Seagate Technology has increased the warranty of almost all of its hard drives to five years, reversing a trend toward shorter-period warranties.
The warranties will apply to all of Seagate’s internal desktop, mobile, and enterprise hard drives that buyers purchase today, excluding external drives, Seagate executives said.
For the past year, the warranties on hard drives have actually declined, while at the same time the drives’ larger capacities have held more and more data. Meanwhile, companies like IBM have received criticism for placing limitations on the usage of drives like the DeskStar 120GXP, which was only rated for eight consecutive hours of operation per day. Hitachi took over control of IBM’s disk-drive assets in 2002.
The extended warranty will match the expected “service life” of the drive, which is also five years, Cousins said. “Service life” refers to the period in which the drive is actually used, before it becomes too small or too slow for a user and is discarded.
The drive maker will also honor the five-year warranty on older models that may be sitting on store shelves, a Seagate representative said, although the warranty was designed to be applied to drives shipping to distributors after June 1.
News source: ExtremeTech
