Hard disk maker Seagate has upped the duration of key product warranties to five years.

The company already offers five-year warranties for enterprise drives, but in a bid to differentiate its products and cope with the price war that has hit all the major vendors, Seagate today extends this to all internal HDDs for desktop and mobile applications.

The new period will apply to all internal drives shipped to distributors after 1 June, and Seagate will apply the new warranty period to older drives still sitting on dealers' shelves.

Rival hard drive suppliers Western Digital and Maxtor also offer five-year warranties on enterprise products, but the usual one- or three-year periods for more mainstream kit.

Seagate last week posted a heavy Q4 loss on reduced sales of desktop and enterprise hard drives, and aggressive price cutting throughout the industry. Maxtor experienced similar financial woes for its second quarter, which coincided with Seagate's fourth.

Seagate is also tackling the problem by cutting 3000 staff and rolling out new, compact hard drives aimed at notebook and consumer devices. However, with the notebook sales boom now apparently over, the shift of focus may have come too late. ®

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