TiVo Community Forums Archives - WD also cuts warranty to 1 year effective 10/1/02 (excluding special edition)

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WD also cuts warranty to 1 year effective 10/1/02 (excluding special edition)
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Posted by: cwerdna

It looks like WD is following Maxtor. I wonder if anyone else will follow? See http://www.wdc.com/company/releases...sp?release=1438 and http://support.wdc.com/warranty/newpolicy.asp for more info.

I can understand the business side of it (having to produce enough spares/spare parts or continuing to produce outdated drives) but at the same time, 1 year is a little short. Maybe if it were 2...

Posted by: cactus46

Let's face it. 100% duty cycle on TiVos has forced hard drive manufacturers into this warranty reduction. Their hard drives weren't as good as they thought in the real world.

Posted by: bsnelson

I think another issue is heat: The SA units are probably moderate to borderline under most circumstances, but the DTivos, even in the best of times, run at nearly 50C if not higher (without user-added cooling), so I think they are especially susceptible.

The only bad part is that I'm not sure whether the DTivo power supply can handle much more load in terms of powering additional fans, so you might be damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Brad

Posted by: Worf

BTW, rumor has it that Seagate is moving to 1 year warranties on thier consumer drives as well...

Posted by: ac3dd

Do you know if anybody has sent a letter to the FTC about this? This is most definitely some form of collusion. WD, Maxtor, and Seagate simultaneously cutting their warranties from three years to one year cannot be a coincidence.

Posted by: sacherjj

They say that competition is good for the marketplace, but smaller hard drive warranties is not a competition I want either to win. :(

Posted by: k606

It's worse than you think, if you read the fine print on WD (and I believe Maxtor and Quantum) warranties you'll discover that whatever the warranty period is, it takes effect (to quote Western Digital) "from the date of MANUFACTURE (emphasis mine) appearing on the product label..."

In other words the warranty on your hard drive is busily expiring while the drive is sitting gathering dust in WD's warehouse and on the dealer's shelf. And of course you can't, unlike say on a bottle of milk, check the date of manufacture until after you have paid for the drive and opened the box.

So really, if a drive manufacturer wanted to be sure to almost never have to honor a warranty claim all they would have to do is hold the units with a one-year warranty two or three months before shipping them to dealers.

Warranties that can theoretically expire before products are even sold aren't warranties, they're frauds and are invalid in a few states. Unfortunately, most legislatures care as much about consumer protection as they do about eliminating leased limos for legislators.

Posted by: Worf

It was inevitable... the cut-throat consumer commodity market does this. After all, TiVos are warrantied for 3 months, and I see lots of other things quickly going that way too as prices drop and margins shrink.

As for collusion, forget it. You can probably legislate the warranty to be back to 3 years, but I suspect it'll just bring the prices 3x as high as they are now - then it'll slowly come down...

(BTW, in a fiercely competitive marketplace, collusion can appear to happen (everyone doing the same thing simultaneously), even though it isn't happening. It turns out if you're selling a product that's not very different from your competitors (i.e., they're equivalent) other than say your name, then there's little to differentiate. After all, Joe Sixpack really doesn't give a hoot about the warranty on his hard drive, or the manufacturer (be it Maxtor, Seagate, WD, Joe's Hard Drive Manufacturing Co., etc), and they're all the same. Back to the point though, is that one company sees another cutting costs by one method, they run through the numbers themselves, and see that doing the same thing can increase profit, and quickly follow suit. After all, they also know the costs of bad hard drives.).

Posted by: RichIngram

I notice BB are offering a 4yr warranty on HD's for I think $40. Not sure how it works but when I bought a new Samsung 40xCD-R drive in CompUSA on Thursday they offered me for $14 a 2yr warranty where if it packed up I just take it back and they give me one off the shelf. Now if it is the same for HD then this could be an option. I know it ups the price a bit, but then the HD is almost certain to pack up outside the 1yr period otherwise they would not cut it from 3 to 1yr!!

Richard.

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