WOW, Seagate ups warranty to 5 years.

[Mercutio]

In their PC servers I saw Seagate and Fujitsu drives as often as IBM.

 

[sechs]

The IBM divisions are completely separate and the server division will use whatever drive they can get for the cheapest price. They don't play favorites, so many IBM servers have Seagate drives in them.

That, and IBM and Seagate SCSI drives don't really compare....

 

[ltothev]

yeah, but hard drives hardly ever fall below $60... so you'd get atleast $6.

$6 dollar? , I don't think that is sometime enough to cover the cost that you have to ship your drive back to seagate for credit at Year 5

 

[Tannin]

Ahh ... but the point of the $6 isn't to provide any sort of service to Seagate customers — $6 is a joke, it costs around $20 just to go through the RMA paperwork and pay the freight — the point of the $6 is to allow Seagate's marketing droids to make ridiculous untrue waranty claims without actually getting caught lying

The first three years seems, on the face of things, to be a fair-dinkum standard hard drive warranty, the remainder is a shonky scam entirely in the worst traditions of the company that brought you the U Series drive.

Al Shugart would never have stooped to that sort of trick.

 

[Tannin]

PS. Full credit to Seagate for restoring a proper three year warranty. No credit at all to Seagate for the dishonest marketing trick that they have wrapped it up in.

PPS: given the shonkiness of the fake "five year" warranty, do we really believe that they will honour the first three years prperly — i.e., replace a faulty drive with onre that actually works, and goes on working? Or do we all believe that they will pull the same cheapskate low-life tricks that they pulled with the "refurbished" U-Series warranty replacements that nearly all fell over within a few months of you getting them? After the second or third trip back to Seagate, you'd just get tired of buggerising about and thow the damn thing away — which, of course, was exactly what they wanted you to do.

 

[ltothev]

I don't even think that in the next 5 years, the drive that you are currently using is still in production by Seagate. I remember back then like 6 or 7 years ago, I got a name brand computer and it came with a maxtor 4GB hard-drive but now, most name brand computer ussally come pack with 40GB and up hard-drive for you.. so think in the next 5 year, we would probably move to something newer, or the EIDE interface would probably disappear and come the SATA 10,000/15,000RPM common age..

 

[Tannin]

Quite so. The average production life for a new drive is about 9 months. The manufacturers, when they stop making a particular model, run off a certain number of extra drives so that they have enough to cover warranty replacements. Then, say a year or so after a given model goes EOL, they take a look at the failure rate figures and, if the drive has been a good one, they might decide to sell off a certain number of the reserve drives in the belief that they have more spares than they are going to need.

Or rather, that's the way they used to do it. We well remember buying boxes of immaculate but out-of-date drives from Seagate and also from IBM for this very reason. Hmmm ... that would have been 1.7GB IBMs ... er ... beautful little 850MB Seagate Decathlons, and the closely related 1.08GB unit as well .. then there were some 500MB and 2.1GB IBMs, and another Seagate model ... a 1.2 or a 2.1 I think it was.

These days, of course, the cost-cutting has got so extreme that they sell every single drive right away and mostly just give you crappy refurbs that don't work. Not just Seagate, Western Digital do the same. Maxtor and IBM too, I imagine.

Hell - I used to happily buy Seagate and IBM refurbs at one time (back about the same period — 2.1GB and the sizes either side of that) and they were just as good as new drives. Come to think of it, I still have an IBM 9.1GB half-height 10,000 RPM Ultrastar that is 6 years on since I bought it as a "new refurb" and apart from making a hell of a racket (which is normal for these old rocketships) it is A1 perfect. It ran 24/7 for five years in my server. It would still be there if I hadn't got tired of the noise after the first five years.

Try doing that with a modern refurb.

 

[Buck]

From Eugene Ra at Storage Review:

I've been asked to pass this on directly by Seagate PR-

"You can let your members know that end users, resellers, and "Point-of-Integration" customers do indeed have return/exchange coverage in years 4 and 5 of this new warranty coverage, just as they would expect. The other terms in question are specific to direct distributor customers and are not seen by them as a negative; they have to do with the industry-standard ways warranty policy affects distributor stock."

 

[Bozo]

Interesting.......Just got a computer in my cube that's being retired. It's a Gateway cica 1998. Most of the Windows file are dated 1999. The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar 36400. This is the original hard drive for this computer. It has been running 24/7 since Nov 1999. (thats the best estimate from the department that uses it.) It's running Windows 98.
Amazing! Wish all our hard drives would last this long.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Tea]

The 24/7 is probably why it's still running! IBM be dammed, 24/7 gives you the longest life. I'm convinced of it,

 

[Fushigi]

The 24/7 is probably why it's still running! IBM be dammed, 24/7 gives you the longest life. I'm convinced of it,

Ditto, my simian friend. Case in point: drive stiction problems only occur after a drive has run long enough to reach maximum (or nearly so) operating temp and is then shut down long enugh to cool off. Thankfully I haven't heard of stiction issues for several years but it is a very valid example of how power cycling a drive, or really any component with a mechanical part, can cause issues.

 

[Bozo]

Well......Maybe I don't wish all our computers would run that long without problems.
I might be out of a job

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Tea]

Don't worry Bozo. Before too long they will bring in engineers that operate 24/7. Probably frm India at less than half what they pay you.

(Only half joking.)

 

[e_dawg]

Indeed, 24x7 is the way to go. I have four WD drives in my main PC, all of them going strong. One of them, the WD153BA has been running practically 24x7 for almost 5 years now. Occasional bearing whine, but it's still going like the Energizer bunny.

Sadly, due to my ever expanding mp3 collection, I may have to relegate the workhorse WD153BA to my secondary PC, as I have <1% (138 MB) of free space left on the drive.

 

[Buck]

Interestingly, the PDF file I linked to, and quoted from, no longer mentions anything about credit. Where ever I looked on Seagate's website, the return/exchange process is eligible for the full five years -- no credit plans. Let's see if WD and Maxtor change with the tide.