Seagate slashes warranties for HDDs

seagate has a love/hate relationship with its hard drive products. I can't see this helping.

seagate used to be on top, this news just makes it sadder.

maybe seagate should just build better hard drives then warranties would not cost them so much

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 .

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.

Originally posted by david100k:

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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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 !

Originally posted by snake2:

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maybe seagate should just build better hard drives then warranties would not cost them so much

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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.

Quote:

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maybe seagate should just build better hard drives then warranties would not cost them so much

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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.

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.....

Originally posted by RichardvonBacon:

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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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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.

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.

I wonder if vendors will reconsider their options for HDDs for their computer lineup, for those that use seagate.

Resellers won't change what they are doing with exception to they may sell more extended warranties now.

I never buy Seagate now less. I use WD because they still work and last longer, at least in my experience, plus the warranty is good on most of the drives. I hope no more manufacturers slashes their warranty periods.

I used to buy nothing but Seagate.
I even had their hard drive firmware bug & they were outstanding in sorting that out FOC.
But then they did an Asian flit and pulled out of Ireland & the UK, so they lost my custom.
Why should I support them if they are just going to be like anyone else making everything in Asia?

But I'd love to hear them rationalise this, how on earth does reducing your warranty cover do anything positive for your brand?
It merely tells the world you will no longer stand by your product as well as you once did.
Great, not.

I get the message (just like everyone else).

I stopped buying Seagate a couple of years ago and switched everything to Western Digital.
Never had one problem with them ever......and they are often around the cheapest anyways.

I'm just waiting on the 4tb drives to appear & be seen to be reliable for my next big buying spree.

Let me check my "dead" HD pile..I have 5 dead Seagate HDs all under 250Ghz in size.....while I have only have 2 WD HDs on the "dead" pile and both of those are over 500Ghz.....This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

Wow, what a bonehead move. People are gonna look at that with a raised brow for sure!

"If they don't trust their drives to last 5 years, why should I?"

Excellent example! :) The one and only seagate I bought, began to fail in under 30 days. Ever since that point, I've bought WD. A few Raptor problems, but it could have been the cable, so I'll never know.

Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Let me check my "dead" HD pile..I have 5 dead Seagate HDs all under 250Ghz in size.....while I have only have 2 WD HDs on the "dead" pile and both of those are over 500Ghz.....This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

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I've never had a drive rated in Ghz which is frequency. I think my microwave oven runs at a little over 2Ghz. My hard drives are all rated in GB. Maybe yours are different.

I've owned 10 WD and 10 Seagate HDD's. I've had one WD fail and 6 Seagate's fail (within the first 6 months of their operation). This is a smart business move on Seagate's part considering how much their HDDs suck.

It's not a smart move in fact it is a dumb move.

The correct move would be to correct their manufacturing problems but since they choose to build drives in countries that have big problems with quality but provide cheap labor this is a bigger issue than it should be. Basically they are in between a rock and hard place if you know what I mean. I personally would think they would send staff over seas to monitor the manufacturing process and assure that materials and processes are improved.

Originally posted by forkndave:

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Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Let me check my "dead" HD pile..I have 5 dead Seagate HDs all under 250Ghz in size.....while I have only have 2 WD HDs on the "dead" pile and both of those are over 500Ghz.....This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

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I've never had a drive rated in Ghz which is frequency. I think my microwave oven runs at a little over 2Ghz. My hard drives are all rated in GB. Maybe yours are different.

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Well Excuuuuse Me......I didn't realize I was in the presence of God..let's just say gigs...Amen.......aye Jesus?

I agree Mr Movies, that was a typical fat cat way of doing business. They lay off their own people so that they get cheap labor but do not include quality penalties in their contracts. Obviously the Asians got the better end of the contract. Now they will go by the way of the dodo birds, go slowly go out of business or get bought out by the Chinese.

Sultan, It is common to get ribbed if you say something stuid like that. forkndave didn't rub it it. I suggest you let that one lie. The members expect to see a minimul level of technical savy with its posters.

Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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..This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

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As for SSDs, sure they are very reliable if you avoid particular models from various manufacturers - again Google particular models for up-to-date info & check warranty cover - they are usually 3-years.

Most reliable and trusted being OCZ Vertex 3 currently, Crucial SSD are very fast and reliable with top CS, Corsair's Force 3 is one to avoid, but not the GTs as they use different SandForce controllers - it has been reported certain Sata cables have failed but using quality Sata-III cables have solved most issues. Intel 320's have 8MB bug which Intel are fixing, OCZs Agility has niggles and occasional BSODs. Bit of a mind-field which is why you need to research for a couple of hours or two.

Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Originally posted by forkndave:

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Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Let me check my "dead" HD pile..I have 5 dead Seagate HDs all under 250Ghz in size.....while I have only have 2 WD HDs on the "dead" pile and both of those are over 500Ghz.....This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

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I've never had a drive rated in Ghz which is frequency. I think my microwave oven runs at a little over 2Ghz. My hard drives are all rated in GB. Maybe yours are different.

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Well Excuuuuse Me......I didn't realize I was in the presence of God..let's just say gigs...Amen.......aye Jesus?

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That was just an attempt at humor which I guess didn't work. I meant no insult. I say stupid things all of the time. Even I am not perfect. (sarc) Even in "Back to the Future" they referred to "jigawatts" which I guess would be abbreviated JW rather than GW.

:D Love that movie
http://www.myfluxcapacitor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=55

Originally posted by forkndave:

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Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Originally posted by forkndave:

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Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Let me check my "dead" HD pile..I have 5 dead Seagate HDs all under 250Ghz in size.....while I have only have 2 WD HDs on the "dead" pile and both of those are over 500Ghz.....This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

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I've never had a drive rated in Ghz which is frequency. I think my microwave oven runs at a little over 2Ghz. My hard drives are all rated in GB. Maybe yours are different.

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Well Excuuuuse Me......I didn't realize I was in the presence of God..let's just say gigs...Amen.......aye Jesus?

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That was just an attempt at humor which I guess didn't work. I meant no insult. I say stupid things all of the time. Even I am not perfect. (sarc) Even in "Back to the Future" they referred to "jigawatts" which I guess would be abbreviated JW rather than GW.

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Let me just say I stand corrected....I was thinking instant coffee when the Ghz came out......sorry about the heat......

This is an unfortunate and inaccurate rumor. The rumor's wrong. Seagate consumer internal drives still all have a 5-year warranty.
- John Paulsen from Seagate

Originally posted by bigfamei:

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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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UPDATED

Seagate shuts down rumor they are slashing warranties

Originally posted by bobiroc:

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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 RMAd 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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I purchased a Seagate Expansion 2TB drive that lasted one week.
When I called Seagate technical support they told me the drive suffered from it's own inadequate power supply and offered to replace it another just like it. Duh, it is now a doorstop in my home and I'll never buy another Seagate anything!

This company used to be known for it's quality, now it's known for it's sub-standard, cheaply constructed devices and lack of consumer consideration.

Seagate is the apex of "Buyer Beware".

So did this story originate from Seagate as it had to come from somewhere, if not who was the original source?
Nice u-turn for their customers! Phew!

Originally posted by bobiroc:

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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 RMAd 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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Been buying Seagate drives for over 10 years. This adds up to over a dozen drives, all in full operation, most in 24/7 operation. In that time, I have had only one (1) drive fail. I shop Seagate first, bottomline, they work. The lower warranty may have me consider a different brand if prices are the same, but for $5-10 extra, Ill buy Seagate everytime.

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Mez

I agree Mr Movies, that was a typical fat cat way of doing business. They lay off their own people so that they get cheap labor but do not include quality penalties in their contracts.

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This little Seagate story gets even worse.

They closed the plants in Ireland to move to Malaysia, only to find that the promises of a large & technically educated workforce just waiting & raring to go turned out to be completely divorced from the reality on the ground.
They had to train a lot of people to get up & running.

They might end up spending less on wages in the long-run but it did not turn out to be as much of a huge saving as they planned & now we see quality nose-dive and their brand tanking.
Idiots.

RE: Interestx, any company that moves production from a well-established location to save on wages is shameful. You hear lots of stories of callcentres going to India, etc and eventually coming back to the UK because of the lack of skills and understanding of the market in a particular region of the world.

If production quality goes down and customer care if poor, it's both the consumer and the company that suffers. Complaints will no doubt rise and eventually they'll move back minus the love we once had for them.

Originally posted by champman:

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RE: Interestx, any company that moves production from a well-established location to save on wages is shameful. You hear lots of stories of callcentres going to India, etc and eventually coming back to the UK because of the lack of skills and understanding of the market in a particular region of the world.

If production quality goes down and customer care if poor, it's both the consumer and the company that suffers. Complaints will no doubt rise and eventually they'll move back minus the love we once had for them.

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So far as the call centers are concerned it is more a matter of accent than of intelligence.

I have lived and worked in US for quite a few years. While talking to a customer he asked me - "Do you understand English?" and my instant response was "Do you speak English?" In the early days I simply could not follow the ghetto accent nor the terminology. Over some time I became an expert. I studied and learned the so called "Queen's English" which in fact is more accurate - grammatically and phonetically than that spoken by half of the English population itself.

BTW the new call centers "returning" to UK are most likely owned by Indian IT companies.

Originally posted by forkndave:

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Originally posted by HK_Sultan:

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Let me check my "dead" HD pile..I have 5 dead Seagate HDs all under 250Ghz in size.....while I have only have 2 WD HDs on the "dead" pile and both of those are over 500Ghz.....This warranty issue will definitely sway my decision the next time I purchase a new HD.....Are SSDs worth the price? Will those SSDs go 10 years and beyond? Gal like me gotta know!

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I've never had a drive rated in Ghz which is frequency. I think my microwave oven runs at a little over 2Ghz. My hard drives are all rated in GB. Maybe yours are different.

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I have deciphered the punch-line and do see the frequency of bad Seagate HDs....Seagate=Many Ghz....I will think twice about purchasing another Seagate HD but that has all become "moot" since the 5 year warranty still exists.....that forkndave...he funny guy....me not flaming....me/LMAO

Honestly it doesn't matter to me if they have 2 or 5 year warranties, it costs much more than the price (in time and lost productivity) to have a drive fail or have to replace one during "prime" working hours that I replace every drive every 2 years. I have had drives from WD, Seagate, Hitachi, IBM(way back when)and Maxtor fail within the warranty on the drive, (if I purchased it alone) but since they were in a computer with a 1 or 2 year warranty, no such luck. I have a lot of WD and Seagate external drives and have had problems with both, a WD jsut stopped working after about a week and a 4 year old Seagate is starting to "beep" (metal on metal scraping, doesn't have a speaker). Drives are cheaper than trying to replace date, so replacing frequently and having multiple backups of external drives is the only option. Ghost and new drives are cheap insurance.

On WD, I purchased 4 of the new "My Passport" drives with the Micro USB connectors, all of them had bad connectors and they sent me new drives, not passports, Elements, with the mini USB connectors. No problems with thoses. I hope they aren't getting cheap FoxCon parts like almost all the computer "manufacturers" who have outsourced manufacturing to Foxcon. It is to the point that Dell, HP, Lenove, Asus and Apple are just resellers, Foxcon is the manufacturer. And they do a pretty poor job of it. Quality on notebook computers has been dropping for several years and appears to be related to outsourcing. Unfortunately, everyone does it, so there is pretty much no choice but to buy a Foxcon POS.

There aren't many moving parts in a computer, the fans (CPU and Power supply for a desktop), CD/DVD drive and Hard Drive. Those are the things that fail most, unless you overclock and cook the computer.

I have 6 Seagate SV (surveilance Video quality 500GB Hdd's & two (nothing but trouble) AS 500GB cheapo Seagate drives, which I bought from Overclockers in Staffordshire (Stoke). These have repeatedly died, and slowed my system down, despite me sending them back to Seagate - I'm not terribly impressed with Overclockers either, but thats another story (the RMA procedure sucks) - I use Novatech (near where I live) now, and am 110% happy - they even repaired a VGA Monitor that was a month over warranty expiry, thats what I call great customer service. The SV drives reall are great, and worth the extra 30% asking price for 24/7 reliability. I also have two Samsung Spinrights 1TB, and these are faultless too!