Unless you consider hard drives to be disposable (not a bad policy, given current failure rates), you’ll probably be interested in hearing that hard drive manufacturer Seagate has upped to warranty period for all of its consumer hard drives to five years. Over the last couple of years, most major hard disk manufacturers had quietly changed their warranty period to one year (most were at a three year warranty before that), in spite of (or because of) an increasingly poor record of drive life-cycles. It has since become almost a joke to presume that any hard drive will last longer than a couple of years without failure; an interesting proposition, considering that the average computer user still keeps all of their data on a single drive.
Of course, just because a drive has a five year warranty doesn’t mean the drive will last that long. You should still back up like a good Computer Scout. But in the worst case, at least you’ll be able to get a replacement drive while you’re tearing up over years of lost pornography.
Read – Seagate Warranties Jump to Five Years [Yahoo]
Read – Seagate Authorized Retailers [Seagate]
