seagate drops warranty period to 3 years
techAdmin
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Well, the rumblings I've been hearing about seagate's quality going down the tubes appears to be true. Seagate has reduced their warranty period from 5 to 3 years.

Warranties on hard disks are a direct reflection on statistical failure rates, you can totally ignore any happy talk they say that indicates otherwise. Seagate is I assume counting on you not remembering that they increased their warranty period just a few years ago to 5 years, a move that was well warranted due to the quality and reliability of their drives, a level that I'm sad to say they appear now unable to maintain.

And I can confirm first hand this decline in quality, which I'd been hearing about online for the last year, and which I personally experienced 6 months ago when I ordered 2 new seagate drives for a client, and had them both arrive DOA, not just any DOA, but the clicking death doa of a totally dead hard disk.

Reports of seagate removing such comments I can also confirm, when I posted these remarks on the newegg feedback thread, for the first time ever, my comments were never put up. I've never seen that happen before.

So how does this drop and decline in quality happen? Well, obviously, they are doing what all the other vendors are doing: outsourcing to companies that are themselves outsourcing some parts of production elsewhere, thus creating a virtually untraceable chain of problems.

Linksys/Cisco did something very similar, and their routers are now, with the sole exception of the Linux running wrtgl series, essentially a total cr#p shoot when you buy them.

This is part of the ongoing destruction of the US economy, for those not following the more macro view of things. But it's still sad to see a company that was top and center of the very best out there fall into the pit of mediocrity and short term profit taking.

Here's just one new example of this drop in seagate quality.

So what drives should you use? I was told by a guy who had some serious, and expensive hard disk issues re seagate drives, he talked to a top level support guy from seagate, who for some reason was honest with him (probably because he was about to get laid off) when the guy asked what drives he should use to protect his client's data, the support guy said.. not seagate, but... drum roll.... Hitachi.

That's straight from seagate support. And don't expect things to get better, seagate is now laying off large parts of their company.

This now puts seagate on my official do not buy list. Sad, but true.

In general, I also hear that Western Digital doesn't seem to be causing people too many problems either. Remember, however, that Maxtor is also now owned by seagate.
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Crust
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Joined: 08 Sep 2008
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I agree that it is sad to see the decline of quality of Seagate drives.
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cthulhu14
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Joined: 17 Dec 2010
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I do agree. I'm working on system that are using thousand of seagate drive and it's worst every year.
Fomr the ST3-73Gb to 300Gb the quality is very bad...

No way to report this, and as you say, comment are removed.

China is less expensive in term of headcount, but western countries employee used to love their work, so make good product... Not sure about this in China.
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iotaka
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Joined: 13 Apr 2009
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the 7200.11 are a nightmare
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