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Have Fujitsu Harddrives Been Failing in Record Numbers?
Michael_Angel asks: "If your hard drive has started to show garbled characters in the BIOS at boot, or just does not pick up. You may be victim to what could be the biggest hard drive manufacturer failure rate yet! Our company is small OEM system builder and we have been hit by a failure rate of %90 of the hard drives we purchased a year ago. We might be lucky because we stopped buying after rumors of hard drive issues 3 months after Fujitsu Limited made some major changes. IBM had a pretty crazy rate of failure and was telling people to turn off smart mode. I've called Fujitsu and they said that there is no problem! However, a simple search for bad fujitsu hard drives on any search engine will point to some angry folks. One notable link is this Register story." Has this problem followed Fujitsu drives into other countries, or might they be limited to the UK markets? Have you noticed an unusual failure rate in Fujitsu drives compared to hard drives from other manufacturers?
He managed tag teams such as Demolition in WWF, and he can probably get someone to kick your ass if you complain about his products!
Whatcha gonna do when Fujitsu runs wild on you?!
I've noticed one thing -
As drives have gotten smaller/increased data density, they've become increasingly unreliable. I'm pretty sure this coincides with the new 1 year warranties (versus the older 3 year standard warranties).
Laptop drives especially...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Every single one of my friends here at school who purchased an IBM DeskStar-line hard disk drive had the drive fail on them less than a year after purchase.
I never thought that dependability could be much worse than for that particular line of IBM HDDs. But, this Fujitsu story sounds like it's a dire situation as well.
As a side note, I'd highly recommend (and do so to family, friends, etc.) purchasing only Western Digital or Seagate drives.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
who the hell would buy a fujitsu hard drive?
that reminds me of the "maxell" batteries I saw the other day. what the hell. stick the with the big names.
I don't know why but all the latest 7200 rpm drives are crap. I have tried Seagate, Samsung, fujitsu, WD and quantum, and all failed before a year, but WD Caviar SE (the only one with 3-years warrantie...)
we need something like the automobile industry's recall system, but it's too bad nobody tunrs in those registration cards...
hard drives are so important, they should be the most quality product of a computer... you can replace a cpu, motherboard, etc... but without backing up, you can't get everything on a hard drive back.
Runnin' On Empty
Its trendy these days to use bad capacitors in critical hardware. Pay a little more for quality... It is so worth it.
After convincing my co-workers to use Fujitsu HDD's, several of our drives began to die. Now my reputation in the office is hurt because of their issues. Then they deny anything is wrong, good one. I'll never recommend using their drives ever again.
Hard drives, on the other hand...
I work for a small VAR that sells Compaq (HP, whatever...) and we have recently replaced a huge amount of hard drives--every single one of them Fujitsu. I noticed that there is a firmware update on Compaq's web site for them, but I do not know if it relates to this problem. Anyway, if I were Compaq I would be really pissed right about now. This can't be cheap.
I've been wondering if the recently revealed electrolytic (ha, spelt it right that time) capacitor problem (bad taiwanese electrolytics) was related.
On a different note, Seagate's ST380023AS and ST3120023AS (Serial ATA) drives which were expected in Mid-October, then late-November, are now, according to a Cnet article a Seagate employee who shall remain nameless, pointed me to, is indicating shipping dates in Mid-December.. hopefully the two are unrelated.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I had a fujitsu drive fail in a work computer last year.
It was a real pain getting IT to even recognise that there was a failure because only sector 0 was bad and NT sort of functioned correctly even though it the drive would periodically thrash and freeze the computer (not swapping). IT's DiskDoctor tool couldn't detect the problem but Fujistu's own diagnostic tool could. Of course, our IT people considered the Fujitsu tool to be "untrusted" software and wouldn't accept it.
Luckily the data was still recoverable when I got the replacement (a crappy Quantum) after a few weeks.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
We could all have Kalok drives in our systems...
But seriously, I have a 5400rpm 1.2g Maxtor that has been in use for over 4 years. I had a 7200rpm 20g Seagate that crashed after 14 months in a machine. I think the combination of high rpms with super dense platters is what is causing the most problems.
Of course, My father thinks that people just don't give a shit about quality any more.....
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you do a search on the net for _any_ manufacturer or _any_ line of products you are likely to find a number of unhappy customers. Every hard disk manufacturer has sent out a bad batch on occasion -- I've had various people recommend to me at different times "Never buy Maxtor" or "never buy Seagate" or "never buy Western Digital" and so on .. because that particular person had a bad experience with a drive.
I have a stack of Fujitsu's here to RMA, and I finally decided to do it, and this is the first story... weird..
How is 90% a failure rate? 100% of all hard drives are going to fail sometime.
My first Fujitsu drive was a 1 GB and I have been hooked ever since. I have never had a problem with any of their drives, and though they are sometimes hard to find locally I always buy Fujitsu.
I was astonished to see this headline.
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
I have a Fujitsu drive and I've cut a hole in it and added a window. It still works fine, but if it stops working I'll never know whether it was due to my customization or not.
This isn't the first time The Register has fried Fujitsu' sushi. Check out an article from this past September entitled PCA attacks 'shabby' handling of Great Fujitsu HDD fiasco.
It makes me wonder if The Register, or at least one of the writers there, didn't get stuck with a few sand grinders doubling as hard drives.
--- have you healed your church website?
I have been using Fujitsu SCSI-2 and UW drives here since '95 with a 24*7*365 duty cycle -- not a single failure to date. Mind you, the latest drives used here are older than thos mentioned in the original post.
I was looking at picking up a pair of new drives of the latest SCSI vintage, any recommendations, if not Fujitsu?
Buy Western Digital. I've been using them for several years now, both at home and at work. I can count, on one hand, the number of failed drives I have had to deal with. And most of those were under warranty.
Personally, I view this as a classic example of, you get what you pay for. Sure, WD might be a bit more expensive than other drives, but on the other hand, have you ever had to deal with a customer who just lost a database that will take days to rebuild? Not pretty.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Maxtor. We have over 5000 PC Workstations at my previous job. We've had problems with just about every manufacturer (Quantum, Seagate, Fuji, WD, etc...) except one: Maxtor. Personally, I've got around 8 of them at home, 3 up and spinning 24/7 and one actually trashing all around the place continously (compiles, builds, rendering, etc...) and never had a bad block.
Does your mileage vary?
I don't know I have a bunch of Dell Servers that are using Fujitsu Hard Drives in RAID Arrays. In the past year and a half of using the dells with Fujitsu drives, we have only had one drive our of about 40 go bad. I can't speak to their IDE drives but the hot plug SCSI's are working pretty well.
I work for a small company as the solo-IT guy. We have had a total of 18 Fujitsu drives, all 10GB, from one batch purchase in October, 2000. I've had one failure out of them, and we're at the two year mark, so I certainly haven't seen a fail rate anywhere near whats described. Just another anecdote for the pile...
You know...
You can't just trash a vendor like that, without proof. Perhaps your company installed them wrong, the power supply has spikes on the output... anything.
Guess who Fujitsu might send the legal folk after?
This took me 5 seconds. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=fujitsu+hard+drive+failure&btnG=Google+Search . I'm not sure what the point of this "Ask Slashdot" is, is the person just trying to inform everybody that there is a problem with Fujitsu drives? I didn't see an actual question in that "Ask Slashdot" except for the ones Cliff tacked on.
rooooar
I have about 60 fujitsu drives at work. One failed a couple weeks ago. However my friend with same job at another location has sent back around 20 drives if not more, in the last few years. While hearing from yet another friend who worked for the state that he had fujitsus failing all over.
Problem
I think so.
I built a 60-node cluster for a client a little over a year ago. The hardware came from the "lowest" bidder selected by the client. The systems used Fujistu hard drives. After about 3 or 4 months, ten or twelve drives had died. We could see that more nodes were bound to fail and that it would be very expensive to tear all the nodes out and replace hard drives in all of them. Rather than wading through RMA hell as new drives dropped, we relunctantly moved to a network boot arrangement. It is not a great solution, but it does work. As of right now, we have about 40 of the 60 drives dead.
The company I work for built and installed 15 systems with identical configurations, all having a 20Gb Fijitsu hard drives. Each system was installed within the same week. Approximately 10 weeks later, each of the hard drives failed, in almost the same order they were installed.. I'd say this is definately a problem they need to look into.
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
I work for a large Oil Company in the North West US. We have roughly 1500 IBM 300PL systems in our inventory. Of those 1500 we have had to replace 700 or so Fujitsu HDDs due to various problems. Fortunately for our sake, IBM was using a mixed hardware pool when our systems were built because out of 1500 systems, all of the Fujitsu drives have now been replaced. Now we are suffering through Maxtor drives, but that is a tale for another day. This to me seemed to be a huge problem. We filed a complaint with IBM on this issue for not having a recall of the effected drives. IBM and all of the service centers in our area know of the problem, but that doesn't seem to be of importance.
Not only is this the largest mass failure of a product, but also probably the largest cover-up to protect all of the parties involved.
What really takes the cake on this whole issue is the pure audacity of Fujitsu in making this appear to be within the bounds of standard failure. That will keep me from ever using their equipment.
One of the many harddrives I have is a Fujitsu and they are prone to go bad, but as much as you say. I replaced 2 out of 20 that I have. I even got a better replacement because they were out of the drives I bought 2 1/2 yrs ago. So, I am happy.
My friend has an HP Pavillion xt926 with a Fujitsu hard drive in it. That thing gave her no end of problems. We had to pull it out of the machine on a daily basis and put it in my machine to correct file system errors caused by bad sectors that kept her machine from booting. When she finally called HP about it they said it was a common problem and replaced her whole system for free. They were very eager to keep it quite and make her happy, aparently they use the same hard drives in many of there low end server platforms. The machine was running Win2k with NTFS and worked perfectly after they replaced it.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
IIRC this happened with Western Digital 4.3GB and 6.4GB Drives.. after about 6 months they would just garble the info and need a low level format to fix the problem. About 90% of the drives were bad, some would just stop showing up in the bios after this happened a few time with the same drive.. I RMAed the drives and Western Digital replaced them without a question but never gave a clue what the problem was. this was in late 98 early 99 I'm wondering if this ws a similar problem...
Just Limin' Mon
It then goes on to say:
Believe it or not, their most recommended brand is now Seagate (the high end models). And they strongly recommend anything with a SCSI interface over IDE -- not for performance reasons (there's really not that much difference if you cache) but for reliability.
I can tell you from experience, that Fujitsu drives were easily, by far and the way the most failed brand of drive that we replaced. It used to be Maxtor's that died in record numbers some time back, but the difference there is that Maxtor's were much more widely installed.
A majority of the time that we had a system in with a bad HDD failure, we'd say "I bet it's a Fujitsu".. 90% of the time, that's exactly what we'd find inside the computer. After a while, we just stopped doing diagnostics troubleshooting on Fujitsu drives..we'd just close the system up and order a new drive.
And if we got a Fujitsu drive back as a replacement, we wouldn't even install it, we'd close it up and send it back requesting another replacement HDD.
They stopped us from doing that, said we couldn't send back drives that were working fine just because we didn't like the brand. So.. we said "ok", and resigned ourselves to the fact that the unlucky customer who got a Fujistu replacement drive would be back within a month.
And guess what? A majority of the time.. they were.
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
My HD started failing about 1 month ago!!!
Unbelievable.
Either garbled text in BIOS, or, no HD detected on that IDE channel.
My hunch is that this is physical. If I open up my case and give the Fujitsu a small tap with a metallic object, and reboot the PC, it works!!! (until it hangs again). Maybe the RW head is getting stuck???
My five year old Fujitsu 4.5GB SCSI-2 HD is still going strong.
I'm skeptical how long the 40GB drive in my laptop is going to last though, especially with the abuse it takes.
If your hard drive has started to show garbled characters in the BIOS at boot . . .
;)
Um... that really is a defect, if you hard drive is corrupting your BIOS...
I found the actual cause of the Fujitsu HD malfunction...PrOn!
/. about bad Fujistu drives it is probably true!
Apparently they are very allergic to PrOn and the more PrOn you have the more likely they are going to die.
And from all of the horror stories posted here on
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
The only Fujitsu drive I have is the one that's running on this system... it started acting strange around one year ago... it would not boot, bios would not even find it... I would "let it rest" for a couple of days, and it would be back up and running... to keep it from failing... I avoid powering off my computer ;)
In any case... I do not like the Fujitsu hdds any more... I didnt even like it when I bought it... what I liked was the price
I had a Dell Inspiron with a Fujitsu drive that used to make clicking noises all the time. When I asked Dell about it they sent me an IBM drive to replace it... they didn't say if they were having massive problems with them but they did indicate that there were a lot of these swaps going on.
Had a Fujitsu Model MPF3204AH, manufacture date June 2000, failed in Dec 2001 My friend had a MPF3204AT also manufactured June 2000, failed in Oct 2002. Never again to Fujitsu drives! In the past I've had a Quantum drive fail. No personal problems with Conner, Western Digital or Maxtor (so far)
I know that there in the west of Ireland that we are having severe problems with Fujitsu drives, especially ones beginning with the serial MPG3. The drives seem to have been giving up the ghost in high numbers for the past 6 months. (ie: in September, one site that had 15 PCs suddenly had 3 hard drives go in a period of 5 days...all three were Fujitsu with that serial number.) I seem to be receiving a call about once every two weeks now about a failed drive, and the majority of them have been Fujitsu ones...
Some Fujitsu drives manufactured just over a year ago have faulty chips from Cirrus Logic on them that cause the controllers to fail. Check the article for details. I believe there's a class action lawsuit in progress that you can join.
I lost one of my SCSI drives last year (a 4GB Quantum Atlas-2). I was not amused. It was still under warranty, so Quantum (now Maxtor) replaced it with another Atlas-2. The replacement (which came with a 90-day warranty) failed shortly after its 90-day warranty expired. Bummer.
I can't speak for the rest of the industry, but I can say this: none of my older (~300 MB) hard drives (which I've been using in my 486s) have ever failed. They rattle a little, they're rather slow, but never once have they let me down. Can the same be said of more recent media? I suspect not.
I owned a small computer shop for three years. We used Fujitsu drives for about one of those years. The main reason was to drive down our costs. However, it turned out that it cost us more in the end. We had a failure rate around 60%. Most of the failures were not spectacular, which made it worse! Strange things would happen. This was about 6 years ago, so I'm not surprised to see that they're having even worse trouble now. I also recommend Western Digital. They have been quite reliable for a long period of time for me and my users.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
I can seriously say that about IBM drives too, both at work, home, and systems i've built for others...kinda odd.
They just need to fire the guy with the rubber mallet at the end of the production line.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Yes, I had this problem on my puter: I have a compaq that comes with "same day support" - which in spain can mean a lot of things. One day my drive broke down. It was a fujitsu. The tech guy came the next day with a new one and even let me keep the old one for a few days while I submerged myself in hardware trying to mount it and copy my stuff out. Yes I do keep backups, but it's nice to just copy stuff back exactly how I had it.
Second time, same problem: hard disk just stopped. Same exact one as before (although I don't remember what it is just now exactly). The same day technician this time was a few days later than last time, because they'd "had to order the part from madrid". The guy didn't even check the drive. He just changed it. He said: All these fujitsu's just crash on us. I don't even check them anymore to find out why. We ordered in a seagate. This time everything was lost. The computer couldn't even read the broken drive.
Ale
Not bad slashdot, only missed the boat by 2 months this time. The Register has been following this for a good long while now.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I used to work for a small and a large reseller about 3 years ago. During this time I found that many fujitsu drives were returned, and in much larger quantities than other manufacturers. Since that time I've never considered buying fujitsu as I remember so many bad experiences with them.
A very large problem here is that almost everyone buys on price alone. Over the years I've seen a number of manufacturers of really superior stuff get beaten up because manufacturers and consumers are so price-oriented.
IBM and Fujitsu hard drives used to be the best -- really really solid and reliable. But they cost more. I remember when, several years ago, Fujitsu dropped their drive prices to bring them in line with seagatemaxtorquantumwesterndigital... -- I was surprised that Fujitsu could build a much better drive than their competition, at the same price. Turns out that they actually could not -- Fujitsu drives quickly started getting ungood.
Sigh. I'll gladly pay a little more for quality, but since few others will -- I'm hosed.
When doing my internship a friend at work recommended IBM drives, mainly on the principle that they had the best record for reliability. I have been buying IBM drives for years now (apart from a nice quiet Maxtor) with now problems whatsoever.
But about two years ago, my uni housemate got an IBM DeskStar drive which died on him after 3 weeks from getting it. Turns out he got the drive where they had the glass platters, and the heads on the drive literally crashed and cracked the platters. He had all his Uni work on there, although we kept yelling the work 'backup' to him. I don't know how many of these drives had this problem, but IBM pulled the drives as soon as they found out about the problem.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
I have no idea whether or not Fujitsu's hard drives have been "failing in record numbers." But if they haven't, then I imagine that Slashdot will be looking at some sort of lawsuit in the near future. Well done.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The ex-girlfriend (still friend) had her hard drive failing. "Okay, order a WD, I'll come by and replace it." So she did, and the WD was DOA, and we end up out at Staples paying too much for a smaller Maxtor. But even too much is so cheap these days. Given that drive manufacturers are barely holding on in this market, and are all scrimping on quality control, does it even make sense not to install drives in pairs with RAID/0 mirroring? The cost of the second drive is far less than the time involved in even doing regular backups (although these are still a good idea for when to tornado strikes), let alone restoring a system.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun. At Princeton University, every time I order a hard drive for my Sun servers, it is actually a re-badged Fujitsu as of this past summer. Prior to Fujitsu all Sun drives were actually Seagate, and they were very reliable.
Though I find this news disturbing, I have to say I have personally not had a failure of any of my Sun/Fujitsu drives yet. Knock on wood...
Perhaps this problem is not in the higher-end 10k RPM SCSI drives?
I had bought 15 such drives 1 1/2 years ago for custom clones. All of these drives have since died. Never again will I buy Fujitsu. Its not that they died (other vendors are no better). Its the fact that they lied, and gave me no support in resolving the issue. They didn't even care that their products were failing with such a high rate. In that same period of time, I had bought some Western Digital drives, that have since died also. But when I called WD, and gave them the S/N they sent me a replacement drive, no questions asked. Compare the two and tell me who you would like doing business with. Vendors who don't stand by their products should be run out of business. Would I buy a Western Digital drive today? You betcha! Would I buy another Fujitsu? No way! Not even if they paid me!
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
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I've had a 30GB 7200RPM Fujitsu drive for some time now... it's been in use at least a year and have not seen any trouble with it yet. The article did scare me into making yet another backup, but seriously, there are a lot of good posts here talking about how we tend to blow everything out of proportion. Yes, the register seems to have quite a bit of proof of faulty drives, and yes, this drive isn't exactly the cream of the crop. I can say that it has been doing it's job, and so far it hasn't made any strange noises or emitted any foul odours. On the other side of the consumer spectrum, it's not unusual for an automobile manufacturer to recalls tens of thousands of automobiles for "issues" that can actually result in death, yet people continue to drive those cars (many of whom didn't even get the recall notice and are driving potential execution chambers.) The fact is, at least with disk drives and data, if you don't have a backup then it's your own damn fault. It's like preventive health care for your information.
I've been at a new job for 3 months now and we use a lot of IBM pc's of different varieties. I've replace the HDD's in about 7 of them in 3 months. All were Fujitsu's. It's not scientific but seemed strange that they were failing at such a high rate. IBM wouldn't even troubleshoot the problem anymore. Just ask the symtoms and ship a new one.
worked at a joint that used Compaq's exclusively they were shipping them with 10gb Fujitsu HDs and then 20gb HDs.
All of them have been replaced with 1.6 - 5.0 WD & Maxtors from older machines. All of them == 490 units. Compaq told us we were loading things wrong. Fujitsu blamed Ghost.
This
I worked on an IT project at Western Digital. The drives that pass quality tests with flying colors go to customers like Dell, Compaq, etc. The lower quality ones go to Frys, Comp USA, etc.
I work in a tech support dept. for a mid sized university. We recieved 18 Gateway desktops with Fujitsu drives in them. Within 6 months, 12 have died. All but one of those were replaced with non-Fujitsu drives and work perfectly. The single Fujitsu replacement was a different model and series that its predecessor and it failed within 3 days!
As the quality of drives is getting worse, more people will be turning to RAID to protect their desktop storage. It's no coincidence IDE RAID is becoming more common on motherboards, and the hard drive manufacturers aren't going to shed a tear about selling twice as many drives.
I Heart Sorting Networks
my friend has a fujitsu 20 gb that failed a couple months back he never rma'ed it though... It seems to me hard drives are getting increasingly unreliable, i Myself have had 2 20 gb western digital drives fail on me (the data was, thankfully for the most part recoverable) and an ibm 40 gig die on me too. it seems that the smaller drives last for nearly ever (my mother has a 8 gig Maxtor drive and its at least 3 years old i think but still works fine) I still have a small 1.2 gb drive that god only knows how old it is and it also still works fine... i find it at least strange
One of the desktop models that we ordered for widespread deployment in our enterprise was the compaq ipaq desktop. The 10GB Fujtsu drives that came in the 866mhz ipaq desktop. "Hard Drive Model MPG3102A" are failing left and right. I would estimate that I have had to replace on average 2 of these drives a week for the last few months. The drives started to magically fail after about a year of use. Fujutsu says that the drives should be covered under compaqs warranty. (which is only 1 year, and since gone), and refuses to help us replace their defective drives. The funny thing is that these drives have a known hardware flaw, and there is a firmware out there that tried to fix it. All of our drives have the alleged "fixed" firmware, yet they still are failing. If anyone wants a box of the 50 or so fujitsu paperweights that I've got over here please let me know. I really wish we didn't have to eat the cost of all these drives.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
"Ever since our launch over four years ago we've been bombarded with e-mail asking us to address the reliability of hard drives. Well folks, this is it... the culmination of months of discussion, research, and development. We're pleased to unveil our 2nd-generation SR Drive Reliability Database!"
Had a Fujitsu 40GB report it was failing (via SMART), so I popped a brand new Fujitsu 40GB drive in off our parts shelf to clone the old one to, and it reported the same error. After spending an hour making sure it really was the drives failing and not the machine I cloned it over onto an old maxtor and sent both in for warranty service. Got new ones back promptly in 11 days. I'll have to keep an eye on them now as well, guess I'll be putting them on the shelf with the spare 75GB IBM Deskstar...
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
The drives in question were manufactured in the UK. No other drives are affected. These drives have 2 major problems:
1) They leak oil
2) Over time, the platters turn brown and rot like a Brit's teeth.
It's an 8 gig...it can not be used as a boot drive but works just fine as the second drive in my computer. With them taking over IBM drives..... Ohhh BOY!~shudder~
Hopefully owners of all the other PC brands will post similarly helpful messages!
I find it ironic that I just got off the phone working out a RMA for a fujitsu scsi I just received today that would not even power up. Here I am thinking "what the hell am I doing wrong, this is a brand new drive". Piece of junk.
ymmv
I would say that the two year failure rate for Fujitsu harddrives sold in my shop was as high as 75% up till 2001 - when I stopped selling them because the RMA's were driving me nuts. I'd also say under %10 for Maxtor and Western Digital, the other drives I sold...
There is however, good bad and best LINES of HD products out there. Ive been running a test lab of over 100 computers, and supporting another 100 or so for 7 years. In all that time, i have dealt with just about every line of HDs from every manufacturer. Every single one of them has a line of HDs that suck. Had one shipment from Seagate once where 17 out of 20 HDs went bad within 6 months. In all the yeras, the only IDR drives i trust now are the Seagate U series drives. They arent the fastest, but they are built to last. And they are quiet. Ive bought hundreds of them for work by now, and have never regretted it. Out of all of them, maybe 5 have gone bad.
Step 1: Create shoddy Hard Drives
...Today is Friday, if you disagree then I don't care cause I'll soon be in Ireland and you won't. So there.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit!!!!
Don't you love capitalism?
.
Fujitsu drives were up to about the end of the year 2000, the most dependible drives I used. I installed hundreds of them in system and had almost no RMA's. Prior to using the Fujitsu drives I used a mix of Maxtor, Seagate, and Wester Digital and had far more RMA drives with those brands, especially Western Digital.
At the end of the year 2000 I noted a sharp increase in Fujitsu drives failing. In fact I just RMA'd 2 more dated 12/2000 yesterday. I'm not sure why but the increase was there.
My Fujitsu 6gb hard disk handles my /usr directory just fine! And its 3 1/4 years old!
From my experience, I've never had a hard drive that I've bought and cared for myself ever die on me for no reason. Probably about 10 hard disks from all different vendors. I have however destroyed my hard disks accidentily.
On the other hand, I've used disks second-hand, or been given disks (or stolen disks) that have died on me. But I can't vouch for their care.
Maybe you guys are just really rough with your disk drives?
One thing I have noticed about Windows users is that they're very quick to blame their problems on hardware when it's really Windows' fault that their devices don't work or their filesystems have been corrupted etc.
Anecdote: I know someone whose NIC just stopped working on their Windows 2000 box. Couldn't get it to work at all, reboots, reinstalled driver, etc. He booted Linux and it picked up the card and configured it with no sweat. How many people in situations like this that don't have Linux end up tossing their hardware because they think it's dead?
Until recently I worked as a technician in a retail computer shop, and we had terrible luck with Fujitsu hard drives, the MPG3204AT in particular. Some drives wouldn't detect at all on POST, most just had the "click of death", and as a result were subjected to the "freezer of doom" so we could try and rescue some of the customer's data (not that it usually helped)
Maxtor/Seagate/WD drives seem to be quite a bit more reliable, but one of the OEM's we were buying premade systems from was using "Fush*tsu" drives, so we encountered quite a few of them (I'd say at least 50% failure rate)
We also had problems with MSI K7T Pro mainboards we recieved from the same OEM, so it could just be we were getting shafted w/ known-bad product.
In any event, in the past few months I've seen the same articles on The Reg and other spots, and I'm not at all surprised to have seen it.
It may be news to some of you that Fujitsu has subsequently pulled out of the desktop HDD business (they still manufacture laptop and enterprise drives) Fujitsu's Hard Drive Lineup
I know there will be about 10000 people here saying Fujitsu sucks but I have to say that my experience has been different. I have a bunch of ATA Fujitsus (MPDxxxx & MPExxxx). They have been all on 24/7, some for four years straight. Excellent drives, running very cool, unlike the stupid IBM's 34 & 75 GXP series.
My two cents...
I work for a small consulting company on the US West Coast, and we have seen a major number of Fujitsu drives fail as well. We actually stopped purchasing them about a year ago and are much happier with the Segate HDs that we have been purchasing for clients.
So far no failures from the Segates, while the Fujitsu rate was over 80%.
this past week i just RMAd 2 20gb and 2 40gb Fujitsu drives. also RMAd one about 2 months ago. whereas ive RMAd 1 seagate in a year, and 1 WD, but I am yet to RMA a Maxtor hdd tis year.
> My five year old Fujitsu 4.5GB SCSI-2
:)
> HD is still going strong.
I bought a 1.054 GB SCSI-2 Fujitsu in 1993. It cost about a grand US. It still works.
It actually performs decently, too -- 5400 RPM, 10.5 ms access time, 512 KB cache. Not bad for a piece of 9-year old hardware to still perform about as well as entry-level current stuff.
The freaky thing about that drive, is that you can use one corner of it (where the arm pivots, presumably) to pick up quarters. It will hold four if you're patient.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I've experienced 100% failure rate in drives I've been getting in machines from a local dealer. They've all been fujitsu. I didn't actually make the connection until I saw this story. The drives work fine for about a year and then completely die. In contrast, I've got maxtor drives in servers that have been running 24/7 for upwards of 4 years.
So does the light really go out when you close the door or what? Dying to know.
I built a file server a couple of years ago and started out with 2 30GB Fujitsus. I don't remember the model numbers, but they are ATA66 7200RPM. They've been spinning nearly 24/7/365 for 2 years now and I haven't had a problem.
However, my IBM 60GB drive is on it's way back for a 3rd replacement in one year. Truly pathetic.
I also have a brand new Maxtor ATA133 80GB drive that runs great with one glitch--I have to use a Windows 2000 or XP boot CD to create a boot delay ("Press any key to boot from CD.....") in order to boot anything (Grub, LILO, Windows). I guess this could be fixed by using an IDE boot delay in the BIOS, but that feature doesn't exist in mine. Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed the speed of my new Maxtor. It's only a month and a half old so I can't comment on reliability as of yet. At least it's not making noises yet (which was the case with my IBM drive).
we are having severe problems with Fujitsu drives, especially ones beginning with the serial MPG3
Must be one of those new RIAA-compliant hard drive models.
You would blame a whole country, a whole culture because of one stupid company?
BIGOT!!
But at least you are not a lameo first poster.
Especially with laptop drives, I've had nothing but bad luck with IBM drives (3 laptop IBM drives and all three failed within 12 months) -- replaced one with a Fujitsu drive (it makes a lot of really scary sounds, but it does still work 2 years later) and one with a Toshiba (quieter than the IBM and a lot quieter than the Fujitsu, and seems to run very reliably).
Oddly, to me, the Toshiba drives are about the same price as the Seagate/Maxtor crowd and cheaper than IBM. I would say that right now I would only buy Toshiba laptop drives. And I'd avoid IBMs for the next few years until I see some kind of concensus that they have fixed whatever is their problem. Fujitsu's would be somewhere in the middle....
-- Ancient (IBM 1620 and Atari 400) Programmer
and I refuse to buy anything buy them now.
What is weird is that I have had drive failures by Seagate and WD. the only brand that I have never had a problem with is Maxtor. So I only buy Maxtor.
Of course after typing that, I fully expect my HD to fail before I click 'submit'.
If you've got a installation of more than a couple of these HDs you'll *know* about the failure rate. If not, then the 10Gb unit is part MPG3102AT dated early 2001 - if you have one of these replace it NOW. I guess that MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT are faulty too.
There's an interesting thread here. But trust me, if you have a home PC with one of these units in, replace it right now.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I work for a large soft drink making company that through a third party contractor ended up with Fujitsu hard drives in all of the equipment that we use to control the blending and dosing (Putting in bottles) of our drinks. About 6 months ago we started noticing failures of these machines in large numbers but could not work out what was causing them.
We initially put it down to heat (Surely these drives can't all be naturally broken) and fitted expensive cooling gear. They kept failing.
We then thought that it was the contractor messing with the machines that caused the failures so we put in better access control (Simple key to allow dial in). This didn't fix it either.
It was only when I ordered 80 western digital hard drives and started replacing the Fuji's once they broke that we started noticing that the WD drives were not breaking. We are currently scheduling downtime of the plant to replace the rest (Not easy given it all runs 24x7 and we are always behind schedule).
Needless to say we are not happy at all. I would hate to think how much money all that downtime has cost the company, and how much lost sleep the IT team has had to endure from the endless call-outs.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
I work at a kinda small PC maker and we used to use Fujitsu harddrives. We have suffered about 60% failure rate and actually lost business because of the ordeal. We have been replacing at our cost the harddrives with seagates.
The interesting thing is that in the UK, Tiny Computers used to use Fujitsu drives... And because Tiny were cheap, many universities bought from Tiny ...
;-)
Imagine just how many PHd students have already sobbed after their disertations have disappeared. . .
I had a fujitsu 40 Gig drive that head-crashed after 8 months of use. In all fairness it was 8 months of pathalogical use (downloading about 40 sources at once, continuously, 24/7 and churning out CD's, then deleting content continuously as well), but nonetheless, for a hardware failure of that magnitude to occur is a real downer...especially since this 40 Gig drive replaced a previous drive that had headcrashed. At least I learned my lesson and had everything backed up for the great DASD crash of 2002. I lost a lot in the crash of 2001.
I work in one of the biggest companies of Belgium, and we have bought a lot of compaq computers with Fujitsu (or Fu-shit-su as we call it now) hard drives. 90-95% of them have failed in the last six months. The rest are sure to follow, we already received 50 hard drives from another brand from our supplier to replace the Fujitsus when they fail. (we can't wait for days for a replacement part to arrive)
It's pretty stupid to say "Fujitsu hard drives are bad" without giving model numbers. IBM drives were fine, except the horrid GXP line. The MAN-series 10K RPM SCSI drives I have at home are all running beautifully. As far as I know, it's just a certain line of cheap IDE Fujitsus that are displaying these problems.
Please be more specific.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Hi! I'm working on computer scene from 10 years now, and we got a bunch of bad Fujitsu drives 3 ago, mostly coming from OEMs, here in Brasil. Terrible piece of junk. Most of them worked no more than 2 years.
Andre "Nariga" Moraes Salvador - Bahia - Brasil
I just worked on a server here at work today.. inside was a Fujitsu 34GB U160 hard drive. Anyway, I got done doing what I had to do, plugged it back in and "No Boot Device Found"...
Great. Then it dawned on me.. this happened to be before on this same server! I opened it up, adjusted the cables, power on, and nothing. Hrm. Did it again, this time wiggling the power molex connector (which seems quite loose) and now it works! I am calling the vendor for a replacement ASAP because I think there is just something wrong with the drive.
Has anyone else noticed how hot hard drives get? As the densities get higher and the parts get smaller, I don't see how such temperature fluctuations can't have a devastating effect on a thing so 'physical' as a HD.
Some time ago we built a system which had roughly 150 IBM Travelstar, 20GB notebook drives in it.
Whenever we turned the system on, there would almost always be some drives (roughly 3 or 4) that made 'clunking' sounds for about 20 seconds. Consequently, the system that one of those drives was in would not boot because it couldn't read from the drive. It wouldn't always be the same drives, but some would do it more frequently than others.
Originally we ran these systems with a in-house written BIOS, but in the end we where able to reproduce the problem without a BIOS chip at all (that is, the clunking would happen, of course the system would never boot). We looked at the power up voltage and it was well within spec.
IBM engineers came over to look at the problem and took a drive with them to analyze it. Nothing came out of that exercise and we ended up swapping all the drives for Toshibas, after which the problem never occured.
What amazed me was that IBM recognized the problem and never came through with an explanation, let alone a fix.
Ha ha
What the hell indeed!
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
Please, somebody post the link to the story about the lawsuit between Fujitsu and the supplier who added phosporous to the molding compound. I've bought a fair number of Fujitsu disk drives mostly they worked great. Of the four drives I bought affected with the recent problem, 2.5 have failed. I don't think it was Fujitsu's fault. That said, Fujitsu has done a miserable job of owning up to the problem once they realized what had happened. The other day I heard that a local school had to return 40% of all drives ordered from this drive series.
I was a tech in a computer store for several years and at some point we started using fujitsu drives for "economy pc's". They had such a high failure rate that we gave them the nick name FuShitSu. I would guesstimate that the failure rate was somewhere around 30% in 6 months! This was a far cry from Western Digital or Maxtor. Within that time frame failures were virtually non-existent, the only exception being some WD's that were made when the plant had been contaminated (the factories story at least). The adage that we used to go by was seagate for scsi and western digital for ide. Though nowadays it seems that maxtor drives are just as reliable as WD. Up until the lowering of warranties I would have recommended either with no hesitation if for no other reason than their replacement policy. Both made it exceptionally easy to rma drives. That will probably continue but 1 year seems awfully short for something that is supposed to reliably hold all your files. How many typical home users actually back up their data on a regular basis???
It wouldn't surprise me to find that claims of such a high failure rate were true. What with the new, bigger, better product coming out X months (sometimes weeks) from now, and the corresponding drop in price of "older" hardware, I think your average gamer, who arguably is the real driver of the hardware industry, doesn't care so much about things like reliability, because it'll be time to upgrade again in a couple of months. Who cares if their HD was only going to work for a month or two after that? Manufacturers seem to only be interested in being able to put higher numbers on their product, instead of building a product that actually will work properly for any significant amount of time.
(caveat) This is based on mostly anecdotal evidence. I guess i've just been lucky, i've been using computers since '84, and the worst hardware problem i've had is a capacitor dying on a monitor.
I've been seeing these problems pop up quite a bit on any tech forums.
Which HDD should I buy? I am in the market for one, but I don't want it to crap out on me in a year...
Any suggestions?
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
They were failing in record numbers here where I work. I was one of the victims but fortunately, I backed everything up before it died.
Fujitsu released a firmware upgrade for them, but it didn't work and the drives failed anyway.
We had a lot of pissed off people with lost work, but there's not a lot you can do about that.
Now the newly-outsourced IT dept. here wants to switch us all to IBM Netvistas.
I would have to say that he is lucky though; those particular Maxtor drives (850 meg to 1.6 gig) are extremely failure prone.
You can't make blanket statements about one brand versus another, but you can take past data into consideration when buying a new drive. Some manufacturers have pretty consistent failure statistics (WDC, Seagate). Others produce good drives most of the time, but have bad spells from time to time that alienate a lot of customers (Maxtor, IBM, Fuji).
All it really comes down to is the level of honesty and support that you get from the company you buy from. IBM and Fuji show an astounding lack of good faith when it comes to dealing with quality problems. Maxtor, WDC, Seagate not only go out of their way to bring problems to their customers' attention, they also have advance RMA policies, even for OEM drives in the case of Maxtor and WDC, to get you back on your feet ASAP.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
1. Buy a Promise PCI HD controller. The ATA 100 one is available everywhere for 49 bucks. Maxtor sells these branded as their own too. 2. On the way home, stop at Radio Shack and buy two 120 ohm resistors. 3. Do a Google search to get the instructions on how to convert it to a RAID controller. If you are able to solder 4 connections, you can do this mod. in 30 minutes. It's beyond easy. 4. Get yourself a HD the same size or bigger then the one you want to mirror. Brand doesn't matter. I bought a Maxtor 60 gig for 99 bucks that had a coupon inside it for a $50.00 rebate to get their controller card free. 5. You're done. Okay it was only four steps. The ATA 66 Promise card can also be modded and doing so is even simpler then the ATA 100 one. I've done many of both and never had a single one go bad. The ATA66 card can be found as cheap as 20 bucks.
I think this is a bad correlation. At the same time drives are getting more dense and/or smaller, more people are using them. The use of PCs over the last 4 years has greatly increased. There are more reasons to need more drive space, I have a 30 GB and a 120GB. I wouldn't have needed those 4 years ago, but now they are about 60% full. Hard drives are used a little harder now. People are modding cases, OCing their systems, and generally getting more out of the PC than they have in years past. I had a 4 GB drive fail 3 weeks after the 3 year warranty expired. Now you would be hard pressed to find a 4 GB drive. I think that manufacturers realized that 3 years is a LONG time in the tech industry. Compare the number of drives sold 5 years ago to the number sold today.
I don't know if there is an increase in unreliability of hard drives over the last few years, but I know that instead of 1 computer I now have about 5 running at home. Of course, all this applies until one of my drives crashes, then I'll be convinced that hard drive manufacturers don't give a damn about quality anymore. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have a 6 gig Fujitsu that has the goofiest jumpter settings. In one mode you set one jumper across a pair of pins like any other drive, in another mode you set two jumpers, one in the normal fashion and another *horizontally* across one of the pins used for the other mode, in a manner normally used to park jumpers on drives that have all jumpers open for some modes.
I neglected to do this properly -- I couldn't believe it worked that way -- when adding it as a slave drive and it corrupted the master drive, sinking my system.
It's the only drive I've ever seen that used jumper settings in this manner. I haven't used the drive much, so it hasn't failed...yet.
Thanks for correction about RAID-1. But wouldn't the extra cost only be for the extra drive, presuming the CPU is lightly enough loaded that Linux kernel RAID shouldn't much affect the responsiveness of the system, as is the case with most home office systems? 60-gig 7200 rpm drives are around 80 bucks - or 100 if you don't shop around. So with two of 'em you're at 160-200, less than a single 10 gig drive cost not too long ago. And at costs this cheap, how could they not be intended to be disposable?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I reecently had that happen too.. I had a 3com PCMCIA NIC. It just stopped working in win XP, even after i reinstalled it and everything. but under linux it was working just fine. strange.
I am good friends with a local computer company, reasonably small, but getting bigger, and very popular, (I also do some work for them, but I digress), they tend to get lots of 3rd party fixes (PC World for example) and obviously, they fix their own as well. They have loads of fujitsu drives laying around, just an initial look shows whole hd holders (what a package of drives are held in) of FAILED FUJITSU DRIVES! They must get atleast a few PER WEEK! They now only sell Seagate drives, and the odd maxtor :). They havn't had one failiure yet on them. . .
Forget slagging off without evidence, they have all the evidence you could want there against Fujitsu.
Where do you get all that energy?
Please forgive me, this is the first time I've ever been trolled. It's kinda neat....
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
If you want a decent hard drive, buy a Western Digital. I've used Maxtor and Western Digtal drives in the systems that I've bought or built, and between the two drives, Western Digital is more reliable. The Maxtor drives I've had in my lifetime started to fail after a couple years, but my WD drives are still running just fine. My first Maxtor drive that died on me I ended up taking apart just so I could see the interior of the drive. While looking for all the hardware to rebuild an old Athlon 750 system, I stumbled across this drive, and I plan on hanging on to it until I decide to quit being a g**k (censored because my girlfriend doesn't want me saying it, along with "n*rd").
My company has purchased about 30 of the iPAQ desktop computers. Most of these had Fujitsu or Seagate drives in them. I can confirm that we (in the past year) have had about 20 of the computers' drives die.
What I've learned in the last year, after purchase of about 150 Compaq EN class machines, is this:
Within about 1 year- Maxtor drives WILL fail. Fujitsu drives WILL fail. Western Digital MAY fail (20% or so), and Seagate drives WILL NOT (so far) fail. All drives are 20G, same specs across the board- Compaq (like most of the big manufacturers) mixes them up for us.
The odd footnote? We've had an 80% failure rate of floppy drives, right out of the box. Of course, since only one or two drives ever get used anymore, we don't find the failure until it's been in the field for a year or more.
Personally, I'd buy Seagate. Their 120G 7200 RPM drive still carries a 3 year warranty- it's not as big as it could be, and maybe that's the reason.
I own a small company selling custom build boxes. We only use Maxtor...had no problems here.
Here are the failure rates from a big French hardware reseller (LDLC) : IDE 7200 rpm 20 Gb : Seagate : 1.3% (448) Western Digital : 8.8% (1506) IDE 7200 rpm 40 Gb : Seagate : 1.6% (7643) Maxtor : 1.9% (8052) IBM 120GXP : 3.1% (4790) Western Digital : 7.2% (1726) IBM 60 GXP : 22.9% (1068) !!!!!! IDE 7200 rpm 60 Gb : Seagate : 0.7% (284) IBM 120 GXP : 2.5% (722) Maxtor : 2.5% (1791) Western Digital : 8.6% (490) IBM 60 GXP : 16.1% (932) !!!!!! IDE 7200 rpm 80 Gb : Seagate : 2.4% (1248) IBM 120 GXP : 2.8% (2131) Western Digital : 3.1% (1676) Maxtor : 3.3% (2060) IDE 7200 rpm 120 Gb : Western Digital Special Edition : 3.0% (132) IBM 120 GXP : 3.1% (708) Western Digital 100 Go : 4.3% (470) Western Digital : 5% (120)
Highpoint chipsets are cheap, I've got two motherboards with them built in (and unused)
In a heartbeat I would buy a 40 GB drive that was actually internally mirrored 40's. Yes, I will pay a significant premium for integrity.
So, manufacturers, build me a single drive form factor hard drive, with 1 ide connector that is in fact a RAID 1 array!
I work as a PC Tech in a medium sized buisness thats been buying Fujitsus for years. There drives where top 'noch till they started to die. There have been weeks when we've had to reload about 4 machines a week becouse of these drives. Thats fairly said considering we only have about 100-150 machines in the company.
http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/news/hdd.html
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The main presentation computer for a non-profit group I work with died just a few weeks ago. Hard drive failure.
Imagine my lack of suprise when I took it out and noted it was the same series of Fujitsu which was in the news.
Getting a replacement was no troubles though. Unlike other manufacturers Fujitsu's Canadian website was very easy to find and work with, providing excellent step by step instructions.
Two weeks later we have our new drive... unfortunetly it is the exact same model and series, so I wonder when this one will go.
-Rod
There's no question here.
Excellent use of a period as a comma.
Unit labels should appear after the quantity. A quantity expressed as a percentage is not a rate but a ratio.
Here are the failure rates from a big French hardware reseller (LDLC) :
:
:
:
:
IDE 7200 rpm 20 Gb
Seagate : 1.3% (448)
Western Digital : 8.8% (1506)
IDE 7200 rpm 40 Gb
Seagate : 1.6% (7643)
Maxtor : 1.9% (8052)
IBM 120GXP : 3.1% (4790)
Western Digital : 7.2% (1726)
IBM 60 GXP : 22.9% (1068) !!!!!!
IDE 7200 rpm 60 Gb
Seagate : 0.7% (284)
IBM 120 GXP : 2.5% (722)
Maxtor : 2.5% (1791)
Western Digital : 8.6% (490)
IBM 60 GXP : 16.1% (932) !!!!!!
IDE 7200 rpm 80 Gb : Seagate : 2.4% (1248)
IBM 120 GXP : 2.8% (2131)
Western Digital : 3.1% (1676)
Maxtor : 3.3% (2060)
IDE 7200 rpm 120 Gb
Western Digital Special Edition : 3.0% (132)
IBM 120 GXP : 3.1% (708)
Western Digital 100 Go : 4.3% (470)
Western Digital : 5% (120)
I work for a an agency of NYS. About a month ago, we received a state-wide bulletin requesting information on failure rates of hard drives. The bulletin stated that there had been a huge increase in drive failures in state-owned computers since 1st qtr 2002, but that it wasn't limited to a single vendor. All of the major manufacturers apparently put out crap. In any case, my agency had observed almost exactly the same failure rate as the rest of the state agencies on the whole, so I tend to believe that manufacturers are just plain making garbage these days. Just my $.02
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
I work for a small company in the eastern US that had the misfortune of using close to 1300 Fujitsu MPG3102AT 10.2 GB drives in our systems. We've had to replace close to half of them already due to a PCB failure.
With first IBM, and now perhaps Fujitsu drives failing seemingly quite often, I'm feeling more and more insecure about all the data stored on my HD. Like a lot of Slashdotters, it would be pretty bad for me to lose a lot of that data. (And it's a LOT). What are people doing about backing up several GB of data at once?
At the company I work for, I have approximately 1500 PCs that fall under my responsibility. Generally, these PCs are purchased in batches of 100 - 150 depending on specific needs at the time.
At some point we ended up with a batch of 150 Compaq's with Fujitsu drives. After a higher than normal failure rate (although I can't say 90%) we were able to get Compaq to listen. They then began sending us replacement drives for every Compaq we had with a Fujitsu drive regardless of whether a specific drive has actually failed at that point.
It's really too bad there aren't enough (any?) sales types that will step up and proactively notify a customer (especially one who does decent--non consumer level--volume) and alert them to a potential problem. Instead, we had the opportunity to figure this one out on our own.
I cannot give you any kind of meaningful data, except this: in the last three years, in environments that are probably equal mixtures of Fujitsu, IBM, and Maxtor (in terms of IDE drives), I've seen far more Fujitsu drives die than anything else. At my current company, I've had 75% of my Fujitsu drives die, without a single other failure.
http://www.tweakhardware.com/guide/raid100/
This is a big surprise.. NOT!!! When will OEMs and consumers learn that you get what you pay for? Fujitsu drives are junk, they always have been and probably always will be. The thing that annoys me is that people compare apples to oranges when it comes to PCs. There is a HUGE difference between someone running a PC with a PC chips motherboard, realtek video card, maxtor or fujitsu hdd and someone with the same spec PC running on western digital, asus motherboard and ati graphics cards. Yet you'll see OEMs try to convince people that their $300 cheaper computer is just as good.
:)
The reality is, the performance is crap and its likely to day the after the warrenty expires!! I've seen people say that all drives fail eventually, to give you an example, I have a WDC 1GB drive from 1994 thats been running 24/7/365 completely hammered since 1994. It died about 6 months ago... Thats 8 years of constant operation without ever failing!!!
What is a real crime is whats happened to companies like Quantum and Seagate. Decent Quantum Fireball drives (AS series) are crapping out because they've used cheaper parts in the 7200 rpm drives causing them to fail!! I have a Quantum AS which lasted less than a year!!!
Seagate used to make great drives back in the RLL and MFM days, but their recent drives have been crap. Anyone have any good experiences with their newer models?
As for Fujitsu... I used to have a Fujitsu 286, called it the Fujiwreck.. pretty fitting for most of their equipment
About 6 months ago, a partner company in Silicon Valley wanted to send us about 30GB of source code. We decided that the easiest way was for them to ship it on a hard disk for us.
It seems they had a policy of using Fujitsu drives and we went through no less than 3 drives that arrived dead.
So I can certainly say without a doubt that Fujitsu drives are the most unreliable I have ever seen.
FWIW, the data was shipped on a WDC drive and it arrived fine. We never did get a single Fujitsu to work here.
I love to ask other techs what their harddrive superstitions are, you always get different answers. I recently told a client not to worry if people told him his new drive brand was bad, you can find a horror story on any brand.
Everyone's got a jilted lover somewhere.
Now, my experience has been very good with fujitsu, with the exception of the ones from the junkyard, which can't really count. It's just a coin toss! If one has a 5% failure rate and another has a 1% failure rate, who cares? It will either fail or it won't. 50% chance.
My IBM IDEs have failed 3 out of 6, but actually, it was TOTAL failure on any system that is regularly cycled and total sucess on systems that are always up. Hmmm....
I've been burned by every major brand except one fujitsu that was my fault for hitting the circuit board with the shield of a USB cable by accident. Luckily had an identical drive, swapped the boards, no sweat.
All IDE hardware seems to have moved into the CONSUMER area of things, and it's all really equally crappy, (except DeskStar really sucks) I have about a dozen Seagate and IBM 9 gig SCSI drives, no problems there! Been royally burned by both their IDE's, though I don't shun Seagate, but when they started to look like Connors (they bought connor) a few years back I lost some faith.
So, my rule is, RAID-1 if it's important, even the best drives will fail. Standalones are disposable, back 'em up to RAID and when they get even a little wierd, open up the window and throw 'em out!
=mortimer
Sorry, but the parent post was a troller's comment. It said precisely the opposite of what most of the people here will tell you they've experienced.
I've personally (Though you'll have to take my word for it) lost several WD drives; the last one made a frequent clicking sound for about a week before it went kaput.
I'm told by several of my friends (who build and sell computers) that IBM drives have usually been untouchable, while one of them said he'd shoot himself before putting a WD drive in a customer's machine.
Minor lesson:
How are you going to tell the difference between a troller's comment and a factual (or at least honest) comment? You really can't, without having been around to absorb the general opinion.
When I don't know much about a subject, I usually depend on the anecdotes and hyperlinks. Up to this point, even this post, by that criteria, is highly suspect.
Wouldn't it be neat if Slashcode had a sort of Bayesian (sp?) filter that tried to predict whether a particular user would reject or accept a post based on his past reactions?
While in training, it would merely tell you what it would have predicted, while you train it by performing personal moderations on comments. (personal mod points would be granted depending on the availability of CPU time to run the Bayesian analysis.) These personal moderations could even be made visible to friends and fans.
Granted, it's the worst form of censorship: I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would simply reject anything they don't agree with, and thus silence the opinions of any dissenters to their private world. It also has a large possibility for abuse, if you consider Slashdot admins to fulfill the "big brother" role.
But people who reject dissenting opinions automatically probably wouldn't listen to the opinions even if they did have to see them. So I think it would still be a nice, and useful, feature.
I'm going to put this in my personal journal, for those of you interested in following this topic.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I work for a smaller school district as a PC/network tech. The company we usually purchase computers from was using fujitsu hard drives because they were dirt cheap. After about 6 months or so of normal use, we started having failures. It started to be several a week and as of now we've probably replaced 20-30% of them with western digitals. Until I saw this story I wasn't sure if it was just us getting a bad batch or if Fujitsu was FUBAR'ed. Good to know others are going through our same woes.
the easiest is to put the drive as far down as you can get in the case
Interesting idea. I hadn't thought of that. For my computer, I mount my 3.5" hard drives in removable 5.25" drive bays. The bays are made of aluminium to help dissipate the heat, and they have a small fan in the back to help circulate the air away from the drive. Of course, the only 5.25" drive bays in my case are at the top of the machine.
I originally bought the drive bays years ago because I noticed how much heat there was between my two drives. Given that there was only a couple millimeters of space between them, the heat had a difficult time escaping. I wanted to put more space between the drives, but my only 3.5" bays were taken by the hard drives and a floppy drive.
The drive bays cost me about $50 each (I bought two), which seemed expensive, but as I think about it, I've never had a hard drive fail on me. These days, you can get similar drive bays for $10-$20 each.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
It's a bit difficult to do comparisons when both the manufacturers and their major purchasers have their own reasons to be, er, less than transparent about the actual figures.
Fujitsu do seem to be attracting a lot of attention recently, though. And the place I work has had 2 division-wide replacement programs for Fujitsu HDs for their Compaq ENs in the last couple of years - for most cases a precaution, with data copied successfully 1 for 1 to the replacement device.
Just a single data point, of course.
I have to agree... Manufacturer QC yo-yos so much these days that by the time one manufacturer has an established rep, their QC changes and people buy loads of drives they think are reliable that die in droves.
IBM used to have a stellar reputation for drives, and I would never buy from any other vendor. Now, IBM's name is mud and no one who has a clue is going to buy a Deathstar.
Likewise, it took me 4+ years before I heard enough testimony indicating that Maxtor and WD had shaped up their act before I would even think of buying another drive from either of them. (I now have a Maxtor 80G drive, and I'm pratying.)
Back when I was in high school administering my school's network ('97-98 is when I did most of my admin work there, as we got our 'net connection in erly '97), we had Western Digital 540M drives failing on a regular basis. Out of 20-30 PCs with WD 540s, we had an average of one failure a month. Our web server used 2 gig Maxtors. Over the course of 2 years, we had two of these units fail.
Supposedly WD and Maxtor are much better now... I hope so. I have a Maxtor and may be getting another 120G unit.
Seagate has always had a stellar reputation, especially their SCSI drives.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I had a 20gig and it failed about 1 yr later. It was fine for the first few minutes but once the PC was warmed up it would start to fail. Took it back to Fuji, they are just around the corner from me(Near Toronto) and swapped for another one, no questions asked. It was like the guy looked at the model and new what the problem is/was.
You're also neglecting the appliances: ipods, Xboxes, PVRs all have Harddisks too.
Between my laptop, fileserver and workhorse, plus the other oddball products, I've got 7 drives a spinnin. and three or four in a box somewhere that were too small to continue using.
That said, i've NEVER had a drive fail that I didn't addicently cause myself. I've had a few with niosy bearings, but have found that as long as I didn't power cycle the machine they were in, they continued to run faultlessly.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I've personally replaced over 9 fuji drives (of the 10 i've sold in the past year) in the past 2 months. The frightening part is that the 10th drive is mine! Time to go find me a replacement before this kicks up its heels i guess. When I brought back #'s 7,8 and 9, the guy actually had the nerve to ask me if I wanted replacements for them! lol I told him it would be a loong time before I bought/sold any Fujitsu product again and he couldn't seem to understand why, even after I pointed out that i've replaced 9 of his drives that my customers trusted me to purchase for them. Worst part: refunds were 'current market value' ($105.00 for a 20GB, 7200rpm) while we paid over $150 new. (monsters!) thanks for validating my suspicions! diginorth.com
I wonder if the relatively recent (October) change in hard drive warranties was a pre-emptive move on the manufacturers part realizing that they could ship these just-good-enough drives with severe early mortality rates and get away with it.
I don't see Fujitsu in the lineup but I know very little about hard drives, so far all I know one of the manufacturers Tom's Hardware reviews actually applies to them.
My
Limekiller
I work for a mortgage company we have all Compaq machines. We have about 350 deskpro machines, all identicle. In the last seven months we have had 29 failed hard drives all of which have been Fujitsu drives.
http://www.stormpages.com/crazyape/mbraid.html
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Still have a 100MB Toshiba MK234FC running in my firewall box. Got this drive 2nd hand in 1991 over the net from a guy at Univ Chigago. Its been running 24/7 ever since. By far my most reliable drive, and its been in quite a few systems.
This is weird. Just this morning I had a server go down. It wouldn't boot up at all. I put the HD in another PC (as a slave) and the screen came up all screwey after a reboot. I set it as the master, and again-- the screen text was garbled.
A few mins ago, while waiting for NT to reinstall, I came across this article. My failing HD just so happens to be a one year old Fujitsu.
Will
P.S. I'm in Canada.
the DMCA?????
Q. How do you spot a troll?
A. With very *very* large knives.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
IBM's reliance on Fujitsu to handle their drive manufacturing was a mistake. Fujitsu, was also responsible. I work for a disty and the Fujutsu 20 giggers labeled IBM have been failing for the past 1.75 years. IBM selling out their interest to Fujitsu was a good move for IBM. Bail out while the bailing is good. Research is great, and IBM is good at that, but manufacturing takes expertise, which Fusitsu did not have, nor did they develop either.
http://www.sheller.com/ibmclassaction.htm
With Compaq aka The new HP computers in our office, which almost all had fujitsu or maxtor drives, the fujitsu drives have almost all died out from our 2001 computer batch. Computers prior to 2001 seem to be far more reliable. I would say 80% of our 2001 fujitsu's have needed the hard drive replaced.
Here is a lawfirm with a class action lawsuit regarding several models:
The Fujitsu hard disk drive model numbers that are a subject of this litigation include, among others, MPG3204AT; MPG3307AH; MPG3102AT; and MPG3409AH. Continue to monitor this page for the addition of other model numbers.
Where I work we ordered several hundred Compaq Deskpro 733's we noticed right off the bat, failing hard drives in the order of 20 - 30%. Fixe actions ranged from smacking it (if you're a tech, you know what I mean), to just having Compaq replace to drives en masse. Sorry for the anon -but better safe than sorry.
I have had hard drives from IBM, Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate and most recently from Maxtor fail well before their expected EOS.
The magnets in them are great for all kinds of other uses and the platers look neat when lined up on my wall. I havn't found much use for the heads.
0xfeedface
I've been pretty happy with my sample of *two* Fujitsu MPG3409AT drives. They're silent, run cool, and serve up 40GB each without hassle for about three years so far.
My beef is with the IBM Deathstar GXP drives.. the 60 and 75GB drives last 1 to 6 months, and then get read errors. I have one drive that has been RMA'd four times. I don't dare install the replacement drive.
but its the only hard drive ive ever bought that failed within 5 years. and it failed in like a matter of 6 mos.
________________________________________________
Because, luckily, I have RAID 57. So, I can handle it when 90% of my drives die.
I agree.....I was being a little sarcastic...I have 4 - 3.2gig Seagates in a Samba box that has not hickuped once. I think there are more factors than brand name that dictate failure rate.
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72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think it's a good correlation. I've been a computer user for the last seventeen years. In the first fifteen of those years, I had one drive go bad. In the last two years, I'm going through them like butter.
What I think is happening is that manufacturers are exploring the cheapness threshold that consumers are willing to tolerate in their push for higher densities. Once it crosses too deeply that economic threshold, they pull back and make them just reliable enough to keep the average consumer content.
I'm personally hoping that a more expensive drive is released that is more reliable. I'm willing to pay extra for a critical component in my computer needs.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I had the misfortune of using 4 IDE 60G DeathStars, 2 for work and 2 for home use. Within 6 months 2 of the HD failed on me! Please do not use IBM DeathStar HD especially with such a high capacity. IMHO, this issue is indicative of what is plaguing the computer industry in general, that hardware companies love to market a product by boiling down the "quality" of a product into 1 or 2 quantifiable performance measurements. i.e. PSU - wattage, processors-clock speed, HD-capacity/transfer rate. We as consumers buy into this philosophy. If a cheapy-asian component's performance in 1 or 2 categories is equivalent to a reputable brand's, but 20% cheaper, heck we'd all buy it. But what we have to start doing is evaluating products in all aspects, including: stability, durability, power consumption, noise output, etc.. and not just in the raw performance category. Raw performance just doesn't cut it these days. Here are some examples: AMD is cheaper but no I'm not dealing with heating issues anymore, GeForce4 is great in raw performance but isn't image quality just as important?, and finally PSU/heat sink fans - yeah my cheap-asian heat sink fan can cool like a mofo, but no I don't like my rig sounding like its preparing for takeoff. I don't know about everyone else but do you sometimes feel like computers nowadays require an on-hand IT staff just handle HW issues? Not even including SW compatibility issues/crashes. -Muaythai Pitbull
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I think there's a grain of truth to some of the complaints.
You have to look at things over the LONG term though.... not just an isolated batch of complaints from around the same time period.
Honestly, I know relatively few people with complaints about Maxtor drives. Like everyone else, they occasionally released a bad batch. Still, you'll consistently find people relatively satisfied with their products over the years.
Fujitsu, on the other hand, I never had a good feeling about. I heard some good things about their rather pricy SCSI drives, back when they competed with Micropolis and built drives that took 2 full-height 5.25" drive bays. Whenever I looked at their IDE drives though, I just got the idea they weren't striving for "top quality". They cut corners on the little things, like the IDE connector itself. (Instead of surrounding the pins with a plastic guide, they typically went without - making it harder to plug in the ribbon cable properly.)
IBM always had a great hard drive reputation, until they trashed it with the horrible Deskstar issues. It's going to take a lot for them to dig back out of that hole.
Western Digital is probably the one drive vendor that's that hardest to pin down. I've generally liked their drives a lot - yet I can't deny they have a lot of drive failures. From using their products over 10+ years now (in the workplace and at home), I get the idea they generally have a lot of RMA "out of the box". If you get a good drive that doesn't make any weird noises, it'll probably be a good drive for years to come. If it seems a bit "flaky" when you first start using it though, look out. It'll probably be a dud in the long run.
I had/have a 10 gig Fujitsu MPG3xxxx Drive that went bad a couple weeks ago. Was very annoying, had my Linux partitions on it and data and I ended up losing it all. Their online RMA thing went pretty smooth though so I'm glad in that respect with them. I hope they somehow make this more known to people other than Slashdot so everyone doesn't lose their data past those who already have. Explains a lot though.
I think I'll just lie down and sulk for 2 days. I hate my life.
Also, you know who really scares me?
Die-hard Michael Bolton fans.
They are crashing hard drives everywhere with the sheer force of the stupidity field generated by their musical preferences.
freecddb.org had to be restored from tape 3 times in one week as a result.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have a FUJITSU MPE3064AT and the thing sounds like a crying baby. It's only two years old. S.M.A.R.T reports one failure so far. Thankfully, it's no longer my primary drive for anything useful ;-)
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
That they're there isn't necessarily a big deal, but quantity can be telling. And how many people you see saying good things. And so on.
This is true of all sorts of things. The first computer that was completely mine was purchased from a company that eventually went belly-up, had all sorts of shady business practices, and tons of bad things said about them on the 'net, but I didn't find that out until after I bought it.
Let the buyer be informed. It's always a good idea to read up before making major purchases.
I've had 3 10gigs, a couple of 5 gigs, a 6 gig a 2 gig and a 20 gig all RMA'd back to WD.
don't make blanket statements. wd is all I buy, and they're not immune either.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
I have to say this....I have some Micropolis 5.25 FH 6.4gig SCSI HDs that get very hot....but they still run great. Maybe the 'rated operating temps' have changed, or lowered, or maybe, just maybe, hard drive quality is less than it used to be.
On a side note...I was being sarcastic about the Maxtor / Seagate thing. I have had Maxtor / Conner / Quantum / Western Digital hds crash on me, and I have one of every brand (well maybe not any Conners) still running somewhere in my house.
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72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I would mod you up +1 Funny.
Nice one!
I work for a company which has a large number of PCs both internally and at client sites (200k+). many of these machines have fujitsu hard drives. We were actually informed from Compaq (at the time) that there were problems with the drives. While we haven't actively replaced them we do replace the fujitsu drives when ever we come across them
I work the IT desk at the engineering dept. of a large university. You have no idea how many failed drives (Laptop and Desktop) we've gotten with Fujitsu on them... They are absolutely terrible. I couldn't even find a diagnostic for the drives. Anyone found one?
If it's the ondrive controller thats failed, not a head crash,
then you can take the controller off an identical model, and
copy the data off to save it. It's just usually about 5 screws,
and carefully removing the ribbon cable. BE CAREFUL!
Note that i said IDENTICAL model.
The downward price pressure on hard drives has been extreme in the last few years, and now wer're paying the other price - in reliability.
I worked for several years for a company which designed and manufactured ICs for hard drives (I worked on read channels, but the company made other chips as well, such as preamps and servo controllers). There has always been competition and downward price pressure in this market, but early on, both the ASPs and the product lifetimes were somewhat reasonable.
Over the last 5-10 years, things have changed a lot. The lifetime of a drive product is very short (sometimes as short as 6 months), and each new generation is so much faster and denser than the last that many of the critical components require a from-the-ground-up redesign with very little being borrowed from the previous generation. This, combined with lower ASPs than ever, have made it more and more difficult to be highly profitable as maker of chips for hard drives. Companies that are successful have engineers working very long hours to do it. Several companies have left the market entirely, or have taken on other product lines as well
And this is just the ICs. I'm sure manufacturers of other drive components (platters, heads, etc.) have seen similar erosion of product lifetimes and ASPs.
The end result of all of this it that there will be an inevitable hit in quality and reliability. There's really no other choice. When customers are once again willing to pay $200-$300 for a current technology drive, you will see the quality go backup. Even today, SCSI drives, which are generally more expensive then IDE drives are also more reliable, as many posters have pointed out.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Anyhow, almost 60% (probably more, the PC's are spread all over the country) have had Fujitsu drive failures. These are all domestic (U.S.) Pc's with Fujitsu 10 GB drives. I am so glad that this is a real problem - I feel like sending this link to the pain in the ass support guys that have made my life hell everytime a PC dies and needs a hard drive replaced.
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
If people can't write complete sentences.
Then I don't know.
Which is more important.
Whether hard drives don't work.
Or whether our language skills don't allow.
Us to.
Talk about it.
In some previously agreed.
Formal manner.
I just replaced a drive for a client, not due to failure but due to need for increased storage.
When I looked around for drives only Seagate were prepared to give 5yr warranties on their products.
If manufacturers don't stand by their products, how do they expect consumers to.
Interestingly, this axiom *should* apply to most commercially available software which usually has a complete disclaimer of incompetence, warranty etc in the license agreement.
How long before we see such disclaimers on hardware?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I don't think it's about one brand vs. another - more likely the particular model. The low-end high-density consumer drives are less reliable than the expensive 'server' SCSI models (yes, sometimes they are the same drive with a SCSI interface, but not always).
Nearly a year ago I was worked for a company in California (not going to name it) but we sold 1000+ drives to a government organization, easily more than half were returned to us defective before I left in the summer and from my understanding even more have been returned since then. I thought it was just something they were doing but after looking around on the web, I found out it was a defect, the company kept hush on it and just replaced the drives.
The problem is if the PSU goes on the blink, this can trash multiple drives. If you are unlucky, it can trash your entire RAID-5 set. The PSU on many machines is selected purely on a cost basis and even if can deliver the watts, it may send spurious voltages in the process of self-destruction.
The only way is a second system and to synchronize, i.e., with rsync, the data on each system. Regrettably, disks have expanded beyond the capacity of all but the most expensive tape drives.
I have a 15GB Fujitsu drive that fails all the time. Bad sectors are a common thing on this drive as well as every time it boots Linux, having a hard drive related problem.
--- WAL
I'm an IT Admin for a film school in New Zealand, and we had about 20 of the 10gb and 13gb variations fail in about 3 months. It got to the point where i'd just turn up at our supplier, walk out the back and grab a new one from the pile of replacements.
Our supplier acknowledged there was a problem, but we never got any offical word from Fujitsu.
I have RMA'd 14 Fujitsu MPG3102AT drives(all manufactured between 11/2000 and 3/2001) drives over the past year, and 7 other misc model Fujitsu drives. I estimate that I have only purchased about 60-70 of these drives in total. No other companies drives we use have had this high a failure rate. Fujitsu is always happy to exchange them under warrenty, but when pressed they will not admit that there is anything unusual about these failures.
I work at the IS dept. of a major hospital in Canada. Fujitsu 10GB HDDs have about a 40% failure rate for us right now...
I can't really take sides when it comes to hard drives nowadays. Best bet I can say is buy ones with 3 year warranties. If we all continue to buy drives with 1 year or DOA warranties, the manufacturers are just going to keep pumping us with crappy equipment. But, some of this might come down to how we take care of our equipment. We have to keep these newer drives cool, and we have to pay attention to what they're doing. If you catch one odd action right away, you got a much better shot at saving what you have on the drive. I can't take sides on brands. I had 3 maxtor 20gig 7200 rpm drives go, 2 within one month of receiving the drive. The latest is still working. Sucks that I lost a ton of pictures from my digital camera. (dumped them to the drive to wipe out my laptop's hd, which normally holds the pictures, then the drive died) I just recently had a WD go, and somehow they won't honor the warrany...i won't buy one of theirs anymore. I have a couple Fujitsus, and they are running good so far. And, i've yet to see a Samsung drive go.... I guess we just gotta keep backed up, and take care of our drives. Just don't sell out for the cheaper price if you're not getting a decent warranty.
The Cirrus logic chips on the drives controller have been manufactured with the wrong grade of material causing them to fail over time.
Typical symptoms of drive failure are:
IDE drive not ready errors.
Smartdrive reporting recommends drive swapout.
IDE checking software e.g. DPS found in Compaq Deskpro EN machines BIOS reports various errors and recommends drive swapout.
The failures are so commom we don't bother to do a drive check anymore, we've been swapping out 20 machines a day and cringe when Compaq send us a MPG3 series drive as a replacement which nearly always fail the DPS check or are returned a week later as DOA.
I have had 5 hard drives come to me as unbootable in recent months - which is 5 more than normal, and they have all been fujitsu.... I asked fujitsu about this and they swore it was coincidence....
One week before the warranty got void, my IBM 45Gig drive crashed. I lost a lot of object files, so no actual dataloss, just recompile everything :-) ... happy me :-)
:-(
And two days before the warranty was over I got an RMA number
But in general, all my hard disk drives crash after about 4-5 years of running 24/7.
Cheep drive --> early failure.
I think this is not specific to drives, it is a general issue! A company that sells items which will work forever will go bankrupt soon, the life of some item just needs to be a little bit longer than that of the competitor. That's business
I was working for a small PC white box OEM in 1995, and Seagate had a run of bad drives right around Christmastime. I'd say for every Seagate we pulled, 2 out of 3 crapped out on the format-and-burn. It got tracked down to a quality control thing at one of the factories they were buying parts from.
Either way, it sucks to lose the data, but Seagate's still around and they fixed their reliability problems. Lots of people swear by them. By the same token, I've never seen a bad Fujitsu drive so YMMV.
I've been working desktop for a large company for a little over a year now. We have HP omnibook laptops throughout. The hard-drives vary in manufacturer (Maxtor, toshiba, fujitsu, and the dread ibm travelstar), but one thing is certain they all die. I now spend 8 hours a day attempting to recover the data, that is NOT covered under warranty. In doing so I void any warranties for replacement of the drive. So not only are we facing record numbers of failure (at least 4-5 a WEEK) but any attempts to recover result in US having to pay for replacement of the unit.
And 9 times out of 10 the replacement unit we are sent (directly from hp) is factory refurbished. These naturally have worse rates of failure, most don't even make it the first month. What surprises me the most is that these things supposedly go through a qa process, but on plugging them in most sound more like a sewing machine than a hard-drive.
I can run a drive ALMOST to seath and then take it out of service, never to use it again. If it hasn't failed yet, it will NEVER fail. Therefore your 100 percent rant is merely empty words.
Does anyone have a good tip on what backup-program/script to use?
I only have a CD-RW, but I only need to backup some 2-500 Mb. The important issue is the verifying bit, so I know my restore will work. Are there any good backup-programs/script you would recommend, thats open source?
Those of you with Compaq Ipaq legacy-free models featuring DPS should check out your hard drive... bet you have the featured Fujitsu MPG3xxxx. Oh, didn't you read the article before reading this? Go back now, read it.
We all get along together like tornadoes and trailer parks.
The biggest mistake I've found is to put the drive in a 5.25 'cooler cage' as these enclose the drive in more metal, and vent it with a 40mm fan, which DOES NOT MOVE MUCH AIR - I remain to be convinced this helps, in my trials the temp of the drive is HIGHER in so called 'cooler bays'.
Why - look at the size of the blades on a 40mm fan, they can practically hardly cool themselves.
I've also cooked 2 Maxtors to death in a Lian-Li removable IDE Rack for similar reasons. I will never again put any 7200 rpm+ drive in a single enclosure with 40mm fans - my data is too important.
If you want to cool drives you need to move a large amount of air - ideal is one of the cages that mounts an 80mm fan with 3 drives - this will move and air and does help. Thats what we used in the RAID server I mention below, and are one of the great advantages of Chieftec cases (also sold under other names)
Failing that put the drives in the bottom so they are in front of the cases lower intake fans, or less ideal in front of the upper rear exhaust fans if you have a larger case (not great as they'll be over the PSU, but with 2 fans it will help)
Bottom line - additional 40mm fans are for decoration only, the cooling is negligable - the only case where they work are where they are built into the drives like some burners - because these draw air through the case that otherwise wouldn't move. As hard drives are hermetically sealed this doesn't count, you need to get air moving at a fair rate over the metal chassis if you want to make an impact - 'cooler bays' don't do this, they don't have the flow rate with thier puny fans, fans grills, and the fact there is very little airspace in the case. Far better just to mount it in a 5.25 mounting rails and lett convection do the rest - there will be more air flow!
The only product that ever made a difference was one that was totally open and had 3 40mm fans across the front(Bay Cooler I think??). But with 3 fans its a noisy little sucker as the 40mm run like crazy to shift enough air, I stil favour a single decent 80mm mounted at the front of a large drive cage, less noisy and more efficient.
Funny - I've always found Enermax supplies to be better than most on its regulation.
Especially when we put together an IDE RAID server with 4x8 drives on 4 3Ware cards, plus boot and CDRom drives.
It's been my experiance that drive failures come in batches. Actually, it's been my experiance that electronics failures come in batches. Of the hundreads of systems I've worked on, I've seen hard drive failure rates of only around 3%. But most of those drives were all part of the same order. I haven't seen any increase recently in any one brand of drive. And not anything that relates to decreased warranties. I've seen higher failure rates on laptops, but I expect that from machines that get hauled around here and there.
The question posed made mention of complaints on the Internet about Fujitsu. But this is really what the internet is about. I mean, other then the most efficient porn delivery system in the history of the world. The Internet is about people making unfounded complaints because they think the 'system' is screwing them over. They tell lots of horror stories, but rarely is there any credible evidance to back them up. But it's out there on the Internet, and I can read it, so it must be true, right?
bance.net
Funny that this story appears just days after I had to ship a defective 6GB notebook Fujitsu hard disk back to Fujitsu for replacement. Fortunately, Fujitsu has a very friendly website at www.fcpa.com that allows you to test your drive and fill out an online RMA form to return any defective drives to them for replacement. I think most of their drives come with 3year warranties.
I have a Fujitsu 6gb laptop drive that has been running great since 1998. I also have a Fujitsu 3.5" 20gb that has been running equally well since 2000. My brand spankin new WD-800BB 80GB Western digital drive failed in 5 months after purchase (and the only reason i got it was because of their $75 rebate on a drive that was almost $200 in Feburary 2002).
All these stories about crashes scare the hell out of me...
My IBM DeskStar 60gig is running at 22 degrees C, what would be the best temperature and what would be the treshold before it bursts in flames?
Anyone who knows this stuff?
I'm still using 5 1/4" floppies. sorry
it's a sig, wtf?
I have a Fujitsu drive (MODEL MPG3204AT) that came with a gateway machine purchased in the US that failed about two weeks ago. The machine was working fine, rebooted, no drive detected. Now the drive is a paperweight.
No problems here with Western Digital drives, which have been perfect in recent years.
So you want a "redundant pair" of drives in one package?? Wheres the redundancy in that? I can't imagine them cramming in completely independant electronics, heads, servos, spindles, platters, and spindle motors, and if they did, I'd imagine the extra heat from all that would make the drive fry itself much faster than a non-redundant 40G drive would. Also, with one IDE connection as per your specs, that alone becomes a single point of failure. What I really want is a reasonable backup solution thats affordable, fast, and easy to use.
the hard drives still suck. I had this same sort of failure problem with them 3-4 years ago when we had put in a bunch of new Compaq workstations. They were very nice about it even though they made us go back to Compaq, who then promptly sent us Western Digital drives and did not even bother to ask for the Fujitsu ones back.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
They got excellent performance reviews on Storage Review but no reviewer can travel forward in time a few years to see how the drives hold up.
The result is that we have IBM drives in all our production database servers, web servers, and app servers. And I picked the hardware. Who said no-one ever got fired for buying IBM? Guess it's true, as I didn't lose my job over it.
AnandTech had an interesting article here on the drives, and why they went bad (poor microcode that handles the interval between tracks as the drives heat up).
I just got my first Fujitsu (10 GB) a year ago, and it's holding up fine. Western Digital ("Caviar" (sp) models) seem to have a very high failure rate from my experience.
I've had a 2 GB Seagate running (heavily used) for 7 years now. Maybe it's true what IBM says about the more you use your HDD, the more magnetized it gets (and thus furthers it's lifespan).
One of our developers machines locked up. He rebooted and there was a bunch of garbled text where it was trying to detect the IDE drives. Nothing would fix it. I tried the drive in other machines and nothing got it back up. So the guy had to recode everything he had been working on for the last few hours after I got a new drive installed for him.
Then one day I got called out to a client site. They had a Linux server I installed for them. They said it was locking up. I told them to power it off and bring it back up. They did that. I SSH'd into the machine and it locked up about 30 seconds in. I told them to reboot it again and it wouldn't come up. They said "it is printing some really weird stuff on the screen." I dropped everything and headed over there. It was the same exact problem. I couldn't get the data off the drive. No bios would accept it. I noticed it was the exact same model. It was a 9.1 gig IDE drive by Fujitsu.
Needless to say, as a person with a lot of influence on what my clients buy, they never buy Fujitsu ANYTHING anymore.
I've had FIVE of these die in the last year. Five out of about Eight. Model number is MPG3204AT. Someone in my department had his drive die on Monday.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
I think this is a bad correlation. At the same time drives are getting more dense and/or smaller, more people are using them.
I work in tech support for a company where the population has been largely fixed (so it doesn't matter if the rest of the world is using more than usual - I have my own data). I have LOTS of hard drives going through my hands so I'm familiar with failure rates. They have been increasing. Certainly, there are lots more drives out there, but they are failing at a higher rate.
In years past, it was easier to deal with tech support if you could let the drive "speak" to the technician on the other end of the phone. Usually, the techs were button monkeys that didn't realize that *I already knew* the drive was bad and needed to be replaced. So in the end, I'd usually just power up the drive and give it a few good whacks on the counter. Then I'd call up support and put the phone up to the drive. This reduced call times to only a couple minutes rather than the typical 20 - 30 minutes that it took the monkey to run through the flow chart.
Me: Here THAT? It's broken!
Tech: Your shipping address, sir?
Today's drives don't take much whacking as they are much more delicate. This is also evident by IBM's new Thinkpad Shock Absorber (page 2, feature #5). With my old Thinkpad, I once (forgive me...) had a near car accident while it was powered up. The damn thing flew across the car and smacked into the dash with nary a problem. It still works today.
Tip: for the new one year warranty's, just buy two drives and mirror them. Whack one at 10 months and the next at 11.
Cheetos,
swordboy
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I have a 3.1 GB Fujitsu drive that just started reporting funny characters during the BIOS boot process. Should I quit using it, or what?
I've never met someone who lost the drive instantly and permanently without using some simple technique to temporarily revive the drive long enough to get the data off.
Usually it's just an old drive that won't spin up anymore. I tell them to get a replacment drive, install it, then power up, tap the "stuck" drive on the side gently with a rubber hammer (or a regular hammer wrapped in cloth), then copy your data off of it to the new drive.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
I'm personally hoping that a more expensive drive is released that is more reliable. I'm willing to pay extra for a critical component in my computer needs.
Yes, me too.
Anyone know which is considered the most reliable drive manufacturer out there? Is there any brand that is famous for not crashing?
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
i just replaced my friend's fujitsu 20gig with a maxtor 40gig. it was being detected periodically upon boot up, but typically the bios couldn't detect its presence. i wasn't aware it was such a huge problem. the drive was working perfectly, then one day.. piff. the data on the drive and its integrity seemed to be okay. just thought i'd add to the list of people that have had a problem (or this specific problem) with fujitsu's harddrives.
then again, i bought an ibm for myself and witnessed a failure with one of their scsi drives just 3 weeks ago at another friend's place.. guess i'm sticking to maxtor from now on for the sake of convenience. their RMA and replacement department is only 30 minutes away from me =).
my friends and I all have a 100% failure rate with 10 and 20gb fujitsu hard drives... i got about 4 of them for free from an auction (a computer training business went bottom-up, and i was working with the auctioneers about technical stuff), and none of them lasted more than a week. these were brand new drives. since then, i have had friends that have acquired these same model drives through similar means, and none of them have worked for more than a month or so.
the problem that would appear:
things would start to get unstable... acting flakey; so you run scandisk. bad sectors start at the beginning of the drive and continue for at least 5 gigs. not something i want to sit through... i have a friend that did a full scandisk, and it took ~6hrs for a 10gb drive. when it was through, he had ~4gb of usable disk space left.
just my experience...
It was because of recurring problems with IBM drives that I ended up replacing them with Fujitsus about six months ago.
My system is all SCSI, all the time. As a result, I end up paying in the neighborhood of $200 for an 18G drive. With prices like that, failure is simply not acceptable. Some people say that all hard drives are crud and are going to fail, so one should simply plan for it. Well, then why are the hard drives in my 12-year-old Amiga still working fine?
After enduring my most spectacular failure to date, I resolved to change drive brands. A couple of years prior, I upgraded the drive in my laptop computer. The first drive I tried was an IBM Travelstar, and it made the most gawd-awful racket. I could hear the thing two rooms away over the fans in my main rig. So I sent it back and took a Fujitsu instead. It's been perfectly quiet and reliable ever since.
After this happy experience, I decided to put a couple of Fujitsu MAN3184MP SCSI drives in my main rig. So far, they have given me no trouble at all.
I can't imagine what the heck's going on in the hard drive industry to cause so many failures. I can only hope one of the manufacturers will spill the beans at some point.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
In evidence that this defect is not limited to the UK or US markets, I have recently replaced an MPG3204AT with a Cirrus Logic chipset which I purchased in Canada, less than 2 years ago. I also have an MPG3102AT running in another machine which is yet showing no ill effects.
I've used/been responsible for quite a few different brands of IDE drives over the years, and it does seem to me that quality is getting much worse. It seems you can hardly get 2 or 3 years out of a drive anymore. I've had a lot of Western Digital drives fail, but that is probably because I've used mostly WD drives. I've also had one Fujitsu fail... it was one of their 6.4GB models I think. I still have some old drives in service, like an old 127MB Quantum that just keeps on ticking. It must be about 7 or 8 years old by now! It's apparent to me that overall quality is decreasing in the IDE drive market. Drives used to last to the point where they were too small to be practical, but that is becoming incresingly rare these days. Drive manufacturers probably just want to sell more drives...
I had a laptop which ate hard drives. It was under warranty so I kept sending the hard drives back to the company, and they kept sending me new ones. I was going through about 2-3 hard drives a year (my laptop stays on constantly, It almost never gets turned off) I noticed that most of the problems only occured after the hard drive had reached about a capacity where only the last 8% or so was free (that's about when I knew it was time to do a complete backup).
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Check out these articles. and here
And don't forget this
I have failed IBM drives, and a failed Maxtor. Will stick with Maxtor for now because of what IBM put me through.
I think part of it is that there is a bigger demand for drives, so the companies that make them are pushing the technology. It does seem that there are bad "batches" or "runs" of drives. In the rush to get to market, I can see where quality and perhaps durability has slipped. But several years ago, there didn't seem to be this big of a push for bigger drives. I have a feeling that the quest for larger drives will slow a bit, because currently we are running out of ways to fill them up. Not everyone needs a 100 GB drive. When the average user could fill 10GB, demand for drives seemed to jump. For the average user, a 20 or 30GB drive is PLENTY of space, at least right now. If you do video editing, or keep a digital music collection, or run a server of some kind, you need more space.
At least by pushing the speed/density frontier, manufacturers are advancing the technology. Hopefully that will drive for more stable storage technology as well. I am pretty sure that the platter style hard drives we currently have has its days numbered, but they aren't going to find the replacement until they push the limits.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
We lost about 50% of the drives in our IBM 300GL PCs within a year and a half of purchasing them.
The drives were 10GB Quantums and the Phillips controller on them was frying. IBM's response to this was horrible. They knew the drives were bad, and were going to fail, yet they would only replace them after failing. Our account rep was no help what so ever in resolving this (she basically disappeared after selling us several hundred thousand dollars in equipment).
Eventualy, after some threats from our purchasing department, IBM sent up replacement drives for the rest of the PCs. I don't even want to think about how much time and money this whole ordeal costed us. Hell, we don't even blame IBM for the bad drives...how could they have known. However, we do blame them for the poor service we received in resolving the issue.
Becuase of this, we stopped buying any IBM equipment. All servers and workstations are now coming from different companies. Had IBM's support just treated us with a little respect back when this issue started, they would still have a (rather large) customer.
ÕÕ
/me stares at ibm365 here,my desktop /me remembers it has two drives, an ibm and a fujitsu /me remembers other slashdot threads about drives /me sighs
Just had one of these Fujitsu Drives blow out on me... lost 35 GB of data, including a bunch of audio work... nearly lost all my wife's graduate work...
I admin about half-a-dozen or so systems, which include a couple of servers, a couple of office machines, and couple of audio production / broadcast machines.
There seems to be a number of Fujitsu drives in use in my systems, and I've recently experienced a half-failure of one of these drives (it's dying a slow slow death, making odd noises and gently developing bad sectors). Fortunately it's only the system drive of one of the office boxes, so is not really critical. I am concerned about the drives in the other machines though.
Personally, I've only ever experienced two drive failures: one was caused by me dropping a drive on its side, thus inducing a head crash (oops :o) ), the other was an old 1.2gig Seagate that had had a good innings, so I didn't mind too much.
My greater concern in recent times has been with fan failure. In particular, I've personally had problems with fans on slot CPUs (old Slot A Athlons, P-IIs, stuff like that and of that vintage). Slot A fans are particularly awkward, since it so dificult to find replacement heatsinks nowadays (yes, I brutalised the heatsink when removing it from the CPU, no, I didn't think of just replacing the fan til afterwards ...). I've also seen fan failure on recent socket CPUs and graphics card GPU heatsinks (one of my flatmates had a Geforce 2MX go manky after the fan started to knacker itself).
This is a problem that is only going to get worse, as we start to have to put fans on more and more components and bigger fans in place of existing ones. I have seen systems that have three case fans, a GPU fan, a chipset fan, two hd fans, and one brick of a CPU fan. Perhaps a tad overkill, but before too long this is just going to be a necessary setup in high-performance machines that aren't externally cooled (i.e. air conditioned), which is just about any system not in a cool room or well conditioned office. Heck, what are we to do in a couple of years time, liquid-nitrogen cool everything?
Sorry Hans, and respects to your mother :-)
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
My SCSI drives havent failed in over 9 years.
I still have a 486 running with a 380meg SCSI drive acting as a a dot matrix print machine for line by line log printing.
You get what you pay for...
When you spend $100 for 60gigs of space, guess what, youre getting a shitty and unreliable drive.
I paid over $300 for 36gigs, and the drive has a 7 year manufactuer warranty, with reduced cost data recovery services.
Several years ago, I worked for a little company which sold PCs for professionals and individuals. During several months, we have sold fujitsu drives ranging (1.6, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3 and 6.4 GB). These models were based on exactly the same hardware, and we had lots of drives failing because they suddenly confused their type ! 1.6GB often became 2.1, and 3.2 or 4.3 became 6.4 GB. Of course, there weren't enough platters to make this work, so not only our customers lost their data, but we had to send the disk back to warranty. It was a very embarrassing situation because the hardware was OK, but we couldn't get the data back. The disk started, detected the error, then stopped. Sometimes, waiting several days allowed the disk to recover its original model. I always wondered if they stored the model on the medium itself instead of an eeprom.
That was a bad experience unfortunately, because except for this problem, these disks were relatively quiet and really fast !
Willy
After maintaining a good number of web servers and office machines for over three years, I have a nice pile of dead hard drives. About 30% of the machines got Fujitsu hard drives, yet every single dead drive but one is a Fujitsy. I stopped bothering with replacing them under warranty, because a new Fujitsu would just mean another dead hard drive in less than a year.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I have about 40 machines that i bought about 2 years ago, and more than 20 of those have had the hard drives crash....... It has been absolutely horrible!!!
Most of the crashes we had with the CDC disk packs were the heads letting loose. But there were occasionally the platter breaking up.. I was really happy at how strong the plastic/glass/whatever was that cdc made the window on top of the drive out of.
We used to have one drive that crashed heads/packs all the time (out of about 10 drives in the room). The CDC CEs were always grumbling about how dirty it was in the room 'cause they always had to change the filters on just that drive. Remember that these were the days of raised floors and serious air ventilation. One night we found out why. The janitor would run his jumbo soft broom over the floor to clean up. Then he'd go over to this hole in the floor and shake out the mop. All the dust disappeared. *sigh* -- nobody ever told him not to do it so he didn't know any better. That was rectified quickly.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Western digital. The do tend to run a little warm, so make sure they get some air, or better yet their own fan.
;)
No, I do not work for WD. I am just a VERY satisfied customer. I have bought many HDDs and have only once had a WD fail, and even then it made the most beautiful pinging noise.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
I run in my system an Maxtor 24.7gig, IBM 16.8gig, a Seagate 8.4gig scsi
I've never had any problem with any of these drives - the SCSi drive I took from my old job's system (kinkos) where it was used as a backup drive of internal progs for them. It's about 4 years old currently. This is the drive where I keep all my portfolio type stuff.
IBM drive I have had for 4 years as well and had no problems. This drive is used as my dump drive and gets a lot of download/upload usage all day long.
The Maxtor drive I have had now for 2 years and have had no problems with it. This is my "C" drive where all my games are played off of.
Now about the failures.... My friend has had a Western Digital drive which has died on him twice now over the last 2 years - he loves WD anyway since there warranty replacement system is kickass. (whatever)
My Guardians son has a packbell system with a Fujitsu drive in it that recently konk out after 2 years of use. By konked out I mean everything from bad sectors to everytime you ran a full scandisk there was less and less GOOD space.
With all this said I think my next drive purchase will be either another scsi Seagate drive or another ATA/100 Maxtor drive. With all the bad stuff I here about the latest IBM drives, Fujitsu drives, and Western Digital why would anyone buy anything else.
Ave Molech Setting
Also, don't think about me while you are masturbating, you fucking asshat.
I used to work at a small "mom and pop" computer store here in Ottawa. The general conscensus, echoed by our technician, was this:
;)
Maxtor, Western Digital, Quantum (now part of Maxtor) and Seagate were generally good drives.
IBM, Fujitsu and Samsung were considered pretty crappy.
Personally, I've seen more Fujitsu failures than any other. I'd never buy one. Although, with ANY computer product, a "bad run" can happen anytime. A bad batch of power supplies from an otherwise good manufacturer, bad motherboards from top brands, bad batch of hard drives. These all happen now and then. And someone's gotta get bit
[i]Certainly, there are lots more drives out there, but they are failing at a higher rate.[/i] Is that rate "failures per drive" or "failures per gig"? IOW, if I wanted to be safe, should I buy two smaller "very old" drives or one larger "quite old" drive? Mind you, I'm not making a joke here; I don't currently posses the cavalier mindset requisite of jocularity. I'm thinking replacing my current Hungary-made IBM GXP75's with a reliable system, preferably before these buggers fail too.
You would judge a human being because of one stupid post?
BIGOT!
But at least you're not a self-contradictory knee-jerk leftist, are you?
Antec cases include a removable "box" for mounting hard disks. The entire assembly locks into place, but can easily be removed. The box includes a snap-in bracket for an 80-mm fan.
So, you can put a ball-bearing 80mm fan in a position that blows air directly over the hard drives. I ran a pair of IBM DeathStars 24 hours a day in up to 80-degree(F) ambient for over a year without any problem (while so many people were reporting failures after a few months). .
I've since switched to a pair of Western Digital SE's. But, I'm wondering if the reason I never had any trouble is because I'm keeping the drives cool.
OK, I have a Fujitsu MPG-3102AT date coded 2001-03, right smack bang where the problem occurred. It's also dead, an ex-drive, if it wasn't screwed to the drive-bay it'd be pushing up the daisies... The problem is reported to be with the controller chip, one Cirrus Logic's CL-SH8671 batch coded 450E on mine. I contacted Fujitsu (being unfotunate enough to have purchased mine from a computer fair, silly sod) and found that they DON'T hono(u)r the warranty for end users! The b@stards! Last time I buy a Fujitsu drive. The problem with the chip is that Cirrus, in their infinite wisdom, changed the material they use to encapsulate this huge QFP IC without telling anyone (so Fujitsu's story goes) and subsequently the reflow ovens in the SMD process were not reprofiled to take into account the new properties of the material they used. So the *chip* ended up either cooked to the point that ingress of moisture became possible during heat-up/cool down cycles or didn't reflow properly so ended up with dry joints on the legs because the new material leeched the heat away from the joints. I tried reflowing mine on an SMD rework station and no joy so I suspect the former. Can't believe they say there isn't a problem, especially when they're rumo(u)red to be currenly in dispute with CL over this batch of ICs which they claim were sub-standard. If they were so sub-standard, how di they get through QC, humm? IS ther a QC dept.? Draw your own conclusions!
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
I have at least 2 fujitsu limited hard drives.. no problem with them.. (may have another as i dont know what the third one is in my system, I havent pulled it out in awhile and it is hot now)
Now for the track record for failed hard drives, i have 1 dead segate 1 dead western digital 1 dead maxor and one dead caldera 2 dead quantum fireballs and a dead connner.. (all of them arnt mine, just hard drives i have replaced for people)
DRACO-
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
Robert
WebMaster:
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I've been working in the general public (pc home repair, commercial, government, education, etc) for the last 10 or so years, the last 2 years have been the worst for HDD failures. I used WD for a long time until about a year ago they started dying left and right. IBM is the worst next to Quantum, I've had about 8 (40GB 7200RPM) go in the last 4 months. Lost a few Maxtors recently, including my data drive (thank goodness for backups). I've had little problems with Fujitsu. All cases have been well ventilated with 1-2 case fans (plus PS fan). I think it has something to do with the spin rate. I haven't had ANY dead 5400RPM HDD. Some were sold ~4 years ago. 5400RPM and SCSI seem to be the only reliable drives out there. Hopefully something will change with Serial ATA.
All 4 of our Fujitsu's failed within a week of each other, approx a year after we got them - it was chaotic.
...
And yes, we will never buy fujitsu again
I'm working as a support analyst right now and you'd be amazed how many fujitsu hard drives fail on us! We probably have a few hard drives die per week and over 90% of them are fujitsus.
Fujitsu
Seagate
Western Digital
Samsung
HP
Maxtor / IBM (tie).
The IBM and Seagate drives (and a Western Digital) all run WebBinaries XXX Thumbnailed Newsgroups and WhoreBoyz so they get pounded (no pun intended) pretty regularly.
We dont run any IBM SCSI or IDE over 40GB (36GB & 40GB largest respectively), ALL the Seagates seem to suffer bearing or motor burnout - so far 37% of them died all while running in well cooled $6,000 Tricord ES Series filtered dual redundant power supplied drive arrays (ie: they werent abused heat, air quality or power wise).
The IBM, btw, was gotten operational again with a little WD40 in the bearing hole under the label (woulda used lithium grease or something better, but no time, and the drive is very old so other than backing up a whopping 2GB of data, I really dont care about it).
The Maxtor was a little newer.
WebMaster:
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Fujitsu drives have sucked for some time, now. The Register has been reporting on the recall of the Fujitsu drives for months now. This is really not news. More like, olds...
man rtfm
AFAIK, it was the first batch from the brand-new Hungarian fab that caused all these problems. When they got the particle-filtering et al. over there up to snuff, the 75GXP drives have been good as usual. I had two of them fail on me, with large losses of data. Both replacements have behaved, tho. (Irish, both.) All this ate IBMs good rep tho, I agree.
If you've had failures that consistently the problem is not the drives. That's one of the first lessons I learned as a professional troubleshooter: If the replacement part fails, the part you replaced was not the problem. That doesn't mean the part you replaced wasn't bad, but it does mean that you're going to have to keep replacing that part until you take the time to get to the root of the problem, which is something else.
Power supplies are the most often overlooked problem causer, but it could easily your RAID controller or a poorly made data cable. It could also be that your drives are simply overheating.
I've built several computers for various friends, family, and small businesses over the last 6 years and I've used Deskstars exclusively for the last 3 years. I follow a few basic rules when mounting them: (1) always leave an empty space between the hard drive and any other device for air flow, and (2) never stuff excess cable or other crap into that empty space. I have never had a hard drive fail in any of those systems.
If your case doesn't have space for you to do that, then your case is too small. It's that simple. Having parts fail due to inadequate airflow is much more expensive than getting the right case.
As for second hand drives, that's always going to be a dodgy issue. The manufacturers do test them, and they don't send them out if they don't pass their tests. The problem is, though, that none of the drive test utilities really stress the drive enough, IMO.
I torture-test SCSI RAIDs for a living, and we've found that the standard test suites were letting too many drives through that couldn't hold up to the demands our customers placed on them (we're talking top-end digital video production), so we had to develope our own tests. I typically push a drive/LUN/controller card at the threshhold of it's advertised performance for at least 2 days before I call it good. The funny thing is that spending more time doing a more serious test actually reduces my work load, since I very rarely get any of those drives back, and those I do get back are usually because the customer was moving their equipment and wanted to have spare drives on hand just in case.
Not everyone has $15,000 realtime MPEG encoder cards lying around to hammer their drives with, but I'm sure there are other ways to achieve similar results.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I managed to save up enough dough at the start of this year to get myself a fairly decent box, but after only 3 days of use, it stopped detecting the boot sector. I also noticied that rather than being detected as a 'maxtor' by the BIOS, it was detected as a 'laxtnr' (notice an ascii shift here?).
After checking all the cables were plugged in fully and the right way around, I tried booting again to no avail, so I took it back to the shop. Where I was branded a liar! It booted fine. So I took the box back home, and had the same problem again!
After a couple of months of my machine not working for days, I finally worked out what it was, intereference between IDE cables, caused by them running at different speeds (ATA133, and ATA100)!!!
You'd think the harddrive manufacturers would be aware of this and produce better cables!
I worked for an OEM here, and indeed fujitsu hard drives 10,20,30Gb hdd's where coming back in the droves. Our upstream supplier denied problems initialy.( same with a PSU problem time i was laid off ) . :)
Typically they would simply die and dissapear from bios, others would develop dozens of bad blocks.
Unfortunately by the time management took notice some customers had come in for a replacement replacement. I remember one unfortunate customer who had 3 fail.
two small bussiness had ~half their pc's fall over, we removed the rest before they fell over.. eventually we stopped using fujitsu
I would not touch one ( except to drop kick the bloody thing of a cliff of course
But what's new in the PC world , who cares ?
had a near car accident while it was powered up
Perhaps if you werent surfing slashdot when you were driving you wouldnt have had the accident
Working in a laptop depot repair shop Ive replaced tons of hard drives. Not 1 Fujitsu, but rather Toshiba and IBM.
as always, YMMV
the history of the world
Yet more truth to the fact that "if it ain't broken, don't fix it, and if it is, hit it with a hammer".
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I'd say Quantum, but you'd have to go w/SCSI. I think Maxtor bought them out. I have yet to see a SCSI fail me.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Well Quantum Fireball drives are well...burning up. But then again what would you expect from a drive called a Fireball.
Linkage
Isn't this something you could put in a poll?
-----------
(o) I own a Fujitsu and no problems.
(o) Fujitsu 0wned my harddrive
(o) I don't own a Fujitsu and no problems.
(o) I don't own a Fujitsu but many problems.
(o) I want a Fujitsu so I can get problems.
etc etc
my sig
Yes indeed, I have experienced a seriously large number of drive failures in the last months.
;)
Historically my company has purchased only HP equipment. The HP SCSI disks we received as a part of an unusually large order this year are all OEMed from IBM and Fujitsu. Of the IBM drives most failed right out of the box with loud screeching noises, smoke and such. The fujitsu drives are now failing one by one. HP has claimed this is due to bad firmware (drives intermittently not spinning up, cutting out, etc) and so we have stormed around plugging little floppy disks into our systems hoping we wouldn't have to RMA them, but alas, they all have been sent back one way or another.
For a small company like the one I work for this is terribly frustrating. Luckly we run Linux with software RAID 1 or RAID 5 everywhere.
We want a refund
In all my years I have rarely noticed any hardware manufacturer (among the recognized brands, that is, a Mark stereo is never as good as one from Philips e.g.) as having a higher rate of failure, but I still like to know that my investments won't break down and cry after a few months. That is why, on the systems I use and trust the most, I use WD drives and Intel chipsets (compared to SIS or VIA or something else), because not only do I know that they work, and work, but they do it very well at that. And as a closing note, if one thing is cheaper than another, it is most likely to not work as well, or for as long.
"If you go to the next town, going across a desert is a shorter way." - Pu-Li-Ru-La (Taito)
I can certainly agree on that.
Here at work (all SCSI) we have a webserver that had two consecutive failed Fujitsu drives (no, it wasn't my choice). Both died after a year or so of use while all the other-branded drives have kept going. The main difference I noticed between the Fujitsu's and everything else was how HOT they were! You couldn't hold your finger on them for more than a second. We also had a pair of mirrored Segate's in another server that also ran real hot (due to poor ventilation). They died almost simultaneously after two years. These times may sound par-for-the-course for home use, but we're talking expensive/scsi drives, not your cheapo IDE. The average drive-life here in our server room is easily 4+ years.
I've since installed extra fans in the front knockout spaces of all our servers, keeping all the HDs cool to touch.
-Malloc
___________________ I want to be free()!
You *do* know that the bios is loaded from a motherboard chip, not the hard drive, right? Worst case, the hard drive identification string could be garbled, followed later by a message saying something like "operating system not found".
That's 20 Gigabytes down the drain; the date on the HD was 2000-12. I replaced it with a 80 Gigabyte drive - but not from Fujitsu.This, by the way, was the second HD to fail ever in my life: The last one as a full sized HD, about 40 Megabytes (!) if I remember. That should tell you how long ago that was.
Interesting you should say that. I worked for IBM a few years ago and on the way back from a conference wrote off my car (ford fiesta) with 6 thinkpad 600's in the boot. My car suffered a direct sideways impact on the side of the boot from another car (don't ask); and then spun round and hit a traffic light post on the other side of the boot. All six worked perfectly afterwards, and I contrinued to use one daily for the following 6 months. Thank fuck.
I still think they are the best laptop you can buy and am about to pick one up second hand.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Every hard drive I have owned has failed at some point, it doesn't matter which brand. The difference has been how long it has taken for them to fail.
Over the last 12 years, I have owned in my various computers such brands of hard drives as Miniscribe, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, CDC. I probably owned about 25 drives.
You may not recognize all the names because some of the manufacturers are defunct. During about 4 years, I ran a BBS 24/7 and kept the drives running. I remember maxing out the capacity of the narrow SCSI card (7 devices).
I have not resold any of the hard drives, rather, I have just kept using them. All of them ended up dying, except the 3 I'm currently using, which are all less than 2 years old. Most of the drives failed between the third and the fifth year. Since they were nearly all SCSI drives that carried 5 year manufacturer warranties, they were eligible for free replacements, but of course by then the capacity of was ridiculously small.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
Stage 1) Make faulty harddrives
Stage 2) ???
Stage 3) Loss
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Go take your perversions to your favorite porno site. Not Slashdot!
Look at Western Digital now, though. Their reputation has been buffed to a shine, and the newer ones still fetch a good price on the open market. Let's just hope Fujitsu learns from their mistakes (if any have been made).
These posts are from what we call "Punk Kids"
A Fujistus drive that's actaully working, is one that should be backed up.
- AZ
* In Britain, the homosexuals rule with an iron fist and force all television networks to air nothing but gay content.
* In Britain, it is illegal for a man to look at a woman without criticizing her fashion sense.
* In Britain, no toilets are equipped with handles for flushing. Instead, the patron is expected to eat his or her excrement.
* In Britain, all Starbucks offer sugar and creame but the creame doesn't come from cows, if you know what I mean.
* In Britain, everyone who receives a license must pose according to their gender. All males must wear a pink boa while all females must shave their head and put up a West-Side gang sign.
* In Britain, only gay music like The Beastie Boys, Queen, and The Village People may be played on radio.
* In Britain, fucking dogs is not only legal but it is encouraged during National Fuck Your Pet At Work Week.
* In Britain, the sewers are called Anal Cavities of Tasty Gay Enjoyment.
* In Britain, children at school are taught that all French people are straight.
Nope I am proud to be a gun carrying American. We are the normal people. You are the ones with the sick minds. We don't need to hear your trash talking on Slashdot... News for Geeks... No where did I see it say News for pervs
Hard drives fail.
They always have, they always will. They're mechanical, and even better than that, they're magnetic. That's how it is. You should plan to have to replace your hard drive every 1-3 years at least, if not more often than that, depending on workload and conditions. That's how it's always been. For the people saying 'but... I've never had a hard drive fail...' -- you're lucky as hell, but someday your luck will run out.
Even backup solutions fail.
Removable storage is mechanical as well. There are a lot of variables. Years of experience taught me the following lessons:
This may all seem excessive for the "home" user, but if you're anything like me (these days I'm a writer/photographer), being a "home" user can often mean that your entire livelihood and household are tied up in your data.
As for me, myself, personally, right now I keep my nightlies on a rotating group of 14 8mm tapes using an Exabyte 8505XL drive. I use only data-grade tapes from major manufacturers. I run drive diagnostics often. I never use a tape through more than 10 passes. For my really important data, I also use 9.6GB DVD-RAM for redundancy. I would never consider working without backups, simply depending on this brand of hard drive or that one to not fail. I've lost too many hard drives over the years (ever seen a platter on an 10" drive crack and bits go flying everywhere, cracking the other platters and half the windows in the room?!) ever to be naive enough to trust one again.
Point of post: BACK UP YOUR DATA. Never think of a hard drive as anything other than short-term storage. Never think of any magnetic media as anything other than short-term storage, or you'll be crying sooner or later.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
NO!, I will have nothing to do with your homosexual cause. You love men. That is your right. But I, sir, choose to love women and women only. I want nothing to do with your parades or your balls (the dancing kind, not the body part, you pervert) or even your fancy dresses. I will never love you and would appreciate it if you stop fantasizing about me while you're in the shower.
Oh, you have AIDS.
These are the people who belong in jail
I used to work for a hardware company in Darwin Australia and we had a failure rate of almost 80% accross approx 5000 machines on the university campus. We then did a uni wide replacement for maxtors and found about 70% of those were unusably noisy, ie loud enough to piss off clients. Buy a seagate and be happy, or better still wait till serial ATA gen 2 comes out and get a couple of those in a raid array.
You mean the "Punk Kids" or me?
I brought a couple Fujitsu laptop hard drives home from work last month. (the benefits from working in I.T.) I had planned on upgrading my laptop at home for more capacity. I swapped out my existing IBM drive and formatted and installed the OS on the Fujitsu. A day later it froze and never booted back up again. The drive refused to be reformatted.
Since I still had my second Fujitsu drive, I decided to give that one a try. Two days later, the same story; it crashed and the HD died. I promptly replaced it with my old IBM which was originally there and haven't had a problem since.
So now I am stuck with two dead Fujitsu drives that both died within days of each other.
At least I will have a couple new tweeters to go with my Western Digital Caviar speaker set.
We have some POS Ipaqs at work, all contain fujitsu mpg series harddrives, so far 4 of them have kicked the bucket. Each one doing so just weeks after the one year warranty is up.
I kept losing my pencil sharpener, so I partitioned
my disk into two, and only use the first partition for storing data.
I cut a pencil sized hole in the drive casing, and
use the second partition to sharpen my pencils.
wow - that is really sad
I mean the fucking jews - those filthy penny-pinching bastards.
Hello
Recently, I had an IBM 75GXP and an IBM 60GXP die on me on the same day, out of four IBM drive that I own. I am going to be forced to send on of them to a company like Ontrack to recover the data off of the platters. It is going to cost me somewhere near $3,000.00
One trick that I tried before I got this desecrate for my data was to replace the controller card of the disk drive. I have had success in previous circumstances replacing the controller card on the hard drive with one from an identical model and capacity, thus resulting in a working drive -- working long enough to get the data off of it.
The drives that this controller card replacement worked upon were older, and I have not tried this trick in a few years now, but almost all of the electronics on a drive are on the controller card, which can be replaced pretty easily, without the use of a clean room.
If the chips that are failing are mounted upon the controller card, and I get the impression that they are, then there is a possibility of recovering your data yourself by swapping the controller card. This can be done, usually, without being detectable in the regards of warranty violation.
Has anyone attempted this on this drive, and have they or have they not been successful?
Unfortunately, my attempt with my IBM DLTA-307045 was a failure. The problem seems to be with the disks or the heads, or leads themselves.
sharaharass@yahoo.com
The company I work for bought 165 Compaq EVO desktops with the Fujitsu drives. 20 have died so far. These drives are definitely dud.
I think that page may be somewhat out of date. IBM doesn't even make hard drives after their disastrous 75gxp...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I have noticed an increase in HD failure recently ;)
as well as memory for that matter. But I wouldn't have
noticed fujitsu and Maxtor drive failure since I find
the failure rate of those manufacturers (not doa rate)
to be so high I run drive diags as soon as I see the
label on any system I'm repairing. This has dramatically
improved my productivity at work
Yet to see a SCSI fail you? The one file server at my work has had two scsi drives fail before I was hired. And three weeks after I was hired, another of the scsi drives failed! (Maybe it's because the drive is running at 95% full and it hasn't been defragged since 1999. That's alot of head movement)
I've had three 10GB drives go this year, all dated early 2000. Fujitsu Canada had been great. I got my last RMA in 24 hours!
Over the last year we have replaced over 400 IBM drives in both Sun and IBM disk arrays. All of these failed between 2 and 8 months of age. Most of the replacements are fujitsu. So far no problems, but I have to wonder if right around the end of the year the fujitsu's are going to start to fail.....Oh well it is job security for me if the servers never had problems I'd be out of a job...
I used to work for a small PC builder myself.
About 5 years ago.
We had so many bad fujitsu drives that the store stopped by any of them. I have told every person I've met since then what pieces of crap they are, but obviously I didn't tell enough people. It's sad that they even MAKE hard drives any more. I didn't even know that.
I have had plenty of bad experience with Western Digital, and very limited bad experience with Maxtor. For the "Value" brand Hard Drive.. I would always go with Maxtor.
The problem with the IDE market is that everyone and their grandma uses IDE disks, so it doesn't matter which drive is more reliable; people buy whatever is cheap, and manufacturers have no economic reason to invest in making their drives last longer than 2-4 years.
If you want reliability, grab a nice high-end 10,000 RPM SCSI disk. Actually, pretty much any SCSI disk will do -- I've got a set of Seagate 'cudas that have been spinning for eight years and are still spinning as I write this. I also picked up a dual-133 IBM box at an auction a few years ago that's also running SCSI. It's a great little file server, and as far as I know it still has the original hard drives (from back in the day when dual-133 was cool).
Remember: the server market is designed for reliability. Grab an HPaq Proliant or some other box designed for the datacenter. Yes, they're far more expensive than workstation models with similar specifications, but they aren't going to break any time soon.
You get what you pay for.
I work for a large international company, 95k+ employee's. IBM is our prefered supplier. Over the last two years we have been noticing an alarming number of our laptop drives failing. When we check the drives 90% are Fujitsu or Hitachi drives. I've only seen two IBM travelstar drives fail. It's a shame a company such as IBM can't seem to demand a high standard for thier suppliers.
IBM uses Maxtors in all their computers. Go figure. I've never had a Maxtor fail on me. I'll stick with them.
Anyone calculate a Mean Time Between Failure?
Michael C. Hollinger
We have two arrays at our business which in total have 120 18GB IBM scsi drives. They had been running just fine for two years. Starting three weeks ago they started failing, and this last saturday night/sunday morning 15 of them failed, one right after the other.
They are all dated Sept 2000.
Fun.
that's alot of nuked WinXP installations ;-)
(though really I do empathise with these victoms)
I guess you've never taken apart a hard drive before :)
The magnets in them (at least in any model I've ever opened up) are some of the strongest permanent magnets I've ever seen. And yes, they're located on the pivot of the drive head arm.
Also, the platters make way nicer decoration than boring cd-roms.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"If your hard drive has started to show garbled characters in the BIOS at boot, ..."
.. can I submit nonsense and get it front-paged on Slashdot too? Pretty please?
hey, this quote makes absolutely no sense
I have seen alot of comments about hard drives being used more now than 4 or 5 years ago, and also comments about hard drives getting denser and what not. One point all these comments keep missing is that fujitsu's drives are failing at a much higher rate than any other drive manufacturer. If the above comments were true, then all hard drive manufacturers should be experiencing such high rates of failures; but they are not!
Things Fall Apart
I run a small 100 machine lan. All of our compaqs we bought a year or so ago with fujitsu's have been going down the past month. There are ten more machines left that haven't been replaced yet. I'm just waiting for a phone call from these users.
In most windows clusters the other server is just sitting there waiting for the first to fail.
I've got a dead Fujitsu CD drive in my box at the moment (it died and jammed the Windows CD in there, at least it has ironic elements). I can tell from reading usenet that I'm hardly alone.
::sigh::
I would guess there are quite a few shared parts in hdds and CD drives nowadays, though the reportage of failed CD drives is probably lower due to their less critical nature as well as they're less able to be affected by thermal problems.
Don't touch anything from them is my opinion from now on.
Just as well I've got an 8 year old Matsushima 2x Cd drive which will always work
A few days after installing a Maxtor 60gig, i was inside the box cleaning up the spaghetti
Well if you don't quit the habit of stashing food in your PC I bet it won't last six months.
I've seen 100% failure rate on a batch of 10 and 20 gig Fujitsu drives installed in the summer of 2001. They started failing after 10 months or so. This was in Norway.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
i knew about fujitsu drives dying years ago. I worked for a small ISP that also OEMed systems, the owner loved to orderd fujitsu drives because they were cheap and he could make a big profit. but he eventually stopped because we were losing more money in delayed systems because of DOA drives, and system returns. anybody who thinks fujitsu drives are a good choice, just hasn't dealt with many hard drives yet.
RM Plc (here in the UK) simply replaced all the Fujitsu hard drives in the machines we had... even if they hadn't failed (two out of three had failed). They did this even though the PC's were themselves out of waranty.
Bravo RM! I'd certainly recommend them.
return 0; }
The largeish outsourcer I work for here in .au has (had) a large installed base of these fujitsu HDDs, and a very LARGE percentage have failed..
6 19AE8 B22D48DBCA256C6100149A81?OpenDocument
5 34 ECD39BC6CA256C610083007B?OpenDocument
See articles at:
http://www.arn.idg.com.au/idg2.nsf/AllARN/A5
and
http://www.arn.idg.com.au/idg2.nsf/AllARN/4A0FB
for some recent articles in a local industry mag
Yes, letting the drive speak for itself is a great idea. And if you're wondering what they say... it's this!
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Does anybody know whether putting fans over (in front of) hard drives extends their lifespan?
Or it doesn't matter the high failure rate is due to other factors?
Compaq Armada E500s are now no longer in production but the ten we bought both as a company and as individuals all came with 12Gb Fujitsu 2.5" hard-disks and each one of them has failed and had to be exchanged. While under warranty we had them exchanged with other Fujitsu drives all of which subsequently failed. They were replaced in-house with IBM TravelStar 20 & 30Gb models which have performed flawlessly ever since.
Our original suspicion was the usual "bad batch" but since we bought the E500s two at a time that was somewhat unlikely. When the drives coming back from "maintenance" failed too we definitely decided it was a Fujitsu issue and not a "bad batch" issue.
Neither is trsnfering to other disk in the same room.
Companies that are serious about backups can afford a tape streamer, a few tapes and a Linux box to act as backup server if they are thight on money.
or they can outsource the whole thing for a few hundred bucks per month.
Big companies have full time personnel doing this task (shifting tapes, putting them offsite, stablishing backup policies), they are under no illusion that mirroring is backup, neither should be small companies or even the home user.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Mod parent up. Those are funny. I am going to use them as event sounds :)
I ran mine outside the case at first, to see how much vibration it had (really *very* little!). I then made sure to ground myself, and felt the electronics. I was amazed to find out how hot some ICs were. Hot is bad, unless you have no other choice. Arranged a fan, pronto, to blow air past the electronics, and drive ran nice and cool.
Although IBM's design engineers seem to have thought of all sorts of Good Things, somehow they missed this aspect, requiring air past the electronics. I called IBM Tech Support, and they said not to mount a fan onto the drive, because its vibration wouldn't help reliable reading/writing. (I was going to use one of those blue-plastic-framed types that adapt a 3.5-in drive to a 5.25-in. bay.)
I got a Maxtor 40 GB Romulus (D540, maybe?), which ran much cooler, but took no chances and installed a little CPU fan to blow air over it.
I too have been disappointed with modern drives, especially large capacity IDE drives and fujitsu, and some of the newer scsi drives arent much better, especially considering the cost of them.
For storage now tho, i put a 100mbit eth card in an old p200 pro server, added several raid cards and built arrays of old tried+tested 2, 4 and 9gig drives, which can be picked up fairly cheaply from ebay nowadays.. Ofcourse there is the problem of noise and power consumption, but you cant have everything.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
All my high tech paper weights are Fujitsu branded...
realkiwi
I'm not sure if you all remember, but quantum drives started to fail just as they sold the business to maxtor. We've had nothing but problems with fujitsu and have since continued using their product - we had a 70% failure rate within 2 months of install.
And so not affected. Or the 10GB batch you got didn't use the affected chips.
4
Fujitsu blames Cirrus for close to 6 million hard drive failues:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=607
Fujitsu's filings suggest Cirrus Logic had supplied it with defective chips in the summer 2000, and started to receive complaints about failures from May 2001. The filings confirm what our Eva discovered here: that a change in the constitution of the resin used to attach the controller chips caused a failure in up to 5.9 million drives.
---
Still, backup backup backup.
They're reducing warranty periods, raising prices etc.
It's just most people don't have good access to relevant data. I think many dealers would be "punished" if they published return/failure rates. Just so the master distributors or manufacturers don't get punished by reduced sales of stuff below expectations.
Right now all most see is measured performance vs _anecdotal_ reliability reports.
Given better access to information I'm sure many would pay a fair premium for reliability, though not an obscene SCSI premium (at SCSI prices one might as well mirror two or more drives from different manufacturers).
Someone here has posted failure rate stats allegedly from a french hardware reseller.
I find 1-2% failure rates acceptable in a major consumer level component.
I'd avoid stuff in the 5%-10% region (like WDs). Not totally crap for some, but still crap to me.
Anything above that region I almost feel a responsibility to tell other people to avoid them. It's practically civic responsibility to advise people to avoid buying something that is 20-100% likely to fail within a month or two.
So what if they provide good warranty or RMA. I want to spend time using the product not returning it.
Sure, manufacturers sometimes can't tell what impact a change in process would have on actual failure/return rates, same goes for totally new models - those MTBF figures are mostly bullshit, I only pay attention if they are unusually low. That said, they can't totally use that excuse for they do know how to make reliable drives e.g. most SCSI drives are ok.
But without proper statistics, there can't be market pressure to get manufacturers to produce reliable drives at lower prices.
Believe me, stay away from WD.
:)
They're bad, bad, bad.
Bye.
There is a reason that the warranty periods have been reduced. Warranty periods are not being reduced simply to screw us, they're being reduced because the "us" has changed. The target market for IDE drives is now heavily consumer, where 10 years ago it was heavily business.
I have been away from the industry for around five years now, but having worked directly with drive designers, I know that at least at the design engineering level, they used to be genuinely concerned about reliability and MTBF. Now that disk drives have been pushed into the commodity consumer market space, manufacturers have to cut more corners than they used to to meet the low ASPs
What's happened, however, is that over the last 10 years or so, disk drives (and computers in general) have largely gone from being considered primarily business tools, to being considered primarily commodity consumer items. These two categories come with very different ASPs and expectations of reliablity.
One thing that you can't escape from is that if you target the same functionally identical product for $300, you can design and build in more reliability than if you target it for $150. You can do this by using higher quality components and sub-assemblies, by spending more engineering time evaluating, testing, and beating up the design, and by more thorough production testing.
Now, its not uncommon for manufacturers to offer multiple tiers of product quality for different markets. Unfortunately right now in disk drives, the two main choices are IDE (low end) and SCSI (high end); there isn't much middle ground. I agree that the SCSI premium is too high for most consumers to consider.
Perhaps if the true reliability data is known, as you suggest, then this might help create pressure on the manufacturers for a "middle-ground" tier of drives - perhaps a line of IDE drives that would be a little more expensive than current IDE prices, but less than SCSI prices with corresponding "middle-tier" reliability.
With Western Digital, I have the best luck. Every drive I own, never died under 5 years of age. I currently own about 12 drives, in functioning systems. Two of them are still under 500 meg. I really think they make a high quality drive. Back in 1998, I had one 1.6 gig drive that I coudl nto get working, and I really did not want to be without a drive. Tired using maxtor utils, fdisk /mbr, and even mounting under unix. Drive was fine but could nto boot to it. Use my 18" speaker, let it sit on it for about 5 minutes, formated it worked great... go figure.
:)
:)
Quantium - I delt with 4 of their drives before. One died after 4 years, 1 6.4 gig BIGFOOT died after a year (got a replacement within 2 weeks of call), and the other two (under 2 gigs) I am still using till today (both are SCSI from macintrash units).
IBM - I only had the pleasure of owning one. Bought an UltraStar 9.1 gig SCSI 80 pin drive and died after 3 months of usage. Got a replacement after two weeks but never really depend on it 100% after that. Worked fine now since 1998.. go figure.
DEC - Dec drives from DecStations are the best friggin SCSI drives. So abusive and do not want to die. I have 4 of them;2 one gigers and 2 500 megers. They are full height but are sweet.
Maxtor - Lets nto even go there. Peice of shit. Owned 10 gigier and a 40 giger, both died within 3 months and go replaced twice.
Seagate - My favorite. The only company that gladly still replaces your drives over the warrenty period. Deal with them alot. Let me tell you this one story. A few years ago, I bought 12 ~1.2 gig drives dirt cheap. One of them died, under warrenty, so I called them up and the sent me a repalcement unit of a 4 giger. I was surprised. Knowing that my 1.2 gigers would be unusable in a year and the warrenty was comign close, I did something pro-active. I removed them and paper-cliped* them all. Two weeks later, I got 9 four gig drives. I was happy!
*paper-cliped - a process to short curcuit a unit, in which you use a paper clip to touch various open circuity with each other. AKA you fry it
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
This may just be a coincidence, but I think it has something more to do with quality and controll over all of the hardware, but I have NEVER had a drive that came installed in any of the 10 or so Apple computers I've used fail in 9 years, and no one I know that uses a Apple has had a drive fail. Now Apple doesn't make their own drives, and in fact usually seem to use Fujitsu, but never the less, 0% failure rate for me in 9 years. I've only had one drive fail and that was a 20 Gig Maxtor on a G4 tower that I installed, and it still went about a year. Granted the 300 MB drive in my now ancient Performa is now basically useless, but it does still work.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
I recently obtained a new computer, which contained a Fujitsu drive. That drive failed, followed by the next three replacements. All of the drives failed with about a month. I just quit dealing with them, seeing as they are unable to make a drive that functions for a reasonable amount of time. Anyway, if you are in the market for a new drive, I don't think it would be wise to get a drive made by Fujitsu.
Yes, I also have got an (old) Futjitsu drive, 3.5Gigs, it died after a few formats. It's completely corrupted, i can't even format it anymore without it having to "fix" 120.000 sectors.. then after that it says it still is corrupted.
I recently bought a MHS2020-AT. Should I be worried ?