[pifm_guy]

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]

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]

APC sell surge protectors with equipment protection insurance for less than $100. Apparently, it's possible even for products sold at $100.

[Marsymars]

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.

[mrtksn]

Sure, should be possible to sell you an insurance.

[walterbell]

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]

> 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?

[joenathanone]

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

[nightfly]

Lifetime warranty on a consumable product (SSDs have a limited number of writes) doesn't seem reasonable.

[joenathanone]

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.

[paulmd]

using up the flash doesn't hurt the controller, though. the controller still knows how much writing it's done even if the flash itself is toast, it's a totally different part of the drive.

And even still, you could construct the controller so that it was burning e-fuses to indicate lifespan and the fuses could be readable through JTAG, short of complete controller death or lightning-strike level surges (which you can legitimately argue as being abuse and not warrantyable) you could make it offline-readable from an external device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse

The problems here are primarily economic/social, not technical. Companies don't want to hold warranty liability on their books for 10+ years, but they also don't really want to accept returns for defective products or other things either, and we make them do it anyway.

The EU is already pushing warranties to a minimum of two years for exactly this reason. Could it be 5 years, or 10 years? Sure, why not.

Companies will scream in the short term, of course. It's cheaper for them to push out crap that'll die and be in the trash in 3 years. Engineering products for longer lifespans would be a shift in engineering/design mindset. It probably would also push minimum device costs upwards at least a little bit, but, that's not a bad thing either - the slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle", in that order, and "reduce" there means simply buy less or buy things that last longer. A shift away from planned obsolescence isn't the worst thing culturally, we don't want to encourage design-for-disposability.

Especially as Moore's Law slows, hardware is relevant for longer and longer periods of time. For example, a lot of people are finding that their GPUs are dying before they're actually irrelevant as hardware. It's not just NVIDIA who had bumpgate, a ton of hardware from that era failed over time due to faulty solder and probably could have been fixed with an hour of a tech's work.

Even worse, they're often dropped from support. There's really nothing wrong with a R9 290X as a GPU, but AMD won't support it with software anymore, despite the fact that it basically works anyway and it's pretty much purely a software lockout (which third parties have hacked and bypassed), because they want you to buy the new one. Wouldn't it be nice if GPUs were just expected to work for 10 years from purchase and that was covered by warranty and software support?

There are an increasing number of people who do hang onto hardware for 5-10 years because the relevant lifespan is getting longer and longer, and we should encourage that and require companies to support those consumption patterns. Just like not gluing together phones to make the battery irreplaceable, we really should be making sure electronics bumpouts don't fail in 3-5 years and that companies don't dump-and-run on the software.

Routers are another one where the software support is just egregious, too. How many rando Linksys or TP-Link or whatever actually get an update when a bunch of new vulnerabilities in WPA or whatever are discovered? Not that many, and "just install OpenWRT" is not a society-level answer especially when companies are locking down hardware.

[thfuran]

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]

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]

> 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.

[TacticalCoder]

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]

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.

[paulmd]

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_...

[dataflow]

The SN850x seems to have its own issues from what I read (just google it).

[h2odragon]

Perhaps an insurance agent can craft a policy to do that for you.

Failing that, maybe a bookmaker.

[Spooky23]

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