[pifm_guy]

I really want to see ssd manufacturers offer a decent warranty...

This drive costs $100, and will last 10 years or until 100TB has been written to it, as long as you keep it within the specified temperature/humidity/power conditions.

If it fails to do that, we will return $1000 to you.

[mrtksn]

This sounds like an SLA agreement, its very unlikely you'll get that for 100 bucks. Even if this manufacturer somehow perfected their process and have zero defects, they are still acquiring a 10 years liability for 100 dollars of revenue.

[rlpb]

APC sell surge protectors with equipment protection insurance for less than $100. Apparently, it's possible even for products sold at $100.

[walterbell]

In theory, a 3rd party insurance equivalent to AppleCare could be constructed for some technology products, but this is hampered by short product lifecycles, lack of BOM transparency (e.g components changed within a single product generation) and ability of firmware updates to change product behavior and invalidate previously collected data on reliability.

Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability.

[CharlesW]

> Open-source SSD firmware would provide more transparency on performance and reliability.

This seems fantastic. Are you saying you could review the firmware source and know that the 980 Pro would lose ~1% of its endurance per week?

[joenathanone]

Lifetime warranties used to be commonplace, I wish we could return to those times, or at least to a time of repairability.

[nightfly]

Lifetime warranty on a consumable product (SSDs have a limited number of writes) doesn't seem reasonable.

[thfuran]

It also used to be the case that a computer was basically ewaste within two or three years because a new one would be ten times faster.

[TacticalCoder]

Back when HDD would fail really a lot warranty was working. I'd happily fill an online form, Web 1.0 style, and then send my Seagate (I'm in Europe, was sending them to the Netherlands IIRC) disks and a few weeks later I'd receive a new drive.

I probably still have a few screenshots of these forms somewhere.

[jeffbee]

I am not sure why you want a 10x refund, but it seems like your request is easily met by current warrantees. A 1TB WD SN850X advertises 1200TBW endurance, rather more than you require.

[paulmd]

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/punitive_damages

Seems clear the idea is to make sure that companies err well on the side of lifespan rather than designing something that fails a month after the warranty expires. Because if they're cutting it close, a decent number of units are going to fall under the warranty line and they'll be liable.

Even if a company is required to stand behind the product, a lot of consumers won't pursue it if it's not perceived to be worth the trouble. Do you care about the 120GB drive you bought in 2012? Not really. Do you care if you can get 10x the original ($1/gb) purchase price for it? Sure, $1200 is worth my trouble.

As they say - "A times B times C, if that's less than X, the cost of a recall, we don't do one".

I'm not OP and am not gonna die on this hill as a point of policy, but if 9/10 consumers just shrug their shoulders and accept that their 8yr old drive has failed and throw it in the garbage, that's still a bad thing at a society-wide level where you want people to be using hardware for longer and longer periods of time. Especially as moore's law tapers down even further and hardware becomes relevant for longer and longer periods of time - a R9 290X is still a pretty nice piece of hardware!

Michigan used to do something very similar with checkout price scanners - if the price coded in the system was more than advertised, you got 10 times the difference up to a limit. And the point was to get retailers to pay fucking attention because a 50 cent pricing error on a can of chili could cost them 5 bucks. Punitive damages, with citizens who spot the violations receiving the bounty.

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/michigan_changed_item_pricing_...

[dataflow]

The SN850x seems to have its own issues from what I read (just google it).

[h2odragon]

Perhaps an insurance agent can craft a policy to do that for you.

Failing that, maybe a bookmaker.

[Spooky23]

HPE does that for enterprise disks. But it ain’t free!