Have you been talking about starting up a RAID formation for the last few months? Or maybe you are getting tired of your 20 Gig capacity. Times are tight, and so is money, but let’s face it you’ve been putting it off. It’s probably time to buy.
On October 1st, Western Digital and Maxtor, (in totally unrelated moves of course), are dropping the majority of their hard drive lines down to 1 year warranty. For Western Digital, only their Caviar Special Edition will maintain a 3 year warranty. For Maxtor, Only the Maxline II and Atlas line will maintain a longer warranty. The majority of over-the-counter drives will run with the 1 year warranty.
It’s the inevitable march of time. If you bought a desktop computer 12 years ago, you probably received a comfortable warranty of up to 5 years. If you upgraded 7 years ago, you probably noticed that the warranty had dropped to 3 years. If you bought another within the last several years, you were probably a little skeptical about the 1 year warranty you were blessed with.
The natural inclination is to think that the hardware manufacturers are getting a little lazy with their construction. Maybe you’re right. More likely though, manufacturers noticed the bottom line. As the technologies improved, and ran faster and hotter, it became far less profitable to keep a longer warranty. That 486 in your closet probably still runs, but do you honestly believe that your 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 is going to repeat that longevity? A quick look at a warranty bathtub curve can reveal manufacturers’ reasoning. After a certain length of time the chances of a breakdown become far higher, and continue to rise over time. Their crew tries to figure out the exact last moment that they can end the warranty and still have high profit levels. All of this without putting off the consumers with a backlash of angry people not buying their product because it has the shortest warranty.
So, the big question is, will an 80 GB hard drive bought on the 12th of November really break down faster than one bought tomorrow? Of course not, but it will have one-third of the warranty.
