Intel Upgrades Warranty on SSD 320 Series Drives

It has been less than two months since Intel launched its new SSD 320 series solid-state drives, but yesterday it was announced that the company would be extending the traditional three year warranty to a full five years for both current and future 320 series owners.

It’s very possible Intel liked the numbers it was seeing on failure rates and after no initial bug discoveries were found as with its previous SSD launches, the company was confident enough to implement the upgrade. Or it may have something to do with Intel wanting a PR coup, as with this announcement it’s the first SSD manufacturer to offer a full five year warranty on a solid-state drive marketed to consumers. By comparison, the average mechanical hard drive includes a three year warranty, and would be doing well to last even five years.

It is worth noting the new warranty coverage does not extend to Intel’s 510 series SSDs, which are powered by a Marvell controller linked to Intel’s 34nm NAND flash. Instead, the 320 series is purely Intel, featuring the “G3” or third reiteration of the company’s in-house controller paired with its newer 25nm NAND flash.

Given the recent worry from users about the lifespan of 25nm NAND, this new warranty should do much to dissuade concerns. Of course the 320 series has other aspects speaking for its durability, such as an internal RAID 4 esque approach at the NAND level, and onboard capacitors to allow the drive to flush cache and complete any writes in progress in the event of an abrupt power loss. In any case, we can only wish that more SSD manufacturers will decide to follow suit.

Confident in the enhanced reliability features of its recently introduced third-generation solid-state drive (SSD), Intel announced it has extended its limited warranty for the Intel® SSD 320 Series from three years to five years. The extended warranty term will apply to all Intel SSD 320 Series drives, including those already purchased. Additional limitations apply to enterprise usage levels.