By now, most readers know that three of the largest hard drive manufacturers have announced their "unpopular news" that, effective October 1st, 2002, their normal warranties for most ATA hard drives will be reduced to one year. Consumers, as well as OEMs, are accustomed to the standard three-year warranties that these hard drive manufacturers have previously offered on their ATA hard drives, and they are not at all happy with this news.

While none of us at THG were overjoyed with this announcement, we decided to dig deeper into this subject to try to provide a better understanding of the hard drive manufacturers' reasoning and points of view surrounding this unpopular announcement.

Can You Answer A Few Questions?

In order to help our readers understand the ramifications of the newly enacted reduced warranty policy, we decided to approach three large-sized manufacturers of hard drives, and ask the same questions of each of them. We sent the questions to Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital, and they gave us some answers.

While asking questions of manufacturers is common, asking those manufacturers to answer them, with their knowledge that their two other competitors were answering the same questions, was a political challenge. We asked identical questions of each manufacturer, and gave each manufacturer the opportunity to explain their answers so that the responses could be fairly compared.

In developing the list of questions, we first asked for reader input. We posted a message in THG's Community Forums, and Forum members provided some of the very questions that made the list. (If you have never taken the time to explore our Community Forums, you might want to do so - it is an excellent place to get opinions and feedback.) As expected, Forum members were not at a loss for words on this topic.

We were fortunate to enlist the cooperation of these representatives from the manufacturers: Stephen DiFranco, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Branding at Maxtor; John Paulsen, Manager, Product Communications at Seagate; and Darrin Bulik, Technical Marketing Manager at Western Digital. Our thanks go to each of these individuals and their companies for working with us on this article and for turning around the responses to our questions on a short period of time. Even with the "loaded" nature of the questions, each company did an excellent job answering the questions. Read on for the interesting comments to some of the questions asked.