Now everyone limits warranties on hard drives

A NOTICE ON A SITE selling hard drives indicates that it's not just Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital limiting their warranties from the 1st of October, but nearly the whole shooting match, or the world+dog if you prefer.

The note, on scan.co.uk said: "Important Notice: We have been informed by IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital and Fujitsu that all IDE based Hard Disk Drives will revert back to a 1 Year Warranty from October 1st 2002."

This is the kind of coincidence which gives the industry a bad name.

The fact all of the major vendors appear to have lit on the same date is very spooky. The chances of them all choosing the same date to limit their guarantees must be billions to one.

Or shall we take the cynical view and suggest it's an industry wide announcement with all the savoury flavour of a cartel. µ

* A READER NOTES that the warranty isn't reduced on all IDE models. For example, Western Digital says its SE 8MB cache drives will continue to have a three year warranty. See here.

** AND ANOTHER reader says Samsung has told his company that it would not reduce its three year warranty on HDDs.

See Also
Euro two year guarantee on hard drives "a myth"
Seagate, Western Digital to cut hard drive warranties too
Limited hard drive guarantees means data disappears earlier
Maxtor slashes warranties to one year from three