Seagate and Western Digital are cutting back on hard drive warranties, in some instances from five years to one, in order to save money or redirect it to product development. Seagate’s warranties on certain drives will be reduced as of Dec. 31, and WD will follow beginning Jan. 2. All drives shipped prior to those dates will continue to carry the current warranty term associated with the products. The warranty period reductions, first reported by The Register, mean some of Seagate’s and WD’s most popular drives for desktops and laptops will no longer carry three- or five-year warranties. In an  [ Read More ]

A global shortage of traditional, spinning hard disk drives has coincidentally come at a time when Apple’s flash-based solid-state MacBook Air is one of the company’s most popular products. The success of the redesigned MacBook Air has come with “fortuitous timing” in the face of the hard drive shortage, analyst Rob Cihra with Evercore said in a note issued to investors on Monday. He believes Apple is largely insulated from the ongoing component constraints, caused by flooding in Thailand that has affected hard drive makers Western Digital and Seagate. Apple’s MacBook Air features only NAND flash for storage, relying on  [ Read More ]