Because hard drives have a limited lifespan. If you buy the drive expecting it to last 5 years, and it's already been used for 1 year, that means you aren't getting what you paid for.
Furthermore, for the customer, "the food might cost more than the freezer." Meaning, the work of changing the drive, restoring from backup, ect, ect, might cost more than the drive. Thus, it's "worth it" to expect a new drive.
"The food might cost more than the freezer." IE, a few years ago I bought a chest freezer for $150, and put $500 worth of food in the freezer. If the freezer died prematurely, I'm out more than the value of the freezer due to lost food. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer will ship me a new freezer for free.
Edit 2: I have a NAS in my basement, with drives paired in RAID. If a drive dies under warranty, will it be replaced with an identical drive? If the replacement is "equal or better," I'll have to pay to replace the other drive, because RAID drives should be identical. Likewise, replacing the drive is "time" to me: The time to contact the company, the time to open up the NAS, the time to wait for the new drive to be restored, the time to replace the other drive...
For one thing, these drives aren't retail drives, and aren't covered by the retail warranty. Which is unexpected when you bought it in a retail environment. OEM drive warranty starts when originally sold, not whenever you purchased it, labeled as new.
For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures.
I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again.
I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.
gwbas1c|1 year ago
Furthermore, for the customer, "the food might cost more than the freezer." Meaning, the work of changing the drive, restoring from backup, ect, ect, might cost more than the drive. Thus, it's "worth it" to expect a new drive.
"The food might cost more than the freezer." IE, a few years ago I bought a chest freezer for $150, and put $500 worth of food in the freezer. If the freezer died prematurely, I'm out more than the value of the freezer due to lost food. It doesn't matter if the manufacturer will ship me a new freezer for free.
Edit 2: I have a NAS in my basement, with drives paired in RAID. If a drive dies under warranty, will it be replaced with an identical drive? If the replacement is "equal or better," I'll have to pay to replace the other drive, because RAID drives should be identical. Likewise, replacing the drive is "time" to me: The time to contact the company, the time to open up the NAS, the time to wait for the new drive to be restored, the time to replace the other drive...
toast0|1 year ago
For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures.
I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again.
I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.