Both of Western Digital and Seagate internal HDD will be changing their warranty policies on the new year of 2012.
Western Digital – Effective date on January 2nd, 2012.
Desktop and Mobile (Blue and Green family lines) change from 3 years to 2 years. Black product line will remain at 5 years warranty. Enterprise class products stay at 5 years warranty.
As of January 2, 2012 Desktop and mobile Western Digital Blue and Green will be 2 years.
As of December 31st, 2011 Major desktop and mobile products from Seagate will change from 2 years to 1 year, 5 years become 3 years and most of the Enterprise class products will reduce their warranty from 5 years to 3 years.
This makes you ask the question, why are these warranties being reduced? Are they known to be not as reliable drives anymore? Are people using warranties more often? We know the computers are not made as well as they were in the past. They are cheaper to buy, but they are built with plastic instead of metal, no CD’s included, and hard drives are made cheaper as well.
Regardless of warranty, hard drives store your data, and they are one of the most common components in a computer that regularly fail. Don’t forget to do regular backups and you should be fine. Hopefully you don’t have to purchase a new hard drive soon, since the prices more than doubled in end of October after that flood in Thailand. (See our previous blog)