Western Digital and Seagate Cut Hard Drive Warranties

[Ian]

If you're looking to buy a new hard drive, you might want to do it now. Both Western Digital and Seagate will shortening the warranties on their hard drives come the new year.

From The Register:

Western Digital is cutting the distribution warranty period for Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three to two years.

Channel partners have been sent a letter from SelectWD explaining this, which says Caviar Black and Scorpio Black drives will continue to enjoy a five-year warranty. We understand WD's AV drives and its external drives have unchanged warranty periods.

The SelectWD letter says:

This new warranty policy will be effective for drives shipped from January 2nd, 2012. It is important that you take a moment to update your website(s) and collateral to reflect this change for effected drives shipped after January 1st, 2012.
All drives shipped to distributors prior to Jan. 2nd 2012 will retain the current warranty terms. Because of existing inventory in the distribution channel there will be a short period of time when some drives with a 3-year warranty will be sold at the same time as drives with a 2-year warranty.

If you have any doubt about the warranty of a drive you purchased, you can go to support.wdc.com, select Warranty and RMA Services and proceed to the Warranty Check page.

The letter goes on to say: "In the near future we will be unveiling an extended warranty offering with special pricing."

[Ian]

The Register has also reported that Seagate has followed suit, cutting, in some cases, the warranty of their hard drives from 5 years down to 1 year.

Effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from a 5 year to a 3 year warranty period for Nearline drives, 5 years to 1 year for certain Desktop and Notebook Bare Drives, 5 years to 3 years on Barracuda XT and Momentus XT, and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics.

The details of the new warranty periods are:-

Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives: 3 years
Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives: 1 year
Barracuda XT: 3 years
Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm): 1 year
Momentus XT: 3 years
SV35 Series - Video Surveillance: 2 years
Pipeline HD Mini, Pipeline HD: 2 years

Mission-critical and retail products are not affected by this change. The new warranty periods will apply to shipments from 31 December.

[SithTracy]

Done with Seagate anyway, but usually only buy BLACK drives for my PC's. I do have 3TB green drive in my NAS, but no way in hell I am paying post-flood prices for another one. Because of HDD prices my planned NAS upgrade for this coming year waits for a while. Shame IBM/Hitachi drives got swallowed up by WD and Seagate took over Samsung. Our options are dwindling.

[Ian]

They must really want people to adopt SSDs.

[SithTracy]

I'm not ready for that move either. Still in their infancy in my opinion. Not even where I expected them to be.

[redk9258]

I'm sold on Samsung. Hopefully their warranty doesn't change.

[Ian]

I'm sold on Samsung. Hopefully their warranty doesn't change.

The sale of their HDD business to Seagate just went through so it will probably be a matter of time before either the brand is totally gone or their warranties match Seagates.