Thursday, December 15th 2011
WD Slashes HDD Warranties By A Third – But You Can Buy Them Back
Way back in 2008, we reported that Seagate was lowering warranties of its hard disk drives from 5 years to 3. This trend quickly spread throughout the HDD industry and unsurprisingly, wasn't something that customers were too happy about. Now, Western Digital is lowering the warranty on some of its HDD lines from 3 years to a mere 2, with the affected lines being the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue. Lines not affected are the Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, A/V drives and externals. Also, as the stock feeds through the channel, there will be a transition period where the same model in a store will have either a 2 or 3 year warranty, depending on its serial number, which can be checked on WD's support site. It will be interesting to see if retailers will clearly differentiate to customers which drives have which warranty, as it might be rather convenient for them not to.
Channel partners have received a letter from SelectWD about this:
So now, hard drive prices are very high across the board due to the Thailand flooding, which will be compounded by rubbish warranties that one can "buy back" the missing period by giving WD even more money. Does anyone sense a money grab here? It would be surprising if Seagate didn't follow WD's lead on warranties. SSDs are looking more attractive every day, aren't they?
Source:
The Register
Channel partners have received a letter from SelectWD about this:
This new warranty policy will be effective for drives shipped from January 2nd, 2012. It is important that you take a moment to update your website(s) and collateral to reflect this change for effected drives shipped after January 1st, 2012.The letter goes on to say "In the near future we will be unveiling an extended warranty offering with special pricing." At this time, there's no explanation why WD is reducing its warranty term.
All drives shipped to distributors prior to Jan. 2nd 2012 will retain the current warranty terms. Because of existing inventory in the distribution channel there will be a short period of time when some drives with a 3-year warranty will be sold at the same time as drives with a 2-year warranty.
If you have any doubt about the warranty of a drive you purchased, you can go to support.wdc.com, select Warranty and RMA Services and proceed to the Warranty Check page.
So now, hard drive prices are very high across the board due to the Thailand flooding, which will be compounded by rubbish warranties that one can "buy back" the missing period by giving WD even more money. Does anyone sense a money grab here? It would be surprising if Seagate didn't follow WD's lead on warranties. SSDs are looking more attractive every day, aren't they?
50 Comments on WD Slashes HDD Warranties By A Third – But You Can Buy Them Back
saved money is made money
and it seems that cheaper drives and low power drives has shorter warranty than the more performance orientations ones, makes sense as they are cheaper!
btw after law in norway you have 2 years mandatory rma on all electronics and on mobile phones and cars we have 5 years
When a company shortens the warranty on their products, it means two things to me: their quality control stinks, and the company is too cheap to fix/replace them. The really bad part is that alternative choices for hard drive vendors are getting very thin.
Also, while lowering the warranty on lower end drives does suck, I don't think we should single out WD here, or try to find some malicious reasoning behind it. Seagate dropped their standard warranty on most of their drives to 2 years a few months ago. WD is just following suit. And sadly because there is no real competition in the HDD market anymore, thanks to there only being 2 real players, if one lowers their quality of service the other will do the same.
Companies just use it as an excuse to go cheap. If they had factories in less dangerous locations like the USA or Germany where our standards are higher they wouldn't have run into these issues and wouldn't have had such a flood risk. Then there wouldn't have even been a HD shortage. They would have longer lasting drives built to better standards. Modern international corporations just prefer to go cheaper no matter what it ends up costing the consumer in the long run. Lead is dangerous and doesn't really need to be used. RoHS is a good thing in my opinion.
Not anything like what they did with my old 120gb. The drive died just a month after the warranty expired, and they offered to replace it anyway. That's what got me to buy them exclusively. I'm going the SSD route when I have any other issues.
Also, lead-free solder gets tin whiskers easier, it is nothing new.
Fine by me WD, I'll just buy and recommend peeps to alternative HDD brands that don't try to shirk customers from decent after sales service (a shorter warranty period does not inspire consumer confidence in your products). :shadedshu
They lower the warranty and they can lower prices. That's how simple it is. You don't get anything for free. If they upped the warranty they would up the cost.
Everybody is chasing cheaper products which means there's a drive downwards on price, something has to give and it's the warranty.
Grow up kids.
So your argument doesn't hold. No, they're screwing the customer, pure and simple. This is what happens when there isn't enough competition in the marketplace.
If they'd reduced the amount of TB in each drive for the same price then it'd be exactly the same thing.
People will now pay a little bit more for a Seagate with 3 years warranty rather than a WD.