FORUMS
PRICEWATCH
VIDEOS
Seagate and Western Digital cut HDD warranties
Reported by Dean Wilson on Tuesday, December 20 2011 12:47 am
Seagate and Western Digital are cutting their warranties for hard disk drives as demand and prices soar following extensive flooding for months in Thailand.
Seagate and Western Digital are cutting their warranties for hard disk drives as demand and prices soar following extensive flooding for months in Thailand.
Seagate is chopping its warranty period from five years to three years on its Nearline, Baraccuda XT and Momentus XT drives, from five years to two years on consumer electronics, and from five years to just one paltry year on a number of desktop and notebook bare drives.
Western Digital is cutting its warranty from three years to two for its Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives.
The Seagate changes will take effect from 31 December, while the Western Digital ones will come into play on 2 January.
The cynical among us might wonder if the manufacturers intend to put inferior components that are more likely to break down in their next batches of hard drives in order to bump up production to deal with the supply crisis, and that this is why the warranties are being butchered.
However, it is far more likely that they simply don't want to have to replace old hard drives right now when they desperately need to provide new ones to consumers and PC manufacturers to address the market drought.
The question, of course, is whether or not they will increase the warranty periods to what they were when supply returns to normal, and if this could become a selling point for some rival brands that keep their warranty periods intact.
The lower warranties will likely only add to the problems facing the HDD market and push more people to buy SSDs instead.
Source: Tech Report
ARTICLE NAVIGATOR
