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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.
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.
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?"
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.