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The three-year warranty on PC disk drives that has been standard for more than a decade is going the way of the dodo bird on October 1. All three top manufacturers are switching to a one-year warranty for most consumer models.

Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate, which share more than 85 percent of the consumer market, call the move a business decision that brings their warranty policies into line with those for the other major components inside a PC.

Nobody is pulling products with three-year warranties off the shelves, but new stock sold after October 1 will have only a 12-month warranty. All existing three-year warranties will be honored through the end of the policy's period.

And even after the new policies take effect, you may be able to get an extended warranty. Some manufacturers may offer the additional coverage for an added fee or in their premium product lines. More commonly, extra coverage could be available from resellers that provide extended service contracts for other consumer technology products.

Strictly Business

Analyst John Monroe of Gartner/Dataquest applauds the change and says that the impact on quality-conscious consumers will be minimal.

"No way is this reflective of any degradation in quality of the disk drives themselves," Monroe says. "It's strictly a business move. In fact, drives are a lot more reliable than they were ten years ago when they went to the three-year warranty."

Monroe points to the steady drop in prices for disk drives and the move to standard one-year warranties from all the major PC makers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. Those were the major factors behind the disk drive manufacturers' decision, he says.

"It is a long-overdue business decision for an industry that has delivered the best and most compelling cost and performance and capacity benefits of the whole IT marketplace," he said.

New Policy Details

Maxtor announced its plans first, saying its Fireball, DiamondMax, and DiamondMax Plus ATA drives will have a one-year warranty. The MaxLine premium drives will retain a three-year warranty.

However, Maxtor will not directly offer warranty extensions, leaving that option to its resellers, who may choose to provide the extra service.

Its two biggest competitors have quickly followed suit with similar announcements. Seagate says the company will back all its consumer ATA drives with a one-year warranty.

Western Digital announced a one-year plan for its Protégé and Caviar Advanced brands. It will retain a three-year warranty on its high-powered Caviar special edition model, commonly used in servers.

Western Digital is directly offering an extended warranty option, charging $20 to lengthen the soon-standard one-year warranty to three years. The extension is not available through Western Digital resellers. The company will not provide a warranty longer than three years for a drive, and owners of existing drives (with current three-year warranties) may not extend their drives' warranty, according to the company.

Quality Counts

Disk Drive quality will be unaffected by the move to a 12-month warranty for consumer equipment, the vendors say.

"I understand people say that [a three-year warranty] is part of the value and provides some peace of mind two and a half years from now," says John Paulsen, Seagate's manager of product communications. "Ultimately, some consumers will feel that way, but [the policy change] doesn't reflect on the quality of the product."

The decision is strictly a business issue, say the trio.

The administrative cost of maintaining a standard three-year warranty program is immense and no longer makes good business sense for drive manufacturers, says Rich Rutledge, Western Digital's vice president of marketing.

"When we moved to a three-year warranty, the expense of doing that was phone calls, repair rates, return rates, refurbishments. None of that has really changed," Rutledge says. "What has changed is the average selling price. Back then, the average price was $175. Today, our average selling price is $65 to $75."

All three companies will maintain longer warranties on their enterprise-level drives.