It was a grim time just a few short years ago when every HDD manufacturer out there was offering extremely limited warranties on their disks. Most of them went from multiple year warranties down to a single year, some went so far as to offer only 90 days on OEM drives. Lately things have been changing, and most recently Seagate has taken their recently acquired Maxtor line and extended the default one year to a nice and comfortable three years. Not only is that nice for people who tend to buy several HDD of one type for increasingly popular desktop RAID, but it also shows some confidence from Seagate that they are offering longer warranties on a relatively new line for them:

"Our Maxtor branded retail kits include an industry leading drive manufactured by Seagate, giving consumers the quality assurance and reliability the industry has come to expect from Seagate."
This also puts their Maxtor drives in line with most other HDD manufacturers, who as a whole have started to rescind from one-year warranties.