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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?!
How is 90% a failure rate? 100% of all hard drives are going to fail sometime.
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.
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...
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."
It seems these days every manufacture wants you to "register". And we all know the registeration process is just a marketing ploy to get your personal information so they can profile you and stuff your mailbox/e-mail/phone with advertising.
I think a collection of real stats which were somehow reliably collected would be really useful in terms of all this commodity hardware
Storage Review had such a database at once upon a time. It was widely hailed as the most comprehensive database of the kind, and pretty accurate (given that "reliable collection" is an oxymoron when it comes to the net).
Then their hard drive crashed and they lost everything.
Yes, it's horribly ironic. It also struck me as really freaking idiotic that a website dedicated to storage wouldn't back up their own data. I'm not an SR regular, so I didn't follow the story that closely at the time.
As it happens, SR is now restarting the reliability database. It'll take time to get accurate data, of course, but it's better than nothing. Here's hoping they succeed.
And that this time, they have backups.
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.
On the bright side, at least they had an entry to make immediately after they started rebuilding the database...
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
There are some easy things you can do for drive ventillation - the easiest is to put the drive as far down as you can get in the case. Most cases vent from bottom front to top back.
I have found that an effective way to ventillate an entire computer, including hard drives, is to remove a side of the case an position a desk fanto blow directly into the case at full power. In all seriousness, it's *very* effective. It may be a little noisy, though.
Next time you have a drive that 'just stops', try this:
;)
Stick it in a freezer bag with a dessicant pack. Put it in the freezer for a few hours. Take it out, hook it up. If it doesn't spin up, tap it lightly on the side with a hammer or somesuch UNDER POWER. If it spins up, furiously copy data after boot, and THEN RMA it.
I did this with a neighbor's drive. Still kinda bummed I didn't get to fsck her, too.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
I have found that an effective way to ventillate an entire computer, including hard drives, is to remove a side of the case an position a desk fanto blow directly into the case at full power. In all seriousness, it's *very* effective. It may be a little noisy, though.
Personally, I have found that an even more effective way to cool down that red hot 'puter is to simply submerge the sucker in icewater. I tried it with mine a few weeks ago and haven't had a single heat problem since!
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
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.
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
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
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