Western Digital and Seagate, two of the companies which supply the largest number of hard drives for the majority of the computer companies, will reduce the warranty for their products. The companies stated that by reducing the warranty period, they will be able to invest in areas that required innovation. However, they did not specify the areas where these companies need innovation.
Western Digital will reduce its warranties for the Caviar Green, Caviar Blue, and Scorpio Blue hard drives. Instead of three years, they will have warranty for two years. The company stated that the new warranty was caused by the floods in Thailand. The floods managed to cause lots of damage to the factories which manufactured the hard drives. The company stated that by reducing the warranty, it will be able to improve the support, the technologies, and the reliability of the products. However, that is all the company stated.
Seagate And Western Digital To Reduce Warranty (Source: hardwarecanucks.com)
Seagate made a much harsher change. Instead of five years, the internal desktop and laptop hard drives will have a warranty of one year. The hybrid hard drives which are a combination between the regular hard drives and the solid state disk ones, will have a warranty of three years, instead of five years. The warranties for the external hard drives will remain the same in the case of both companies. Seagate did not mention if the changes were made because of the recent floods.
Steve Duplessie, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group stated that it is very likely that this was the reason for the warranty reduction, as the move is very unusual. He stated that the two companies cannot afford fixing things because they do not have the necessary components. As a result, they can only sell things, as they cannot afford offering their services for free. He stated that the move is very bad for the consumer, but it is something which the companies need to do, otherwise they would be in lots of financial problems. He stated that they would be destroyed by Wall Street if they would have not made these changes. Seagate will start applying the changes starting with Dec. 31, whereas Western Digital will make them starting with January 2.
Seagate And Western Digital To Reduce Warranty (Source: upload.wikimedia.org)
The hard drives bought prior to these periods will have the same warranty as before. It is believed that because of these changes, the purchase of these components will increase a lot this week.
I did not expect such a move. This means that reliability will drop in time, just to boost sales. The recent prices of hard drives, the shortages and everything will only hurt the market, and the end user will not benefit of anything.
Maybe it’s time cloud storage accelerates the rate at which it’s being implemented.