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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?
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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 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
Here's just one example of an unhappy owner of a large IBM DeskStar drive:
s /ibm_deskstar_75gxp/_review/393167/
I have bought 4 75GXP drives all of the 60 GB variety. Initially I bought two to connect to a RAID system but one failed after only 5 months. Just as well I had my RAID set to mirror otherwise all would have been lost. I have in excess of 25 GB of MP3 files which have taken years to collect hence my need for reliable storage. I then contacted the suppliers of my drives and asked about replacement. I was told it would take at least 6 weeks as they had to go back to IBM.
Given the importance of backup I bought a third drive whilst the 1st was being checked by IBM. Guess what 6 weeks later a second drive failed. BY this time I received back a drive from IBM. This was a second hand drive that had been returned by another customer under warranty. I know this because I was able to unerase the data on the drive and the former user was from Germany. This drive failed after only 4 weeks.
The second drive to fail was also replaced by a second hand drive. This also is making ominous noises.
In fairness when they work they are fast and very quiet but the uncertainty about when they will fail has left me very unimpressed. Of the 4 purchased 2 are new and working fine 1 is broken and I can't be bothered to send it back as I know they will send me another dodgy 2nd hand drive and the final one is noisy and I am sure would fail if it were used as a RAID drive.
My advice therefore is to look elsewhere. When I upgrade my system shortly I shall buy 2 120GB drives from another supplier but I shall research carefully first.
-- From http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/computers/hard_disk_drive
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
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
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!
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.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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
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.
"does it even make sense not to install drives in pairs with RAID/0 mirroring?"
;)
Well, in all honesty, that statement doesn't make much sense as is.
RAID-0 is striping, meaning there's no redundancy. RAID-1 is what you're looking for; that's mirroring. As for your question, it makes sense if you have valuable data and need maximum uptime to run a RAID-1 array. Extra costs are somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 for the card and the extra drive, unless you go el-ultracheapo, in which case you probably don't care anyway.
The short answer is for the vast majority of home users, it doesn't make sense. For anyone running a home office, it should be one of a couple different backup methods, as it only guards against physical failure.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Western Digital has been one of the crappiest of disk manufacturers -
Maybe you don't remember their massive recall in 1999 - 2000 ?
I have a couple WDs that refuse to be slave drives on an ide channel EXCEPT with another Western Digital drive as master.
Maybe they've had to clean up their act since the big recall but I haven't been willing to be the guinea pig to settle that question. I've also seen some Maxtor drives crapping out within 12 months of purchase.
In general the reliability of product in the IDE drive market has sucked as margins have declined further and further with the tech slowdown. IBM leaving the market was very demoralizing to see; if anyone could have turned the trend around - started making drives with high QC and charging more and getting it, it would probably have been them. There aren't too many makes that have not experienced a quality crisis like theirs with the 75gxp deskstar product and stayed in. But they left I am sure, because they concluded that margins would never bounce back.
And we're all gonna keep suffeing for the shortsighted cheapness of the consumer.
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 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.
More info on the Zip drives can be found here. There are apparently known problems with the Zips, hope this helps (check bottom of linked page for the info).
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I *am* a Storagereview regular (I post there as Mercutio, the second non-admin user whose account was re-created after the crash).
The issue was *not* a disk crash, but the fact that SR's colocation facility wanted to charge $x more to run proper backups, and SR couldn't afford it. During a regular upgrade to either MySQL or phpBB (don't remember which), their DB got dumped on accident. Eugene, SR's admin, posted very early after the site came back up that he has a small stack of DDS and DAT drives sitting around his home that he would've loved to install, if only their ISP would've let them.
Incidently, Storage Review's self-reporting reliability database is back up and running now, if you'd like to participate, feel free, but I'm convinced that self-reported statistics are of fairly little value.
Also, a lot of SR's regulars, including myself, chose to create our own community, distinct from SR, in case Storage Review either shuts down or loses its database again. We can be found at Storage Forum. SR's general membership is not aware of our site - we don't advertise it there out of courtesy to SR's admins, but if you spent time on SR's forums and wonder where Tannin, Clocker, P5_133XL, JamesW, time and some of the other mainstays went, well, now you know.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
If the drives are so reliable (MTBF of a million years my ass!), then the extra cost would be $0.00 per unit.
1) I hope your joking, but to be pedantic the MTBF is only 500K hours, not years, of course.
2) The extra cost, even if the drive itself is fine, still exists as you vet problem reports from your customers. In fact, the cost of vetting the problems is probably about the same as the drive itself, so even if they make perfect drives that never fail their warranty support costs would still be half of what they are if the make drives where not a single one lasts for the entire three years.
Now, that said, re-read my note. Nowhere do I say that drive quality is as good as it used to be. I only point out that there are valid reasons, market based reasons, to reduce the warranty that have nothing to do with the quality of the drive.
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.
Let me give you a bit of perspective on what a "300G shock rating" really means. If you drop a can of pop on your counter from three inches, that will induce a shock on the can greater than 1000Gs. When I worked in the HD industry, I learned that simply tapping a drive with a pencil induced a momentary shock of 40-50Gs. I could fire up some diagnositic firmware on the drive, and watch the drive detect and fix errors as I tapped it with a pencil.
Moral of the story, hard drives are fragile The only reason why they seem so tough is because the firmware detects and fixes thousands of errors that you don't even see.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Fortunately, there's a fix. You can buy server-class drives SCSI drives if you're uncomfortable with cheapo ones. Sure, they're going to cost you more, but that may simply be the cost of reliability.
It really comes down to how much you're willing to pay for peace of mind about your data. A monitor failing is no big deal. A hard drive failing can cost you years of work, source code, everything.
Unfortunately, "backing up" is no longer a really good option for most people. Perhaps buying a second drive and mirroring, but tapes (except for the very most expensive) and CD-Rs are simply too small compared to drive size to be very useful for backup. It's actually cheaper to use a second drive to back things up these days (compared to tape). Writeable DVDs still are expensive, still aren't popular or standardized, and even when they get so, are very fragile and likely to require at least ten discs to back up a complete hard drive.
If anyone knows of a less expensive, large-amount-of-data-per-unit backup system, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Hard drives got too big too fast. They outstripped CPUs and Moore's law. They outstripped all competing storage devices. They actually outstripped consumer demand in the last two years or so. The people doing the research on them are *too* good. I remember buying an 80MB drive not-so-many years ago. Slow. Physically huge. Cost something like $3 per megabyte. Now drives have a price/performance ratio 6000 times better. No other product in any field I know of has come anywhere close to this.
May we never see th
As far as sending remanufactured drives as replacements, yup we do, as well as I believe every other IDE manufacturer (scsi I'm not as familiar with so I don't want to conjecture). And repeat replacements from failed refurb drives are actually more rare than you'd think. Sorry I don't have any numbers, just personal experience. And sorry for the long-windedness but either you're REALLY dealing with the wrong company or you're stretching the truth like Gumby on a taffy machine.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"