If you haven’t already heard, Seagate and Western Digital have reduced the warranty period somewhat. It will affect home users most.

Seagate are keeping ‘mission critical’ enterprise drives as they are but hybrids and Constellation 2’s will reduce from five to three years. Home user Barracuda’s will be cut from five to just ONE year, all effective for any drive purchased since the beginning of January 2012.

Western Digital, my hard drives of choice, have cut Caviar Greens, and Caviar/Scorpio Blues from three to two years.

If you bought your drive before the end of 2011, whatever warranty was applicable at the time will still be honoured. That’s nice..

Of my three drives, one has run it’s course (the primary boot drive), one ends at the very beginning of January 2013, and the other ends  towards the end of 2013.

Western Digital warranty status.. http://support.wdc.com/warranty/index_end.asp?lang=en

Seagate Warranty Status.. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assistance/

Before you enter any data into the websites, if you are running IE9, you will have to disable tracking protection for each website or the dreaded Captcha code entry boxes will not be available.

So which make of drive will you be buying next time? I l already do buy them.

It is a pity that stores don’t co-operate with customers over the entire warranty period. As it stands, they shuffle us off after seven, fifteen or thirty days, not so bad for big name items like hard drives but criminally bad for some no name Chinese made item for which warranty dep’t addresses and processes are as good as impossible to find.