It's a hard rain gonna fall..
It hasn't been very well publicized but three of the major hard-drive vendors are cutting their warranties. Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital are reducing their warranties on standard ATA hard drives from 3 years to 1 year.
So the end user will have to read the fine print on systems a little more thoroughly. A typical whitebox PC has a 3 year warranty (as opposed to the 1 year offered by most of the big players). The new reduction in hard drive support may cause both types of vendors to adjust their coverage.
It’s not that the drives have less quality - it’s that they have become so cheap that the cost of processing the warranties is eating into already low margins. So the good news is that big and fast hard drives are very inexpensive. The bad news is that you may have to pay more for an extended warranty that used to be included.
11:06:45 AM
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