Intel 320 Series SSDs Get 5-Year Warranty

Intel has just announced that the company has increased the warranty of their 320 Series solid state drives from three to five years in order to underline the reliability of these SSDs. The new warranty terms apply to all 320 Series drives, even those purchased before this announcement.

Most of the consumer grade SSDs that retail nowadays come with a three-year warranty, so Intel most certainly holds an important advantage over its competition which could lead to better sales.

A recent study, that was run by a French publication and covered the return rates of different hardware components, including SSD, found that Intel builds the most reliable drives in the industry.

According to the study, the RMA rate of Intel SSDs was as low as 0.3%, while well-renowned companies such as OCZ and Corsair had return rates of 3.5% and 2.7%, respectively.

“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,” reads a post by Patrick Darling, Online Media Relations manager at Intel.

“The extended warranty term will apply to all Intel SSD 320 Series drives, including those already purchased. Additional limitations apply to enterprise usage levels.”

Intel's 320 SSD Series is comprised of six models with capacities ranging from 40GB to 600GB and all these drives use the SATA 3Gbps interface.

Their performances vary according to drive capacity, but the fastest SSDs are able to reach sequential read and write speeds of 270MB/s and 220MB/s, respectively as well as 39,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random reads and 23,000 IOPS random writes.

Prices start at $89, for the 40GB model, and go all the way up to $1,069, for the 600GB model.