"Bill Todd" wrote in message
...

"Ron Reaugh" wrote in message
...
Has anyone ever heard anyone claim that the length of a HD's warranty
was
simply a marketing and price point decision by the mfg and the warranty
length has nothing to do with expected drive life? Somewhere I think I
remember someone making such a claim and a bunch of trolls tried
unsuccessfully to shoot him down?

As usual your pompous jibber below says little.

The deal is that HD warranties were ALWAYS a marketing and price point
decision and had little to do with expected HD life. Since the 1 year and 3
year warranty HDs ALREADY had an expected life of over 5 years. So in a pen
stroke a company could change its HD warranty length and even retroactively
without great exposure SINCE the drives were ALREADY going to last for 5
years anyway as I've always said.

Seagate simply announced a modest cost change internally and externally
effectively a modest price decrease, nothing more.

Well, AFAIK nothing physical changed in ATA drives when manufacturers a
while ago decided to drop the warranty period from 3 years to 1. And I
just
read that Seagate is now going to *raise* that period to *5* years as an
inducement to prospective buyers (something I'd certainly take into
consideration: I deliberately chose a 3-year-warrantied drive last time I
bought one).

Even if manufacturers over time might be able to cut corners such that a
drive would often fail in its second year without too much risk of
first-year failures, it seems unlikely that the cost savings could make up
for the resulting bad publicity. So I'd guess that drives should be in
the
bottom of their 'bathtub' curve for several years regardless of what the
nominal warranty period is: unless they fail (even during that nominal
period) at a fairly significant rate the savings that the manufacturer can
realize by shortening it would seem unlikely to be large (though in such a
cut-throat pricing environment the resulting price difference might
noticeably affect sales, so if one does it, the rest may have to follow,
and
the same may be true for lengthening the period as Seagate is doing, since
it would otherwise give them a unique selling point for very little price
difference).

Whether similar considerations apply to the terms of service (e.g., duty
cycle) specified for the drive is less clear: there may be fairly
noticeable savings in manufacturing a drive for light-desktop rather than
server-style use, even leaving aside more obscure characteristics such as
resistance to the need for re-seeking in environments subject to
vibration.

- bill