Seagate, the leading provider of storage solutions, has recently announced that it would change its limited warranty terms for specific drives starting with January 3rd, 2009. According to the company's announcement, some of its products series like consumer electronics (Seagate Barracuda 7200 included), notebook (Momentus 7200 and Momentus 5400 included) and personal storage bare drives will have their warranty period shortened from five to three years.

As the company states, the decision to reduce the warranty period was taken after a close analysis of the returns from consumers. Seagate says that 95 percent of those returns take place within the first three years of the warranty period, which means that reducing it won't affect in any way its relationship with users. The firm has announced that the new limited warranty time is in line with the rest of the industry, while also covering the needs of its partners and consumers.

The fresh Seagate three-year limited warranty will apply only to some of its products and, obviously, to those shipped after January 3rd, 2009. Moreover, the storage solution provider was very clear on the fact that customers who had already purchased a Seagate product would benefit from the warranty in place at the time of purchase.

The company has said that the changes in the warranty period are complemented by terms that should be more suitable to customers. According to the maker, the new terms are supposed to be “in line with industry standard warranty offerings, and that better align to the requirements of our partners and customers”. The warranties of enterprise storage or retail products at this time are not previsioned to see other changes, states Seagate.

The warranty changes and the products subjected to them can be seen on Seagate's Warranty Matrix. More details on the maker’s offerings are available on its site.