14 DAY TRIAL // Storage giant Seagate has reportedly decided to shorten the warranty period of most of their consumer series hard disk drives from the current five years to just two years, in an effort to reduce the costs associated with such storage solutions.
The warranty reduction will affect some of Seagate's most popular consumer drives since the list includes the Barracuda 7200.12, Barracuda and Momentus Green product series, reports SweClockers.
The first two of these are 3.5-inch HDDs meant to be installed in desktop systems and other high-capacity storage solution, and boast spindle speeds of 7200RPM and 5900RPM, respectively. Barracuda hard drives range in capacity between 500GB and 2TB.
Seagate's Momentus series includes both 7200RPM and 5400RPM models offering from 250GB to 750GB of storage space and are destined to be used inside notebooks, as they use the 2.5-inch form factor.
More advanced Seagate hard drive models, such as the company's enterprise offerings or the XT models, will retain the current five-year warranty.
This list includes the Seagate Momentus XT and Barracuda XT consumer models, the Pipeline HD and SV35 Series enterprise drives and the self-encrypting Savvio, Cheetah, Constellation and Constellation ES HDDs.
Seagate's decision was most probably motivated by the company's desire to reduce the costs associated with its hard drives in a pure volume market that is fighting to offer as much storage space as possible at increasingly lower price points.
Right now, we don't know when the warranty change goes into effect and we are still waiting for Seagate to officially confirm this report.
If Seagate confirms the news, we expect other hard drive manufacturers to follow suit and shorten the warranty for their products to the same two-year period.
UPDATE: We were recently contacted by a Seagate official who informed us this article is erroneous. As a result Seagate's internal retail kits will continue to offer a five-year warranty.