
Seagate now offer only one year warranties on some HDD's - osivertsson
http://www.techpowerup.com/156962/Seagate-Take-A-Leaf-Out-Of-WD-s-Book-Offer-Crummy-ONE-YEAR-Warranties-On-Some-HDD-s.html
======
Lazare
A while back I bought six 1TB Seagate Baracudas.

Every single drive failed within the warranty period; I RMAed them and got
replacements. Every single replacement drive failed too. I RMAed a couple of
them, and their _REPLACEMENTS_ have now failed. I believe that's a 233%
failure rate, and it would probably have been higher if I hadn't given up and
just bought new (non-Seagate) drives. And before you ask - all drives were
used normally in desktop machines, and they were kept cool[1].

I have no idea how widespread my experience was, but I've heard rumours of
very high failure rates in some models of their 1TB drives. If so, I can
understand them wanting to protect themselves from a repeat in the future.

[1]: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/hard-drive-
temperat...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/hard-drive-temperatures-
be-afraid.html)

~~~
biturd
I read that heat has yet to be proven to detriment a drive's life or
performance within reason. Sure, 5000 degrees would be bad, but there
apparently is no evidence that cooling drives matters.

I can't source the article, but seem to recall is was google related with the
data coming from their experience with drives in their data centers. It
possibly could have come from BackBlaze, though that is a distant second.

I used to run a small ISP, and found that I had a 10% failure rate on average
of anything, before it was even used. Order 100 new servers, 10 will be dead
on arrival. Order 1000 drives, 100 will be DOA. 100 network cables, all will
work, that was about the only deviation.

With drives, the failure rates were better, however, I never allowed drives to
be put into use that were not internally "certified". I would use SoftRAID,
which is a Macintosh application, though I am sure there are equivalent on
Linux and Windows. While this is nothing more than software RAID for the Mac,
many of my servers were not Macintosh. I didn't use the RAID capacity of the
software, rather using the drive certification feature instead. It takes about
8 hours per 1TB drive to "certify" it. This will run through every sector on
the drive, and make sure it is ok. The softwares ability to "predict" that a
drive was about to fail, or susceptible to failure, was very good. I would
never use a drive that didn't pass.

One handy feature which I did run on non servers with the software, is that it
can monitor the drive and tell me that is suspects failure to be imminent.
This is not SMART, though SMART was a first line test, the software went
deeper and logged aspects of the drive over time.

Once I started doing this, drive failure went to near nothing. I can't really
measure failure in percentage or time, as we would outgrow the capacity of the
drive, or the server would be taken out of commission for a faster server
before a failure ever happened. Those drives were then given to friends or
sold. As a result, we never had an in use failure once we started using this
method of testing. 42U worth of server space, with a mix of 1U, 2U, 4U, and a
few 6U NAS's, plus switching gear.

Do keep in mind, we were a small local ISP, and could take the time to perform
these tests. Someone like BackBlaze has their system created in a way to deal
with failure as part of the operation, and it would be a waste of time to
perform these tests.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Thanks for sharing your story, and an upvote for all the details. But don't
you think it's a little bit dishonest to sell perfectly healthy drives that
you knew to be on the verge of failure?

~~~
Kliment
The way I read it, they sold the healthy drives that they had outgrown and
needed to replace for operational rather than technical reasons.

------
toyg
That's technically illegal in the EU, where two-year warranties on electronics
are compulsory. This means EU resellers and OEMs will have to be responsible
for that second year, or drop Seagate.

~~~
orijing
That's interesting. Do you have a reference?

~~~
latch
The comments on this thread (from yesterday) along with the original article
should prove fruitful: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395577>

------
Intermediate
Nothing unpredictable here. There are less than three HDD manufacturers left
(do you still count Toshiba as HDD vendor?), so what do you expect? No real
competition == (no customer care && no discounts && poor quality of goods)

------
yason
I've been thinking about buying an external hard drive but having some vague
idea about the current failure rates, I concluded that, for my data storage
needs, the new disks will be practically useless for me without RAID-1. The
external disk will store my media and backup my local files already, so I
don't want to have a backup of a backup.

This means I'd have to upgrade the disks of my external RAID-1 unit instead,
but my old unit only supports 500GB disks officially.

Looks like it's going to be expensive.

For reference, I still had some IDE (EIDE?) harddrives manufactured in the
90's that spun up without a glitch a few years ago when I still had an old
desktop box with the appropriate controllers. Ditto for some early-90's SCSI
drives that I turned on in the early 2000's, they worked just fine.

I would trade some speed and silence for a lot more robust platters that I
could actually trust.

------
ComputerGuru
I just had the most pleasant experience RMAing a Western Digital 2TB hd. I
purchased it while on a trip overseas a year ago, and I fully expected to be
SOL when it began clicking for no reason (it's been a fixture on my desk and
most certainly hasn't been dropped).

Lo and behold, a Google search for "WD RMA" took me to their website where
they asked for the serial number. It immediately showed it as being purchased
"out of region" and "not covered by warranty," except "replacement only."

I wasn't sure I read that right, but I entered my CC details and two days
later I had a new drive at my door. Thank you, WD.

~~~
pdubs
To be fair, Seagate's RMA process is similarly painless. The reason I've
bought Seagates and WDs is for the warranties and I've had to RMA both brands;
both were easy and didn't try to give me the runaround at any point in the
process.

If Seagate is only offering 1-year warranties it's simple; I just won't buy
Seagate. It really doesn't matter to me.

~~~
Silhouette
The trouble I have with the whole warranty idea for hard drives is that the
real value in such devices is the data on them, not the mechanics. I'm trying
to think of any hard drive that I or any of my businesses have owned in the
past decade or more that could reasonably have been returned under warranty
other than for being DOA, given the amount of sensitive data that would have
been stored on each of them with even a few weeks of use. The only ones I can
think of where it would be acceptable (or, indeed, legal) are the company ones
that are in a fully encrypted RAID array, which was an experiment we probably
won't repeat because of the horrendous performance hit we see on that
particular NAS box.

In this sort of context, I wonder how much all these extended warranties were
ever really worth. Do some businesses just return failed drives as a matter of
procedure, without regard to the possibility of commercially sensitive data
leaking because it was still readable with patience and/or the right
equipment? Do home users return drives under warranty without realising that
all those juicy bank details in their personal accounts spreadsheet might
still be accessible to someone who gets hold of the physical drive later, and
that such a person might just be buying these things thousands at a time in
some foreign country with no goal other than to harvest things like bank
details that can be sold?

~~~
pdubs
Seagate wipes the drives they get returned [1]. I imagine other companies have
similar processes.

[1][http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-
US&name=...](http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-
US&name=data_overwriting&vgnextoid=f52d29e293eae110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD)

~~~
Silhouette
I appreciate the effort they go to, and perhaps for typical home users they
might consider it an acceptable risk. However, for my business dealings,
Seagate's statement there has limited value, because I still have to release
the faulty drive into some sort of postal/courier system with any retrievable
data intact and trust that it reaches Seagate to be securely wiped. Unless
they provide a specialist collection service with the appropriate
certifications that they have taken responsibility for destroying the drive
securely, nothing that only kicks in when something reaches them via a third
party is likely to be an acceptable risk if you're dealing with data
protection for credit card data, medical records, etc.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Why aren't you encrypting?

~~~
Silhouette
As I mentioned before, in some cases, we do. Obviously if you're dealing with,
say, sensitive customer data like card numbers or any sort of legally
privileged information, then you have to have robust security in place across
the board.

More often, in the particular cases I'm familiar with, we're talking about
commercially sensitive information, where we have to weigh up the costs of
complete end-to-end encryption by default against the loss of productivity
that results when things like big network file transfers slow way down. In a
self-funded small company, with limited staff time and limited cash, total
encryption is not always the answer.

For example, I think you can reasonably have a policy that encryption of any
removable media is required but anything screwed into a rack in the office is
biased toward performance, and in fact that is basically what we do in most
cases. But it does limit the value of the kinds of warranties we're talking
about, because we're not going to just hand over a hard drive that has
probably had sensitive company documents on it to some random delivery
service.

Similarly, from a personal point of view, I don't consider theft of my home
computers to be a very high risk, so I don't routinely encrypt all the hard
drives, even though I have some potentially sensitive data like downloaded
bank statements and bills on there. Instead, I expect to keep the hard drives
for a relatively long time anyway, and then have them securely wiped/destroyed
when they are too old/broken to be useful any more.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying these choices are anyone's problem but my
own. I accept the cost of the occasional hard drive failure as a natural
consequence of these policies. I'm just saying that it means hard drive
manufacturers' long-term warrantes are effectively not worth anything to me or
the companies I run. I suspect that in practice plenty of other people/small
businesses follow similar procedures, and therefore the warranties probably
aren't worth much to them either.

------
dotBen
Timing also seems opportunistic here too. Hard drive scarcity has increased
due to the floods and subsequent production issues in Thailand.

In addition to raising prices, like you would in a traditional supply/demand
model, this would seem to be a good time to increasing the favorability of
warranty terms to the manufacturer given that they're no longer racing to the
bottom on price margins with their competitors.

------
jjm
I bought Maxtor back in the day because of their customer service. I also
recommended them to everyone I knew. Without at least good customer service I
don't know what I'll do. I would pay $200+ for a 250-500GB if I knew the thing
would absolutely not fail within 3, maybe 4 years with high usage.

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961110081033/http://www.maxtor....](http://web.archive.org/web/19961110081033/http://www.maxtor.com/ss.html#No%20Quibble)

------
nwmcsween
I've vowed to never buy seagate after going though 4 RMA's on 4 hard drives on
a raid 10 array that failed one after the other within a month time frame.
After talking to a service rep about how the _new_ hard drives were failing
within A DAY of use I was told 'rma'ed drives are recertified and cannot be
bad' and thus was my fault. If you value your data or your time do not buy
seagate, at least in my experience.

------
caycep
the totally nonscientific, based on anecdote, word for a number of years
(since they acquired maxtor) is that seagate drives - fast but crap for
reliability. which is bad since samsung drives have been reasonably good but
just got acquired by them...oh well, back to hitachi.

~~~
miahi
"Back to Hitachi" is now "back to WD".

------
g3orge
I don't know about the warranties, but Seagate is my favorite manufacturer of
HDDs and SSDs. I haven't had a single failure yet.

------
martin1b
Yep. Even Seagate thinks their products suck. I agree.

------
maeon3
Seagate failure rate is ridiculous. Just do a google search for " seagate
drive failure rates" for proof. I bought a 256 GB Seagate barracuda back in
the day and one morning it just spit read write errors after maybe 3 years of
heavy use. I only buy western digital now. ive never seen one fail. If you
have a Seagate then keep automated backups or you'll be sorry.

~~~
pdubs
That may be a bit of confirmation bias. Google's massive hard drive study [1]
states that there was no significant difference in failure by manufacturer.

[1]<http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf>

