Seagate Warranty

I would complain to Seagate directly about this, but there doesn't seem to be an appropriate forum.

For years I've used the Seagte Barracuda drives, particularly for my raid arrays and on the occasional times I've had failures (2 failures out of a dozen drives I believe) they've replaced them without fuss. They have been the most reliable drives I've ever had and over the years I've had a few...

It seems that seagate is reducing its warranty from 5 years to 3 years It seems most of their returns happen in the first 3 years, so that's all they need to cover. This is rubbish in all senses. For a start if they don't get many in their last 2 years, then it can't cost them much can it? Also there are a few reasons I buy seagates, the first and most important being the 5 year warranty. Of course in the past I have had really good experience with their low failure rate and their returns procedure when they do fail, compared to my experience with Western Digital and Maxtor they are fantastic in both these regards.

Given all this I have 3 ways to protest:
* Write this winge
* Restrict my Seagate purchases to the models that still have a 5 year warranty (if this is still possible)
* Go the opposite route and stop paying extra for what I consider decent drives and go back to buying the cheapest possible drives I can and rely on my raid array and backups to save me when I have lots of failures.

Granted by myself I can do nothing, but as always if everyone does at least one of these and doesn't buy the crap they are now peddling then it can only be for the best to show them what the consumer wants.

It occurs to me that maybe I am an odd user: I don't track the computer upgrade cycle, my desktop is over 5 years old and still works fine for what I use it for. My newest computer is my server (3 years old) that got bought simply for it's I/O system needed by the raid card I had bought (PCI-X). However I buy new drives for the raid array every year or so. Still the drives I bought 3 years ago are still in use either in the array or as part of my backup system, they are still VERY useful and would be really annoyed if they failed tomorrow; for seagate to state that 3 years is the useful life of a drive is to me repugnant.

So I'm voting with my feet!