"CONSUMER" not ENTERPRISE

I really don't see what all the moaning and complaining is about. I used to do computer assembly in a two man shop for individuals and small businesses alike, and as far as hard drives went, the deciding factor was price. The drives are all pretty much the same nowadays, such that individual end-users should mostly buy on price. If you buy a drive today, and it's still working after a year, it probably will continue to work for many years. Having a five-year warranty for end-users (through distributors) makes no sense really because pouring even a little money into those last two years is a waste considering that I, like most other people, buy a drive for e.g. $150, then if it fails four years later, the invoice/receipt/proof of purchase has been lost, I've had four years of service from it, and any hard feelings from lost data might result in a change of brand, but I wouldn't bother calling Seagate about a drive that's four or five years old. I refuse to sit in a call center phone queue wasting my time over a five year old drive that cost me $150.

In the Enterprise however, five years v. 3 years makes BIG DIFFERENCE. I won't calim to know much about the data center business, but to me if I build an enterprise storage network, because of the sheer number of drives I NEED to have that warranty even five years out, assuming of course that data centers aren't rebuilt every 3 years, which they most probably are not. BUT, in this case too Google's approach makes sense: buy a crap-load of consumer drives KNOWING that x% of them will fail and build a storage solution with appropriate algorithms to provide redundancy for those x% of drives, then you avoid having to buy enterprise SAS and other such solutions. Sure, performance won't be as high per drive, but through some clever logic and a huge number of drives, I believe the numbers could be made to work and provide performance while reducing cost. So even though the enterprise case for 5 year warranties makes sense, that's only for all who follow a more traditional approach to enterprise storage i.e. not Google.

Mines the one with "Makes absolutely no difference for Joe Six-pack or Jane Doe buying a hard drive for their home computer" on the back