Seagate Updates Their Bare Drive Product Warranty Periods

We received notification that Seagate is reducing the warranty periods on most of their hard drive product lines.

Update to Seagate Bare Drive Product Warranty Periods

Dear Philip,

At Seagate, we are standardizing warranty terms to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries. By aligning to current industry standards, Seagate can continue to focus its investments on technology innovation and unique product features that drive value for our customers rather than holding long-term reserves for warranty returns.

Therefore, effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from 5 years to 3 years for nearline drives, 2 years to 1 year for certain desktop and notebook bare drives (5 years to 3 years on Barracuda® XT and Momentus® XT), and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics (see table below.)

The new warranty periods will apply to all shipments of applicable products, as of December 31, 2011. Former warranty periods will be honored for all existing channel inventory shipped to you before the effective date. To check the warranty status of a single or multiple drives, you may visit http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assistance.

Seagate will update its Global Limited Warranty Overview Policy as of December 31, 2011 specifically documenting these changes. The limited warranty included in your agreement with Seagate will continue to apply to these products under the new warranty periods.
Please share the warranty change information with your end customers as you sell your inventory. If you mention warranties online or in printed material, don't forget to update that as well.

As always, we believe in strong communication with our channel partners and appreciate your support and loyalty. Please do not hesitate to contact us via reseller.partner@seagate.com if you have any questions, comments, or need any other type of assistance or information regarding the Seagate Partner Program.

Seagate Technology LLC 10200 South DeAnza Boulevard, Cuptertino, CA 95014 USA
If you would no longer like to receive emails from Seagate, visit here.
© 2011 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology, the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. Barracuda, Constellation, Momentus, Pipline HD and SV35 Series are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliated companies in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications..

As is indicated in the above e-mail from Seagate most drive warranties will be 3 years for the enterprise class SATA and high end SATA lines. Seagate SAS looks to be holding in at the current level of five years.

• Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 Product Data Sheet (PDF)

From that Data Sheet we see the following:

Since we have stopped deploying servers with SATA based drives, with only near-line exceptions made for archive type purposes, we are not too concerned with the warranty period changes.

System Builders

System Builders that provide their own warranties for systems going out the door may need to take notice of these changes as the cost of adding a second and/or third year warranty to desktop systems may need to be changed accordingly.

This is especially true in that the failure rate for RMA replacement green label drives that come back from Seagate are substantially higher than new drives in our experience. So, keeping a number of new drives around for warranty replacement needs is something we factor into our extended warranty costs.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.