Plextor slaps a five year warranty on M3 SSDs

STORAGE VENDOR Plextor has joined Intel in slapping a five year warranty on its solid-state disk (SSD) drives.

Earlier this year Intel was the first SSD maker to slap a five year warranty on its 320-series SSDs, citing confidence in its products, even though that turned out to be misplaced. Other popular SSD vendors such as OCZ and Crucial stuck to a three year warranty, however one-time CD-ROM vendor of choice Plextor has decided to join Intel and stand by its SSD data storage units for five years.

Plextor's M3 SATA3 SSDs come in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities and use Marvell's 88DD9174 controller. The firm claims the "lowest average annual failure rate across industry", though it wouldn't say where it got those figures, but given that it is now putting a five year warranty on M3 units, one has to assume that the company is in it for the long haul.

Plextor cites its use of Toshiba's 24nm modules that help the SSD drives achieve sequential read speeds of 525MB/s and write speeds of 445MB/s.

Now that Plextor has decided to put a five year warranty on its SSD drives, this could force other vendors to do the same. This year has seen a number of SSD vendors plagued by dodgy controller firmware and, while a longer warranty won't stop SSD drives from failing, it does give consumers a greater sense of security that their investment won't quickly turn to junk. µ