6 ms·

I really want to see ssd manufacturers offer a decent warranty... This drive costs $100, and will last 10 years or until 100TB has been written to it, as long

I really want to see ssd manufacturers offer a decent warranty... This drive costs $100, and will last 10 years or until 100TB has been written to it, as long as you keep it within the specified temperature/humidity/power conditions. If it fails to do that, we will return $1000 to you.

mrtksn 4y ago
This sounds like an SLA agreement, its very unlikely you'll get that for 100 bucks. Even if this manufacturer somehow perfected their process and have zero defects, they are still acquiring a 10 years liability for 100 dollars of revenue.
- rlpb 4y ago
  APC sell surge protectors with equipment protection insurance for less than $100. Apparently, it's possible even for products sold at $100.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    Sure, should be possible to sell you an insurance.
  - Marsymars 4y ago
    Well they sure market this, but it seems pretty difficult to collect. For the insurance to apply you have to register within 10 days of purchase with a list of what will be plugged into the the surge protector. In case of damage, you have to pay to ship the surge protector to APC. If they determine it's been damage by power line transients, then you need to ship all damaged equipment somewhere to be evaluated. If it's determined that the equipment was damaged by power line transients, then APC chooses whether they'll pay for repairs or for current fair market value.
walterbell 4y ago
In theory, a 3rd party insurance equivalent to AppleCare could be constructed for some technology products, but this is hampered by short product lifecycles, lack of BOM transparency (e.g components changed within a single product generation) and ability of firmware updates to change product behavior and invalidate previously collected data on reliability. Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability. This seems fantastic. Are you saying you could review the firmware source and know that the 980 Pro would lose ~1% of its endurance per week?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Back when HDD would fail really a lot warranty was working. I'd happily fill an online form, Web 1.0 style, and then send my Seagate (I'm in Europe, was sending them to the Netherlands IIRC) disks and a few weeks later I'd receive a new drive. I probably still have a few screenshots of these forms somewhere.
jeffbee 4y ago
I am not sure why you want a 10x refund, but it seems like your request is easily met by current warrantees. A 1TB WD SN850X advertises 1200TBW endurance, rather more than you require.
- dataflow 4y ago
  The SN850x seems to have its own issues from what I read (just google it).
- paulmd 4y ago
  https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/punitive_damages https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/punitive_damages Seems clear the idea is to make sure that companies err well on the side of lifespan rather than designing something that fails a month after the warranty expires. Because if they're cutting it close, a decent number of units are going to fall under the warranty line and they'll be liable. Even if a company is required to stand behind the product, a lot of consumers won't pursue it if it's not perceived to be worth the trouble. Do you care about the 120GB drive you bought in 2012? Not really. Do you care if you can get 10x the original ($1/gb) purchase price for it? Sure, $1200 is worth my trouble. As they say - "A times B times C, if that's less than X, the cost of a recall, we don't do one". I'm not OP and am not gonna die on this hill as a point of policy, but if 9/10 consumers just shrug their shoulders and accept that their 8yr old drive has failed and throw it in the garbage, that's still a bad thing at a society-wide level where you want people to be using hardware for longer and longer periods of time. Especially as moore's law tapers down even further and hardware becomes relevant for longer and longer periods of time - a R9 290X is still a pretty nice piece of hardware! Michigan used to do something very similar with checkout price scanners - if the price coded in the system was more than advertised, you got 10 times the difference up to a limit. And the point was to get retailers to pay fucking attention because a 50 cent pricing error on a can of chili could cost them 5 bucks. Punitive damages, with citizens who spot the violations receiving the bounty. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan_changed_item_pricing_law_but_your_consumer_rights_did_not https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan_changed_item_pricing_...
joenathanone 4y ago
Lifetime warranties used to be commonplace, I wish we could return to those times, or at least to a time of repairability.
- thfuran 4y ago
  It also used to be the case that a computer was basically ewaste within two or three years because a new one would be ten times faster.
  - joenathanone 4y ago
    Growing up poor, I was always a few generations behind, rocking a 486 DX2 when the PII & PIII where the latest and greatest. 33kbps modem when others had 56k. When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      > When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure. I miss that too. Thrift stores suck now, they're pulling all the good clothes out and selling them to upcyclers and pulling all the cool electronics and cameras and other stuff and selling them on ShopGoodwill and ebay. And ShopGoodwill is pretty absurd, almost everything is sold as-is and uninspected, and prices are just as high as ebay if not sometimes higher. The days of wandering through a goodwill and finding some neat stuff at a bargain price are gone now, unfortunately.
- nightfly 4y ago
  Lifetime warranty on a consumable product (SSDs have a limited number of writes) doesn't seem reasonable.
  - joenathanone 4y ago
    True, in my perfect world I would settle for a trade in program, you would get some value for the failed unit so that you can upgrade and the OEM could recycle the raw materials. If we will ever live in a sustainable society we are going to need repairability and recycling programs for all consumer products.
Spooky23 4y ago
HPE does that for enterprise disks. But it ain’t free!
h2odragon 4y ago
Perhaps an insurance agent can craft a policy to do that for you. Failing that, maybe a bookmaker.

mrtksn 4y ago

This sounds like an SLA agreement, its very unlikely you'll get that for 100 bucks. Even if this manufacturer somehow perfected their process and have zero defects, they are still acquiring a 10 years liability for 100 dollars of revenue.

rlpb 4y ago
APC sell surge protectors with equipment protection insurance for less than $100. Apparently, it's possible even for products sold at $100.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Sure, should be possible to sell you an insurance.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  Well they sure market this, but it seems pretty difficult to collect. For the insurance to apply you have to register within 10 days of purchase with a list of what will be plugged into the the surge protector. In case of damage, you have to pay to ship the surge protector to APC. If they determine it's been damage by power line transients, then you need to ship all damaged equipment somewhere to be evaluated. If it's determined that the equipment was damaged by power line transients, then APC chooses whether they'll pay for repairs or for current fair market value.

walterbell 4y ago

In theory, a 3rd party insurance equivalent to AppleCare could be constructed for some technology products, but this is hampered by short product lifecycles, lack of BOM transparency (e.g components changed within a single product generation) and ability of firmware updates to change product behavior and invalidate previously collected data on reliability. Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability.

CharlesW 4y ago
> Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability. This seems fantastic. Are you saying you could review the firmware source and know that the 980 Pro would lose ~1% of its endurance per week?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TacticalCoder 4y ago

Back when HDD would fail really a lot warranty was working. I'd happily fill an online form, Web 1.0 style, and then send my Seagate (I'm in Europe, was sending them to the Netherlands IIRC) disks and a few weeks later I'd receive a new drive. I probably still have a few screenshots of these forms somewhere.

jeffbee 4y ago

I am not sure why you want a 10x refund, but it seems like your request is easily met by current warrantees. A 1TB WD SN850X advertises 1200TBW endurance, rather more than you require.

dataflow 4y ago
The SN850x seems to have its own issues from what I read (just google it).
paulmd 4y ago
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/punitive_damages https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/punitive_damages Seems clear the idea is to make sure that companies err well on the side of lifespan rather than designing something that fails a month after the warranty expires. Because if they're cutting it close, a decent number of units are going to fall under the warranty line and they'll be liable. Even if a company is required to stand behind the product, a lot of consumers won't pursue it if it's not perceived to be worth the trouble. Do you care about the 120GB drive you bought in 2012? Not really. Do you care if you can get 10x the original ($1/gb) purchase price for it? Sure, $1200 is worth my trouble. As they say - "A times B times C, if that's less than X, the cost of a recall, we don't do one". I'm not OP and am not gonna die on this hill as a point of policy, but if 9/10 consumers just shrug their shoulders and accept that their 8yr old drive has failed and throw it in the garbage, that's still a bad thing at a society-wide level where you want people to be using hardware for longer and longer periods of time. Especially as moore's law tapers down even further and hardware becomes relevant for longer and longer periods of time - a R9 290X is still a pretty nice piece of hardware! Michigan used to do something very similar with checkout price scanners - if the price coded in the system was more than advertised, you got 10 times the difference up to a limit. And the point was to get retailers to pay fucking attention because a 50 cent pricing error on a can of chili could cost them 5 bucks. Punitive damages, with citizens who spot the violations receiving the bounty. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan_changed_item_pricing_law_but_your_consumer_rights_did_not https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan_changed_item_pricing_...

joenathanone 4y ago

Lifetime warranties used to be commonplace, I wish we could return to those times, or at least to a time of repairability.

thfuran 4y ago
It also used to be the case that a computer was basically ewaste within two or three years because a new one would be ten times faster.
- joenathanone 4y ago
  Growing up poor, I was always a few generations behind, rocking a 486 DX2 when the PII & PIII where the latest and greatest. 33kbps modem when others had 56k. When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure. I miss that too. Thrift stores suck now, they're pulling all the good clothes out and selling them to upcyclers and pulling all the cool electronics and cameras and other stuff and selling them on ShopGoodwill and ebay. And ShopGoodwill is pretty absurd, almost everything is sold as-is and uninspected, and prices are just as high as ebay if not sometimes higher. The days of wandering through a goodwill and finding some neat stuff at a bargain price are gone now, unfortunately.
nightfly 4y ago
Lifetime warranty on a consumable product (SSDs have a limited number of writes) doesn't seem reasonable.
- joenathanone 4y ago
  True, in my perfect world I would settle for a trade in program, you would get some value for the failed unit so that you can upgrade and the OEM could recycle the raw materials. If we will ever live in a sustainable society we are going to need repairability and recycling programs for all consumer products.

Spooky23 4y ago

HPE does that for enterprise disks. But it ain’t free!

h2odragon 4y ago

Perhaps an insurance agent can craft a policy to do that for you. Failing that, maybe a bookmaker.