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pay 5 bucks more and get a Seagate with 5 year warranty and perpendicular tech at Frys

Hi, I'm cluelessly unaware that this is a Seagate drive labeled as Maxtor.

rebrand or not, 5 bucks for 2 extra years of warranty is a pretty good deal.

Hold off. Was 89.99$ with free Shipping at Frys in early July. Let the price come a bit lower...

I got one of those 500GB Maxtor 7200.10's for $90 last month. Excellent deal. Very quiet drive. But it would have been nice to get the Seagate 5 year warranty.

thats kind of funny; always browsing and seeing ppl saying they should get longer warranties; you dont mind all your effort to d/l all your movies and music and then one day when you have 450 gb of stuff and your hd dies in 4.5 years, you tell yourself; well, atleast i get another one, but what about the content?

agreed alwayscut...

but in 4.5 years, i'm sure it wont take anytime at all to fill up 450 gigs. look at the technology from 4.5 years ago till now.

5 year warranty is a joke. 500GB of storage in 5 years will be compared to a 60GB of storage today.

the way our technology is moving, we are gonna be in terabytes pretty soon... so might as well skip this deal...

i've done analysis on 5 year warranties, basically they hardcore screw the vendor. so its best to take advantage of them. only silly people would up the ante on a part that fails the most in a pc. i predict seagate hurting badly in 2011.

#7, I just used archive.com to see what PCMALL was selling 5 years ago and it was a 20GB Seagate for $79.99. I too think the 5 year warranty is a nice "feel good" for the consumer but probably won't be used after the second year as people will want the new 2TB drive at $99, not another replacement 500GB "small" drive.

If a drive has 3+ year warranty, buy based on price. After 3 years, the data is worth more than the drive, the time and addt'l cost worth more than the drive, and supposing you got a replacement 4 years from now, which will likely be a refurbished drive, what'll you plan to do with it?

It won't have the same performance as a modern drive, it won't have the same capacity, it will be questionable whether you should rely on it since it may be refurbished, and remember that the $ saved could draw interest over 5 years, plus the time and shipping cost to RMA it, in addition to the system it goes in being in limbo while you wait for the RMA process replacement to arrive.

Over the past year, there have been deals for 80-100GB drives for $20 AR. That's larger than the typical capacity of 5 years ago, and new, with full warranty instead of the remainder of the 5 year warranty (which is lower at 2 years at most if you're trying to contrast with a 3 year warranty instead).

Don't get me wrong, 5 year warranty is obviously better than 3, but in practice if paying more for that, it may not always be as important as other factors.

The five year warranty is good to use as a selling point. I always unload my old crap on Craigslist (usually with receipts) and the warranty helps justify the price.

alwayscut, if you DON'T back-up your data then YES, the warranty becomes less of a factor. But if you are like most of us that back up their data via a Raid Array or the old fashioned way I do it(with DVD-r media - $30 for 400 Gb worth of data) a warranty IS a selling factor. What kind of rodeo cowboy wouldn't back up 500Gb of data anyways?

Just curious dave_c, how does one know the right time to replace a drive before it fails? Maybe one of those company policy manuals contains the answer!

Thank's for this post.