Consumer grade bare drive will have 3 years instead of current 5 years warranty. Only retail kit keep 5 years.

 

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assistance/product_warranty_matrix/

 

Thanks for the heads up...

 

Going to 3 from 5 from seagate's website seems reasonable.  From my experiences, I haven't had drives fail after the first year(knock on wood).

Ouch! the blows! I assume if you bought a drive while it had 5 year, it will still have 5 year. That totally kills Seagates competitive advantage in my eyes.

Out of curiosity, after 3 years, how many people actually bother RMA-ing their failed hard drives? I've got a couple of 1~2 year old failed drives that are still under warranty. I didn't RMA them since my SATA slots and free 3.5" drive bays are at a premium and drives with much higher capacity are ridiculously inexpensive nowadays. Just  around 2 years ago, it cost me $150 for a 300GB IDE drive. Nowadays, you can get 1.5TB drives for less than that.

 

Quite frankly, I have no idea how much money they'll be saving by dropping the warranty coverage but I have to say that such a move sure doesn't instill much consumer confidence in their consumer grade OEM drives.

Huh?... the consumer grade Retail drives are the ones keeping the 5 year warranty... it's the bulk packed "OEM" drives most often sold at a steep discount that get the shorter warranty...

 

BTW, I ALWAYS rma even those older drives... I look at it as my money.... and you can always find some archival usage for them...

 

Also discussed here.

 

It likely costs Seagate about the same to make a lower capacity drive as a higher capacity one (after the kinks are worked out anyway), so the cost of replacing a 4 year old 160G drive is likely high relative to its value.  I'd prefer to see the prices of OEM drives go down even further, than have the extra 2 years of warranty.