On Monday we reported that Maxtor decided to reduce the warranty on their hard disk drives (see this news-story) from three to one year, now I have to tell you that both Western Digital and Seagate also reduced the warranty on their consumer’s lines of HDDs to from thirty six to twelve month.

Beginning from the first of October, Seagate will guarantee the quality of their Barracuda ATA IV and Barracuda ATA V for one year after purchasing. Western Digital will lower the warranty on their Caviar line of hard disks. Nevertheless, high-end SCSI and expensive ATA HDDs will still be covered with three years limited warranty, for instance, Cheetah and Caviar SE families.

It seems that the reason why storage solutions’ manufacturers now reduce the warranty they provide with their products is quite understandable. During the last three 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 1999. This year we witnessed IBM and Fujitsu leaving the 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.

HDD makers said that we should not take the reduced warranty as a sign of lowering HDD quality. They told us that this is only needed in order to slash the prices on their products in future. Well, it seems quite hard not to consider this fact as they do not want us to, keeping in mind the faulty HDDs from IBM and Fujitsu. Let us hope for the better, anyway.