Seagate & Western Digital cutting hard drive warranties in 2012

[LionRed]

I still have a couple 40 GB I use for OS install (backups), one 80gb, 4 320GB (but one 320 sob died last night after a power outage).

If/when a HD dies I will rma it...if it is still under warranty (sometimes they send you a bigger drive in return).

They (a company) tried to do this lowering before (some years back) and people stopped buying the drives from the company. They ended up putting 5yrs back on the products.

Funny how the HD companies are dropping the warranty to 3yrs at relatively the same time. Perhaps they negotiated to do this together?

I don't really care...companies rule the world now.

[Mayoo]

Originally Posted by LaughingCrow

Seagate and Western Digital cutting hard drive warranties in 2012 | The Verge

Reading the replies is funny, everyone seems to take SSD for storage drives ... amateurs rofl.

Although this is indeed a bad news. Most of the drives that are sold are those they mentioned. Not everyone wants or needs black disks. I just hope this gets resolved soon. I want more storage on my PC but won't pay the current prices.

Gossip: Did I just saw 64Gb RAM on the G.SKILL ad?!? Who the hell needs that?

[Painbringer71]

A little off topic but I am confused I was looking into getting another drive to close match my current hard drive. I have a WD black 7200 32MB 640 Gig. ( I love it) So the closest I could find is a 750 gig which would work fine for my use. I paid probable around $60.00 for the 640 gig on sale over a year ago. I was astonished to see the pricing at newegg which I shop all the time. (see the below links for an example) I even took the time to call Newegg to tell them something must be wrong. I stayed on hold for 10 minutes and finally talked to a human. I informed them that the pricing on many of the black drives do not seem in line with their competition. The rep on the phone basically blew me off and said that’s our price. What the hell is going on with the drives????

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4538820&CatId=2459

$75.98

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136283

$179.99

[Mayoo]

My quick guess: Tiger is out of stock (shows in red on their page). They will get their prices as high as Newegg when they get stocks, in about 2 or 3 decades ;)

[Soultribunal]

Originally Posted by Painbringer71

A little off topic but I am confused I was looking into getting another drive to close match my current hard drive. I have a WD black 7200 32MB 640 Gig. ( I love it) So the closest I could find is a 750 gig which would work fine for my use. I paid probable around $60.00 for the 640 gig on sale over a year ago. I was astonished to see the pricing at newegg which I shop all the time. (see the below links for an example) I even took the time to call Newegg to tell them something must be wrong. I stayed on hold for 10 minutes and finally talked to a human. I informed them that the pricing on many of the black drives do not seem in line with their competition. The rep on the phone basically blew me off and said that’s our price. What the hell is going on with the drives????

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4538820&CatId=2459

$75.98

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136283

$179.99

Short version.
The Newegg cost is because of the flooding in Thailand.
The TD cost is because its OOS and when it comes back into stocking levels the price will be adjust accordingly.

All HDD pricing across the board is up.

-ST

[le2key]

Originally Posted by AkG

OR how about
"margins are so thin and we have ZERO stock right now that we can not afford a 5 year warranty..but for a small fee we will provide you with a 5 year warranty". This happens every so often and if you feel the need for a 5 year warranty either get the extended or buy a WD Black (and pay the fee that is built into their prices). In a year or three things will go back to 3-5 yr warranties. Nothing new under the sun. Same old same old.

To be honest, how often do most peeps RMA a drive? I usually buy and replace my hdds LONG before they die...as a drive 2-3 years old is a) a SLOW drive and b) a SMALL drive. SSD for OS...and HDD for data means that a short warranty to cover the zinger DOA (or soon after) drives is plenty.

i would think that a lot of people RMA their drives on a regular basis, i'm willing to bet that HDD are one of the most RMA'd comp products. i mean at least it's a big enough issue for them to cut down the warranty isn't it?

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by le2key

i would think that a lot of people RMA their drives on a regular basis, i'm willing to bet that HDD are one of the most RMA'd comp products. i mean at least it's a big enough issue for them to cut down the warranty isn't it?

motherboards/memory get rma'd far more often than hdds

[Panzerfaust]

I wonder when the hard disk prices will return to normal

[Birk]

about 6 months after the cost to make them drops again, that way they can milk this cash cow as long as possible.

[frontier204]

I'm up for someone releasing extremely slow 250 GB SSDs (e.g. cheap USB key speeds) for storage. I know a lot of embedded systems would like this (e.g. you have a 300 MHz ARM as your processor so who cares about 100MB / s write speeds).
If WD / Seagate keep the prices high they'll eventually creep further into competition with SSDs. I know $ / storage space is still on the side of the HDD but with recent price increases you may consider an older design SATA 3 Gb/s 80-120GB SSD vs. a 500GB hard drive for a boot drive now.