hard drives from 2003

2003 was the great divide year for hard drives. From that time on drives become very boring things indeed. Essentially, there were only two sorts of hard drive: (a) reduced warranty drives with questionable reliability, and (b) drives backed by a full three year warranty. Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, and IBM/Hitachi sold the former type, only Samsung retained enough confidence in its own products to stand by them for the full three years. Several of the other makers tried to muddy the waters by offering a full warranty on certain models, or allowing you to buy the normal cover that, up until October 1st 2002, you could expect as of right, but none of them were prepared to stand by their products as they used to.

This was no accident. Warranty service can cost a great deal of money — as IBM found out the hard way with the 75GXP disaster — and to be able to afford a three year warranty a drive maker either has to set aside a substantial proportion of its income, or else be very confident that the product will see out the distance.

Why did Samsung still provide a three year warranty when none of the other manufacturers dared to? Simply, because (as our own return figures clearly demonstrate) Samsung's drives were significantly more reliable. In all our years of experience with hard drives, we have never met as low a failure rate as the Spinpoints deliver.

From time to time people ask when we are going to update the hard drive guide with new models. It's a good question. The answer, however, depends on the manufacturers more than us. We'll update this page when there is something interesting to put on it — and nothing of any particular note has happened in the hard drive industry for quite some time.

Beginning in 2005 the other manufacturers, one by one, have started offering reasonable length warranties again, but alone is not sufficient to win back lost sales. The whole warranty-slashing episode smacked of bad faith, particularly in the light of the uncomfortably high failure rates we experienced with both Seagate and Western Digital drives in the period leading up to it. Both companies had by this time abandoned their previous practice of (in general) supplying new drives as warranty replacements, and the failure rate of the refurbished drives we got instead was much to high to be acceptable — approaching 50%. In the end we just gave up on them and started just throwing faulty Caviar and U-Series drives in the bin because it wasn't worth the trouble of sending units off just to get a refurb that, as often as not, would only last a few weeks until it failed too.

We have no interest in taking chances with people's data, nor in buggerising about with on-again, off-again warranty schemes. In short, we haven't sold a non-Samsung drive for several years, and don't expect to unless Samsung produces its first dud model in a decade, or one of the other manufacturers comes up with something so good we have to look at it. If and when that happens, we will let you know.