Jun 7, 2011 14:13 GMT  ·  By
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD with SandForce controller and 5-year warranty
   OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD with SandForce controller and 5-year warranty

After just a few weeks ago Intel increased the warranty of their SSD units from three to five years, OWC has also decided to go the same route with their SandForce-based Mercury Extreme Pro 6G drives, which now benefit from a similar 5-year warranty period.

The warranty extension is available for all the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs, including those units that were purchased before the announcement was made public.

“We’re very pleased to offer the industry’s longest warranty coverage on the latest and fastest SSD data interface and make it retroactive on all purchases of our Extreme Pro 6G SSD,” said Larry O’Connor, founder and CEO, Other World Computing.

“By building OWC Mercury SSDs with the best components and engineering processes available, we can offer consumers the best pre and post purchase assurances for the ultimate in SSD ownership confidence,” concluded the company's rep.

The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G was released at the end of April and is one of the new generation of SSDs that sports a SandForce 2000-series controller.

This enables it to achieve transfer speeds in excess of 500MB/s (559MB/s sequential reads and 515MB/s sequential writes), while random 4K file read/writes can reach up to 60,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).

Until now, OWC has released three models in this series, which pack 120GB, 240GB and 480GB of storage with 7% over provisioning, but all these models should feature similar performance since all the 16 memory channels are populated with NAND Flash.

The 120GB version of the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G is priced at $297.99, while the 240GB and the 480GB models are listed at $569.99 and $569.99, respectively.

Right now, there is no indication that other manufacturers want to follow on the footsteps of Intel and OWC and offer 5-year warranty for their solid state drives.