Late last week, Seagate cut the warranty period for many of its popular hard drives. Western Digital (WD) has now followed suit. In some cases, the length of time has been cut from five years to one.
The actions for both vendors is focused on home products. Premium consumer drives or enterprise drives, such as the Seagate Cheetah, or the WD Caviar Black, Scorpio Black, and VelociRaptor, remain unaffected.
WD gave no explanation for its change. Seagate said that it had adjusted its terms “to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries.”
Seagate’s new warranty policy will apply to all drives shipped after December 30. WD will apply it to all drives shipped after January 1. Because there might be a mix of drives with different ship dates sitting on merchants’ shelves, two drives of the same model sitting next to each other could carry different warranties.
The cut is likely to reduce warranty costs as well as a reflection of the gradually increasing reliability of hard drives
