which 120 or 160gb HDD?

I know also that WD has a 12 month warranty on their "regular" units,
and a 3-year warranty on their units that have an 8MB cache. Their RMA
policy is pretty good, in that you have a choice of receiving a
replacement BEFORE sending the defective unit back. This allows you to



I like WD's RMA policy and web implementation of RMA but I had 1 died and
the replacement died recently. I just requested another RMA last night.
Just as another netter said, no one vender is distinctively better than
others in my experience. I had Seagate, WD, Maxtor, Quantum, SONY died on
me. Contrary to some people, I never had good experience with refurbished
drives. All of them died a little bit after the warranty period.

BTW, what is the warranty period of the new drives of other venders
nowadays. Are they all 1-year instead of 3-year or 2-year now? Why is it
shorter now? Are they losing money or the drives today just last
longer/shorter????


cpliu

"cpliu" wrote in message ...
I know also that WD has a 12 month warranty on their "regular" units,
and a 3-year warranty on their units that have an 8MB cache. Their RMA
policy is pretty good, in that you have a choice of receiving a
replacement BEFORE sending the defective unit back. This allows you to



I like WD's RMA policy and web implementation of RMA but I had 1 died and
the replacement died recently. I just requested another RMA last night.
Just as another netter said, no one vender is distinctively better than
others in my experience. I had Seagate, WD, Maxtor, Quantum, SONY died on
me. Contrary to some people, I never had good experience with refurbished
drives. All of them died a little bit after the warranty period.

BTW, what is the warranty period of the new drives of other venders
nowadays. Are they all 1-year instead of 3-year or 2-year now?

Mostly, main exception currently is Samsung.

Tho quite a few do offer more than just 1 year warrantys, some have
longer on their flasher drives, some you can buy a longer warranty with.

Why is it shorter now?

Basically the mass market commodity drives are so aggressively
priced that going to 1 year warrantys allows them to reduce the
price even more. The extra 2 year warranty will always have a
real cost, even if its mostly stupids deciding that their drive has
died when it hasnt, or it got killed by something outside the drive etc.

Are they losing money

Some are, some aint.

or the drives today just last longer/shorter????

Not a shred of evidence that they seeing higher failure rates than they used to.