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It is a sure sign of the times as we see many SSDs reaching the five year warranty mark, all the while hard drive warranties are being cut from five years to a year.
Following this tend of increasing SSD warranty periods, Seagate and Western Digital have slashed warranties on many of their most popular HDDs. According to PC World, the warranty for bare Seagate hard drives has plummeted from five years all the way down to a paltry one year of coverage.
Even Seagates’ newly released second generation Momentus XT, which has seen favorable reviews as a high capacity alternative to SSDs, has had a modest warranty cut, being trimmed down from five years to three.
This couldn’t come at a worse time for the magnetic storage industry, as prices have been rising steadily for quite some time now due to the flooding in Thailand. This news simply adds fuel to the fire, giving consumers yet another incentive to avoid mechanical hard drives. It’s interesting that both companies are downsizing their warranties at around the same time, and in doing so, potentially implicating their common manufacturing difficulties as the cause (though a WD representative expressly denied that the flooding of facilities was a major contributing factor).
Seagate seems to be the more extreme of the two companies, as the warranty reductions span across their entire consumer product line. Western Digital, on the other hand, has taken a more conservative path, with the warranty change only affecting its lower end products. Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, and Velociraptor drives will all retain five year coverage.
The saga continues, and as we roll into the next year, it seems the storage market it set to face sweeping and long lasting changes which can only benefit potential buyers of SSDs. Keep an eye on those prices people!
Talk about shooting themselves in the foot! I would think this would be a time when they would want to do all they could to keep the HDD users and future users. It’s like they are helping consumers make the move over to SSD’s.
You will see warranty reduction on SSD as well.
I am not sure as the warranty reduction on hard drives is the result of a specific occurrence whereas this leaves the SSD industry pretty much unaffected. The raising of SSD warranties is actually in tune with their lifespan and reliability and one might have suggested that five years warranties should have been there initially. AS far as SSD shortcomings, there is every reason to believe that will live a VERY long and happy life if they make it through the initial break in period where, traditionally, firmware shortcomings have existed.