05-24-2008, 02:05 AM
Quote:Warranty never entered the question.
The thing about hard drive warranties is that it protects the drive (which is fairly cheap anyways), and obviously not the irreplaceable data. The length of an offered warranty doesn't mean that the drive is going to last longer, it just means that you can get a new drive if yours fails. Big deal - the data is still gone.
If a >3 year old drive fails, it's usually time to upgrade to a bigger and faster drive anyways. I base my drive purchases on personal experience and reviews from reputable sources. And honestly, the most known drive manufacturers like Seagate/WD/Maxtor all produce pretty much equal drives in terms of quality. Everyone always has anecdotal evidence that one is superior to the others, but I bet that the overall failure rates are fairly equal.
Google did a big study about drive failure rate a few years back, but didn't release the statistics of the brand names. I bet that study would be worth a lot of money to marketing people.
I wonder how well a company could do by selling absolute bottom of the barrel crap drives with stupidly long warranties priced about 10% below the competition. Informed people would not buy them, but I'd bet they would sell like hotcakes.