WD and Seagate cut back drive warranties

[VJ]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/15/wd_warranty_period_cuts/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/16/seagate_cutting_warranties/

Seagate even goes as low as 1 year...

[degrub]

i expect it is as much for accounting purposes this year and next as anything.

[Evildead666]

I read that seagate and Western digital are going to drop some drives down to 1 year.

It was mainly explained as a cost cutting measure, to put more cash into R&D.

[VJ]

Yes, that seems most likely, but it does not really boast confidence. The Thailand floods may also have to do with it: they need to rebuild/repair factories and have less income. Add to that that there are only two players on the market, and I wonder if this will not evolve into a kartel.

I always tried to get disks with 3-5 year warranty, just to have more peace of mind....

I also wonder how this ties in with the mandatory 2 year warranty in EU?

[degrub]

Well it can be convenient to meet only the least common denominator = 2yrs.

[MultimediaMan]

We got the bulletin from most of our OEM Suppliers about disk shortages in general.

We buy our non-warranty replacement disks by the pallette: The out of the box warranties are going to be 1-2 years, but you can purchase an up to 5 year warranty with most SKUs.

[The PIT]

Sounds like they expecting a rush of failures. I wonder if this is due to fabs not being quite so clean after the floods.

[MultimediaMan]

No, they are increasing their margins... most drives are OBF or near OBF (within a couple of months).

The plant repairs won't take that long... however, the plant upgrades/ relocations are going to take a long time... there is no way their boards of directors or their underwriters are going to tolerate a recurrance of this travesty: they probably known for years which fabs were vulnerable to floods. I guarantee embankments built around them in the short term, and some of them relocated to less flood-prone locations.

By cutting back their warranties, and offering warranty extensions for a fee, that is a revenue generator, and hedges longer term residual losses (like customers warrantying a drive on the last day).

They've basically gone into the insurance sales business with their own product.

[The PIT]

Only if all companies do it. Otherwise it looks like their products are not as good and are more prone to failure. So people shop elsewhere. However consumer choice is shrinking so they can get away with it.