Western Digital Corp. announced that it is increasing the warranty period of some of its hard drives by standardizing all WD enterprise drives warranty to five years and WD desktop and notebook drives to three years.

“WD has carefully listened to customers, whose storage needs and buying preferences vary significantly based on geography and application. Many of our customers offer 3-year warranties on their desktop and notebook systems and 5-year warranties on their servers. WD’s new warranty policy aligns with the industry standards and meets or exceeds customer expectations,” said Arif Shakeel, president and chief operating officer for WD.

All drives sold through WD’s authorized distributors and manufactured or purchased after June 1, 2005, are affected by the new policy, which means that all the enterprise hard disk drives the company sells are subject to 5-year limited warranty, whereas all the consumer HDD products are subject to 3-year warranty.

A recent survey of thousands of WD customers found that hard drive buyers overwhelmingly rate reliability as the most important feature in a drive. Warranty, performance and capacity also were high on customers' lists of priorities, the company indicated.

“The high quality and reliability we build into every WD drive is the greatest safeguard customers can have in protecting their data,” Mr. Shakeel added.

WD desktop and notebook hard drives, including WD Scorpio, WD Caviar, WD Caviar SE and WD Caviar SE16 drive families, manufactured or purchased on June 1, 2005, or later are now covered by WD’s 3-year warranty. The company’s enterprise drives, including WD Raptor and WD Caviar RE, are now supported with its 5-year warranty beginning the same date. Previously, the company maintained a policy including 5, 3 and 1-year periods.

Some of WD’s rivals have adopted increased warranties in certain markets, but not worldwide.