Hard drive vendors reduce warranties

September 27, 2002, 09:53 AM —  ARNnet — 

Hard drive manufacturers Maxtor Corp., Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp. have colluded to reduce the duration of their warranties on desktop models from three years to 12 months.

As of October 1, resellers and systems integrators that offer two and three-year warranties with their machines to differentiate themselves from their competitors will have to make some tough choices. Either they will have to drop their warranties to one year to follow the market trend, or they will have to source higher value hard drives that still carry three-year warranties and raise the price of their machines.

The manufacturers and many of their distributors in Australia are defending the decision based on several assumptions. The first is that hard drive reliability has improved to the point where a three-year warranty is no longer a necessity. The second is that most hard drives that do fail will do so within the first few months of purchase. The third assumption is that many, if not most, other PC components only carry one-year warranties, so standardizing on a one-year warranty makes the service of the whole computer inherently more manageable. Finally, the decision is designed to suit the larger tier-one PC vendors that only offer a one-year warranty on their low-end desktop models.

But these assumptions have been questioned by several distributors and systems integrators, who now have to reassess their business models to ensure the financial stability of their vendor partners.

The first assumption, that hard drive reliability has improved, is beyond doubt. Vendors have been claiming for some time that the products have become much more reliable. Seagate's general manager of sales and marketing for South Asia, Robert Yang, claims failure rates of hard drives have come down to around 1 percent. Distributors are also reporting a reduced level of stock returns.

But according to recent consumer surveys, the hard drive still remains one of the more problematic components of a desktop PC in terms of reliability. The Australian Consumer Association's recent report into reliability claims that 8 percent of laptop owners and 10 percent of desktop owners have had to repair their hard drives in the last 12 months. Tim Davoren, business development manager for Bluechip Infotech (Servex), said that while the quality of hard drives is improving, they are still quite prone to failure. He doubts that the quality factor is the sole motivator behind the manufacturers' decisions to pull the three-year warranty. "I'd bet my house that if you ship out 50 drives, one will fail within six months," he said.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly

claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century

pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?

sjvn
64-bits of protection?

jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith

mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace