Seagate Proposes 5 Year Warranty for Hard Disk Drives

Hoping to draw users to its storage devices Seagate today now offers a 5 year warranty for hard drives. The average hard drive warranty is around two to three years. How long till other hard drive manufactures start to offer a similar deal?

Seagate Technology, one of the world's largest storage companies, Monday announced it had introduced a 5-year warranty, effective immediately, on every Seagate internal PC, notebook and enterprise hard drive shipped through its distribution and retail channels throughout the world. Virtually all makers of hard disk drives have shrunk the warranty on HDDs intended to personal computers from three years to one since 2002. The majority of hard disks aimed at consumer PCs shipping today come with one year limited warranty, which does not satisfy some customers, who want to have more reliable storage for their data.

Manufacturers of storage devices cited the absence of necessity for three year warranties back in 2002 and 2003, claiming that potentially faulty hard disk drives would become malfunction throughout the first year of use. At the same time they said that shortened warranties are likely to reduce the support cost, which may have an effect on HDD pricing. Three well-known companies – IBM, Quantum and Fujitsu – either sold or just suspended their HDD business in 2002. In the mid- and late-nineties a number of other companies, such as Conner, also either ceased to exist or shelved storage businesses.

View: Seagate Press Release