Wednesday, November 13, 2002
 
IBM Reduces Warranty on HDDs [5:45 pm] Anton  
 
As I have read over this web-site, IBM slashed the warranties on their hard disk drives down to one year. There is no surprise here since Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor had already reduced theirs some weeks before, so, it was logical for IBM to also get rid of ?extra? two years time the company had to repair the faulty HDDs.
 
I fairly understand the reason why storage solutions? manufacturers now reduce the warranty they provide with their products. During the last three or four years, the capacities of HDDs has increased about 15 to 20 times. The drives has become tremendously faster and competition between different storage makers is now more fierce than it used to be in the later nineties. This year we witnessed IBM and Fujitsu practically leaving the HDD business and Quantum was acquired by Maxtor in 2001. Needless to say that the remaining rivals will do everything in order to force each other from this market. All the companies now lower their prices and so not to decrease their profit margin further, they cut the warranty and support time.
 
Starting from the 15th of November 2002, IBM will only offer one year limited warranty on all their hard disk drives, except the latest 180GB 180GXP HDD. I would definitely like to know who will take care of those presumable faulty disks made on the recently shut down Hungary-based fab.  
 
The last company to offer three years limited warranty on their consumer hard disk drives is Samsung Electronics. I wonder how long will they continue to provide thirty six month warranty ? it does not make a lot of sense for them to be unique in this way, hence, they will probably slash the support time later this year.

Response (James W) - 11/26/2002 04:51 AM
 
Hello,
 
All Special Edition (JB) drives (i.e. models that are WD___JB-____) still have will always have 3 years warranty with Western Digital, these are the drives with 8MB Cache.
 
All drives (other than special edition drives) built after 1/10/02 and sold as retail packs in the EU, Norway and Switzerland have 2 years warranty, with the option for the end user to purchase a 3rd year from Western Digital.
 
All drives (other than special edition drives) built after 1/10/02 and sold in the EU, Norway and Switzerland that are not retail packs, but are straight from the factory/ OEM state/ just the drive in a box have 1 year warranty, with the possibility for the distributor to buy a second or third year of warranty. A distributor will be able to buy extra warranty for these drives through our website, by entering serial numbers. This service is available at this link:
 
http://websupport.wdc.com/websupport/clearexp_scripts/res_first_page.asp?extwar=y
 
Alternatively, a distributor can avoid buying warranty from us, but is still required by law to replace a drive of this kind in its second year.
 
All drives (other than special edition drives) built after 1/10/02 and sold in Europe, but outside of the EU, Norway and Switzerland, have 1-year warranty.
 
Regards,
 
WD Tech Support