Hard drive maker Maxtor has followed rival manufacturer Seagate and upped the duration of the warranty it offers for enterprise-class drives. The company also increased the warranty period for internal desktop PC drives to three years. In some territories, that"s already the warranty duration for these products - in others it"s just one year. Maxtor"s move is essentially about unifying the coverage period across all the territories in which it operates.
Likewise, it already provides five-year warranties on enterprise-oriented SCSI drives, so the upgrade here brings parallel and Serial ATA drive warranties into line with those products. Effective immediately, the extended warranties stretch back to all appropriate products that shipped after 12 September 2004, Maxtor said. It also said that it had decided to extend the warranty periods for these two classes of product because of "the confidence we have in the quality and reliability of [our] drives". It clearly doesn"t have much confidence in end-users" ability to install them, however: the warranty upgrade does not apply to drives purchased through retail channels.