This is somewhat unexpected news coming from Seagate. I do not have a good experience with their products that made in China. I’m not sure what really happen to their desktop drive, but I do notice it always making funny noise inside the case when booting up the system almost on every desktop I tested in my office. I brought one Seagate FreeAgent 160GB Poratble from the PC Fair at Singapore on June and it doesn’t last a week before I notice the drive always giving a ‘tick’ sound when transferring file. It was really bad luck after having this kind of problem flying back to my country. Luckily, it can be RMA and sent it back directly for warranty. I will never buy Seagate again, I think in the future I rather buy Maxtor brand instead. xP

According to The Tech Reports article, the Seagate new warranty will take place starting next year on 3rd January 2009. It was not announce yet on their Seagate official site. But you can find out at Product Warranty Matrix page for more information which drives are affected with the changes. Well, hard drive is now damn cheap for 500GB and we should get a price drop for both 750GB and 1TB later next year.