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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?
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.
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
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.
And I have never had trouble with the IBM Deskstar drives in my file server (been running for 3 years now). Maybe I got lucky and was shipped drives from a good batch...
How is 90% a failure rate? 100% of all hard drives are going to fail sometime.
To paraphrase Twain, the difference between "90% failure rate in a year" and "90% failure rate sometime" is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
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.
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
I hear people swearing allegence to a particular brand of consumer Hard Drive all the time, but I don't buy it.
It sucks that your Seagate died and I'm not trying to convince you to buy another one, but in general the reliability for Seagate, Maxtor, and WD's consumer drives are all about the same. If you had bought a defective Maxtor you'd be saying the same about Maxtor and praising the new Seagate you just bought.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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?"
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.
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???
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
"...is the person just trying to inform everybody that there is a problem with Fujitsu drives?"
Well, judging by his user details:
User #624901
Michael_Angel has posted 0 comments.
has submitted 1 stories.
Have Fujitsu Harddrives Been Failing in Record Numbers? on 12/11/02 18:06
that's exactly what he's trying to do.
Sounds a bit fishy to me. He wouldn't happen to work for a competitor, do you think?
Darn kids.
I've still got a Maxtor 7080AT (80 meg) drive in my toolbox with DOS 6.22 and a variety of DOS-based systems diagnostics on it.
Bigger != Better.
> So, manufacturers, build me a single drive form factor hard drive, with 1 ide connector that is in fact a RAID 1 array!
And, when one drive fails, you want to replace both together instead of just replacing the bad one and remirroring??
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
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."
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.
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"
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