I found out this morning that if you pry up on a hard drive platter with a screwdriver that it explodes into shrapnel from very fine dust to large enough to pierce your skin and cause a little bleeding. heh

I hope breathing in that stuff doesn't kill me. :(

I never understood the appeal of HDD lengthy warranties. HDDs will be obsolete long before they fail, unless you got a dud or treat them like crap. Furthermore, the odds are that by the time you get near the five year mark. The vendor in question will no longer have any stock of your HDD model.

If you want to at least protect your HDD data from hardware failure. Look no further than setting up a RAID 1 and surge protector.

The company stresses that it still wants to offer "the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere," but it claims 95% of returns take place within the first three years after a drive purchase, anyway.

If Seagate's hard drives were truely reliable, then wouldn't 5 year warranty's simply be a gimmick?

Meh. This will make little difference in my hard drive purchase decisions or recommendations. I've never really understood why people have been so enthusiastic about Seagate's 5 year warranty; from the get-go it seemed to be more of a marketing gimmick to me. I care a lot more about how reliable the drive is than warranty length, and quite frankly I don't think Seagate is any better than the competition in this regard.

After 3 years, you can buy a drive with several times the capacity and better performance, for less than you paid for the original one. Or replace it with a spare drive retired from another system. Most of the value of a hard drive warranty is indeed in the first 3 years, since that covers the period of time where the drive itself is actually still worth something.

(And as an aside, IMO Hitachi makes the most reliable drives these days... they've been top of my short list for a few years now, even though their warranty is "only" three years.)

100 ;)

So, they'll now escape the liabilities of one in twenty of their returns from this change.

Thank you, Seagate, for deciding that accounting is how to make a profit. Watch fondly as I and doubtless signifant numbers of others change all drive purchases over to Western Digital, now. Especially considering that the quality and performance of your drives has declined, recently.

i have WDC 20GB hdds that are 2001 eara still running. The last WDC drive I had fail was a 13GB one where the casting was weak and flexed when it was installed in a case. currently using drives that range from 200GB up to 1TB.......

with the recent issues regarding Seagates 1.5TB drives, I will stay away from them.

This is a sad SAD day. At this point, F***K Seagate !

After the 1.5TB fiasco, and now this sad news, Seagate is no longer special. In fact, they pretty much lost the only thing they still had going for them.

I will still hunt for 5 year warranties and so far it looks like WD black line is what fits my needs.

Adi

Precisely why I switched all my (mostly WD) drives to Seagate, Now, it's back to WD. Way to go, Seagate bean counter, you just gave WD the best Xmas present.

BTW, their claim most drives fail in first three years is crap, if it were true, why bother to change the 5 yr policy?

Maybe WD will switch to 5 yr warranty and capitalize on the Seagate blunder. :)

here is the brake down of what drives will have what warranty... not too much is going to keep the 5 year....

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assista...

Seagate’s leadership in product quality and reliability has given it an edge in offering customers better value when they need it. Seagate’s current 5-year limited warranty will remain in place for consumer retail products as well as for enterprise-class hard drives, and we will now provide our distributor customers with a 3-year limited warranty for all other hard drives. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by offering a 3-year warranty (which Seagate believes is more in line with the rest of the industry), we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs. The 3-year limited warranty on notebook, desktop and consumer electronics bare drives offers new advantages and enhancements to the business proposition for our channel customers while improving cost efficiencies for Seagate. We expect little, if any change for consumers – since hard drives used in computer systems other devices are covered by the individual manufacturer’s warranty.

Seagate has been going down the tubes for a while now and has given me plenty of time to start the transition to WD.

I haven't had any reliability issues from either camp (within reason) but seagate has been falling behind in pretty much all categories. The only thing they seem to keep on top of is capacities, though I hear the 1.5TB wasn't kind to early adopters.

Does anyone here actually keep a drive more than a couple years anyway?

Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shiat. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your data's sake, for your pr0n's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from Western Digital.

i still got an operational seagate 480MB drive in the 486 mail stamp machine in my office. Its on 24hours a days, the only time its been off was during a blackout we had last year. The machine itself has no more operation fans, even the PSU fan failed (but the PSU still works fine, and doesnt get hot). its filled up with dust, and still works perfectly fine.

the only thing they have to fear is SSD itself.

I've switched to WD. There was a time when I would not consider anything but Seagate, but not now. I hope they get their game back.

BOOOOOO!!!! HISS!!! BOOOO!!!! **throws Styrofoam cup**

While Western Digital may have a shorter warranty, I have found their drives to be extremely reliable. In fact, I have never had one fail, even after 5+ years of use. I haven't bought a non-WD drive in about 6-7 years because of this. I'm actually still running a PATA WD caviar 80GB from 5-6 years ago (in addition to a 3-4 year old 250GB WD caviar)

I had some really bad experiences with Maxtors and IBMs in the late 90s/early 2000s, with drives actually failing in less than a year in some cases. That being said, I've never owned a single seagate drive so I can't comment on their reliability. As they say "If it ain't broke don't fix it"

and no..I don't work for WD :p

"After four and a half years of offering five-year warranties..." they noticed something?

So...it's *not* because the drives don't last 5 years? :p

Thanks Seagate for making up the decision for me to stick with WD black series with a five year warranty.

Oh well. At least before the warranty could be counted in Seagate's favor in a tradeoff with speed/noise/power draw/whatever, now they need to compete without that and that's not good for Seagate :p I also suspect it was part of the reason WD gave the Caviar Black a 5 year warranty aside from it being ostensibly an 'enterprise' line.

I wonder though if they even make more on retail box HDs or is it just more markup in the distribution chain?

Wow!
Seagate became awesome for a while, got a good name, squandered it by slowly inching to higher prices, ruined their silent drive reputation, lost the speed crown and the reliability crown - now the 5 year bonus is gone.

I see no reason to buy their drives anymore, WD have completely taken over now for the enthusiast :(
Well at least Seagate is still my second choice, and to think I swore by them for so many years in a row was impressive.

soo, the only reasons I really bought seagate over western digital is because of the 5 year warranty, and that they have two facilities here in MN so kind of a local pride thing goin.

with out the warranty I dont think I would really have a problem with buying a hard drive from any one else...

im not really a fanboy, i would never say that one companies hard drives are better and that you should always buy from them, but until now i had real reasons to stick with seagate.

let me just pull out my card here and hop on over to newegg.....

Shock. It's called 'spinning rust' for a reason..

Well, the biggest reason to purchase Seagate over Western Digital will be gone for me. I'll choose based on performance and noise levels instead.

I was willing to pay an extra $10 for Seagate's extra two years.

Not again.

Well, it is in line with industry offerings, but that's why we all liked the 5 year warranty, it was BETTER than industry offerings.