Jonathan Osborne wrote: > Why does a five-year warranty make them great? I own a couple seagates > and they've been good so far. But the warranty doesn't really mean > anything. They probably figured out that if they advertise a five-year > warranty, they'll sell more drives, offsetting (or perhaps even > exceeding) the cost of replacing drives further into the future. We have at least 1,000 Seagate drives in production systems right now. A five year warranty means that Seagate trusts their hardware enough that they won't (on average) have to replace the drive within that period, otherwise they would lose money on it like the 'other' drive makers were before they moved to 1-2 year warranties. Like any company offering a warranty, it's a statement of faith in their product. Seagate has always had a 5 year warranty, it's not a new selling point. > Besides, it's the data that's important, not the drive. And even if > they make good on the warranty 4 1/2 years from now, it'll probably be a > "refurbished" drive anyway. Would you trust that? The 4-4.9 year old 80GB drives we're finally RMA'ing are all coming back new or refurbished, usually as 160GB drives. We trust them just as much as any drive. What does refurbished mean from Seagate? a) Someone RMA'd a drive that was perfectly good but had problems with their SATA controller, bad SATA cable, etc. Who knows. It passed the drive fitness tests at Seagate. b) Bad logic board, Seagate replaces the logic board, the platters are fine. c) Bad platters, Seagate replaces the platters, the logic board is fine. No, I don't work for Seagate but I'm definitely a fan of their products. They're right there with Hitachi when it comes to warranty, RMA service and reliability.