Seagate and Western Digital Reduce Warranties for Some Hard Drives.

For Western Digital, warranties for the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced to two years from three years. Seagate’s warranties for internal desktop and laptop drives will be reduced to one year from five years, while warranties for “hybrid” drives — combinations of solid-state drives and traditional hard-disk drives — will be trimmed to three years from five years.

Details here. If you think you need to upgrade, and want the longer warranty, buy before year end.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/2 ... -warranty/

Scorpio Black drives still get the full five years.

That's why i bought one with 750GB this summer, and it has proven to have been a very good decision.

Being rather brand agnostic, if various hardware choices offer more or less the same technical characteristics, i usually prefer the one with the longest warranty time.
If a manufacturer doesn't appear to clearly trust his own products longevity by demonstration of an appropriate warranty period i don't either.