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Maxtor ups desktop, enterprise HDD warranty periods

Same cover in whatever territory you buy

Hard drive maker Maxtor has followed rival manufacturer Seagate and upped the duration of the warranty it offers for enterprise-class drives.

The company also increased the warranty period for internal desktop PC drives to three years. In some territories, that's already the warranty duration for these products - in others it's just one year. Maxtor's move is essentially about unifying the coverage period across all the territories in which it operates.

Likewise, it already provides five-year warranties on enterprise-oriented SCSI drives, so the upgrade here brings parallel and Serial ATA drive warranties into line with those products.

Effective immediately, the extended warranties stretch back to all appropriate products that shipped after 12 September 2004, Maxtor said.

It also said that it had decided to extend the warranty periods for these two classes of product because of "the confidence we have in the quality and reliability of [our] drives". It clearly doesn't have much confidence in end-users' ability to install them, however: the warranty upgrade does not apply to drives purchased through retail channels.

And Maxtor's not as confident in its products as its rival Seagate is of its own offerings. In June this year, Seagate upped the warranty period on non-retail desktop and notebook drives to five years, to match the five-year warranty it had already applied to enterprise products.

Maxtor this week announced the unexpected resignation of its CEO, Paul Tufano, and his replacement by Cornice CEO Michael Wingert, who becomes Maxtor's president and COO. Tufano's departure follows a tough Q3 which saw Maxtor's loss expand to $90.6m despite a quarter-on-quarter increase in sales of 14 per cent, to $927.2m.

Wingert will undoubtedly be glad to leave Cornice, which is currently facing intellectual property violation lawsuits from Seagate and Western Digital. ®

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Maxtor loss balloons on job cuts, falling ASPs
Maxtor boosts SATA HDD cache to 16MB
Maxtor to axe 400 workers
Seagate extends HDD warranties to five years
Western Digital sues Cornice

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