my 500gb RE2s (both sets in the same configuration) I think I read the new ones are a fair bit faster too, 7200RPM and stuff, so may well be worth a look.
Hmm, not that I personally buy Seagate, I know my family have on occasion (if it's on offer), but dropping from 5 to 3 doesn't sit well.
I can't help thinking that it's not because they're just wanting to save money on replacements, but that they may also start scrimping a bit on quality and robustness so they don't have to last the 5 years any more.
It's not a major issue though as the general rule of thumb is that primary (important) drives should be replaced after about 3 years of normal use, but like most things, if they're slightly over engineered so they should last 5 years, there is a very good chance that it won't fail in 3 years.
If I could be bothered I'd go hunt down the graph of HDD failure rates, starts increasing massivly at the 4 year mark, but iirc it wasn't a very conclusive or exhaustive test, more like a collation of information.
I've been rather agnostic about what hard drive brand I buy these days. Right now I'm running a Seagate 7200.11 and some WD drive that was cheap. Both have been rock solid for me.
Seagate drops warranties to three years [News]
pretty much.
