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?

Comments

The Register and Fujitsu

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

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.

Re:The Register and Fujitsu

[beanerspace]

You may have a point there. Add to your list the following Register articles reagrding Fujitsu:

• Crash! Dud Fujitsu HDDs all over UK
• Ouch! Fujitsu to replace 300,000 faulty HDDs

First thing I found in a google search...

[Evro]

http://www.classactioncounsel.com/fujitsu-litigati on.htm

These cases are being brought on behalf of purchasers of the MPG3xx series hard disk drives, irrespective of the entity from whom it was purchased. Additionally, Hewlett-Packard is sued in connection with its sale of the hard drives as components in certain HP computers and its processing of warranty claims. Please note that the MPG3xx hard drives were also distributed to retailers and to other computer manufacturers, although none of them have been made a party to the litigation at this time.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5666

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.

IBM 300PLs

[Mechamse]

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.

Drive Service Company seems to agree

[Brett Glass]

Before I buy a hard drive, I always ask data recovery companies what they think of the most recent models. This page, created by Drive Service Company says the following about Fujitsu:

Fujitsu (Desktop drives only) Their 10, 15, 20 and 30gb desktop models have been failing left and right with either servo loss or electronic failure. Notebook drives are only so-so but are no longer manufactured. They have had so many returned drives, that they have stopped making drives all together.

It then goes on to say:

Fujitsu Notebook drives of any kind are prone to head crash, desktop drives are bad now too, sorry. Again, they have stopped making drives and now barely support what is left out there.

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 personal experience, YES!

[19Buck]

I recently ended a Contract position i was working as a Service Technician for Gateway. My job was basically to perform diagnostics and replace parts on the systems (duh!).

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.

Fujitsu Drives - Bad for some time

[CrackHappy]

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.

Re:Hard to imagine

[ekrout]

Here's just one example of an unhappy owner of a large IBM DeskStar drive:

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_drives /ibm_deskstar_75gxp/_review/393167/

Re:Is it silly not to do RAID/0?

[Loki_1929]

"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.

Check those part numbers..

[Dynamoo]

We too have had a failure rate of over 50% on 10Gb Fujitsu HDs about 18 months old fitted to our early Compaq DeskPro EXDs. Compaq have a BS firmware fix that doesn't work. We insisted that Compaq give us replacements for ALL the HDs, which they did, but they won't admit to the problem.

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.

Re:Hard to imagine

[slaker]

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.

Re:Trends

[meldroc]

Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.

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.