[mythtv-users] OT: Seagate to reduce warranties on consumer drives to 3 years from 2009

[Dan Ritter]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:54:29PM -0500, Preston Crow wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 16:36 +0000, Alex Butcher wrote:
> > > Pushing your warranty would seem to imply that your products fail a
> > lot.
> > 
> > Quite the contrary; it implies that Seagate once had confidence that
> > they
> > could up the warranty from 3 to 5 years without having
> > repairs/replacements
> > cost very much.
> 
> The problem is that to support a warranty, Seagate has to keep a
> stockpile of replacement drives.  That's dead inventory that
> depreciates.  A shorter warranty period suggests that they see a shorter
> product life cycle.

You'd think that, but in fact Seagate and WD have long had an
internal policy that if a drive is under warranty but not in
stock, a larger/newer drive of the same interface type will be
substituted.

I've had 30GB disks replaced by 40GB and 60GB disks and 200GB disks
replaced by 250GB.

They also generally send refurbished drives as replacements, if
possible. I suspect this was largely a marketing decision: how
many sales will we lose vs replacement and service costs? With
drives dropping in absolute price point (when was the last time
a consumer spent $350 on a disk? I remember getting a great
bargain, $345 for a 340MB disk...) the margin hit on the service
component of replacing a drive has to be increasingly painful,
exclusive of the cost of the replacement hardware.


-dsr-


-- 
http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html is hereby incorporated by reference.

You can't defend freedom by getting rid of it.