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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?
Every single one of my friends here at school who purchased an IBM DeskStar-line hard disk drive had the drive fail on them less than a year after purchase.
I never thought that dependability could be much worse than for that particular line of IBM HDDs. But, this Fujitsu story sounds like it's a dire situation as well.
As a side note, I'd highly recommend (and do so to family, friends, etc.) purchasing only Western Digital or Seagate drives.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
After convincing my co-workers to use Fujitsu HDD's, several of our drives began to die. Now my reputation in the office is hurt because of their issues. Then they deny anything is wrong, good one. I'll never recommend using their drives ever again.
I've been wondering if the recently revealed electrolytic (ha, spelt it right that time) capacitor problem (bad taiwanese electrolytics) was related.
On a different note, Seagate's ST380023AS and ST3120023AS (Serial ATA) drives which were expected in Mid-October, then late-November, are now, according to a Cnet article a Seagate employee who shall remain nameless, pointed me to, is indicating shipping dates in Mid-December.. hopefully the two are unrelated.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I work for a small company as the solo-IT guy. We have had a total of 18 Fujitsu drives, all 10GB, from one batch purchase in October, 2000. I've had one failure out of them, and we're at the two year mark, so I certainly haven't seen a fail rate anywhere near whats described. Just another anecdote for the pile...
I know that there in the west of Ireland that we are having severe problems with Fujitsu drives, especially ones beginning with the serial MPG3. The drives seem to have been giving up the ghost in high numbers for the past 6 months. (ie: in September, one site that had 15 PCs suddenly had 3 hard drives go in a period of 5 days...all three were Fujitsu with that serial number.) I seem to be receiving a call about once every two weeks now about a failed drive, and the majority of them have been Fujitsu ones...
I lost one of my SCSI drives last year (a 4GB Quantum Atlas-2). I was not amused. It was still under warranty, so Quantum (now Maxtor) replaced it with another Atlas-2. The replacement (which came with a 90-day warranty) failed shortly after its 90-day warranty expired. Bummer.
I can't speak for the rest of the industry, but I can say this: none of my older (~300 MB) hard drives (which I've been using in my 486s) have ever failed. They rattle a little, they're rather slow, but never once have they let me down. Can the same be said of more recent media? I suspect not.
I've had a 30GB 7200RPM Fujitsu drive for some time now... it's been in use at least a year and have not seen any trouble with it yet. The article did scare me into making yet another backup, but seriously, there are a lot of good posts here talking about how we tend to blow everything out of proportion. Yes, the register seems to have quite a bit of proof of faulty drives, and yes, this drive isn't exactly the cream of the crop. I can say that it has been doing it's job, and so far it hasn't made any strange noises or emitted any foul odours. On the other side of the consumer spectrum, it's not unusual for an automobile manufacturer to recalls tens of thousands of automobiles for "issues" that can actually result in death, yet people continue to drive those cars (many of whom didn't even get the recall notice and are driving potential execution chambers.) The fact is, at least with disk drives and data, if you don't have a backup then it's your own damn fault. It's like preventive health care for your information.
I worked on an IT project at Western Digital. The drives that pass quality tests with flying colors go to customers like Dell, Compaq, etc. The lower quality ones go to Frys, Comp USA, etc.
I work in a tech support dept. for a mid sized university. We recieved 18 Gateway desktops with Fujitsu drives in them. Within 6 months, 12 have died. All but one of those were replaced with non-Fujitsu drives and work perfectly. The single Fujitsu replacement was a different model and series that its predecessor and it failed within 3 days!
I work for a major OEM, and we have had nightmarish issues with Fujitsu (also Maxtor and Western Digital but mostly Fujitsu).
You need to watch out for clicking noises, "Drive Not Ready" messages, and 172x errors during POST.
From the official Fujitsu response regarding their hard drives, it is all how you categorize the failure. If we send back 2000 drives that have all genuinely FAILED, they will look at all the drives and will count those with scratched labels as "damaged during shipping" not a product failure. This helps them skew their numbers so they meet the 3-5% acceptable failure rate. It's a creative accounting method right out of Enron.
Not coincidentally, Fujitsu has stopped manufacturing hard drives.
I know there will be about 10000 people here saying Fujitsu sucks but I have to say that my experience has been different. I have a bunch of ATA Fujitsus (MPDxxxx & MPExxxx). They have been all on 24/7, some for four years straight. Excellent drives, running very cool, unlike the stupid IBM's 34 & 75 GXP series.
My two cents...
> My five year old Fujitsu 4.5GB SCSI-2
:)
> HD is still going strong.
I bought a 1.054 GB SCSI-2 Fujitsu in 1993. It cost about a grand US. It still works.
It actually performs decently, too -- 5400 RPM, 10.5 ms access time, 512 KB cache. Not bad for a piece of 9-year old hardware to still perform about as well as entry-level current stuff.
The freaky thing about that drive, is that you can use one corner of it (where the arm pivots, presumably) to pick up quarters. It will hold four if you're patient.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
.....We've had problems with just about every manufacturer (Quantum, Seagate, Fuji, WD, etc...) except one: Maxtor....
Does your mileage vary?
My ex-roomate had two 8GB Maxtors fail on him when we built his PII a few years back. The first one failed within a day of use. He called Maxtor who were very helpful on the phone and sent an advance replacement. The replacement drive lasted a little over a year.
Regardless of brand, there are only two types of hard drives out there:
1) A hard drive that has crashed
2) A hard drive that is about to
I think we're slowly reaching the end of magnetic media's life as our primary secondary storage mechanism. There are just too many delicate moving parts requiring extreme precision to even function due to the density of data we're storing. I think we'll see more and more solid state storage solutions replace hard drives and more optical solutions used for backup.
1. Buy a Promise PCI HD controller. The ATA 100 one is available everywhere for 49 bucks. Maxtor sells these branded as their own too. 2. On the way home, stop at Radio Shack and buy two 120 ohm resistors. 3. Do a Google search to get the instructions on how to convert it to a RAID controller. If you are able to solder 4 connections, you can do this mod. in 30 minutes. It's beyond easy. 4. Get yourself a HD the same size or bigger then the one you want to mirror. Brand doesn't matter. I bought a Maxtor 60 gig for 99 bucks that had a coupon inside it for a $50.00 rebate to get their controller card free. 5. You're done. Okay it was only four steps. The ATA 66 Promise card can also be modded and doing so is even simpler then the ATA 100 one. I've done many of both and never had a single one go bad. The ATA66 card can be found as cheap as 20 bucks.
absolutely, I've replaced four drives in the last few months for myslef and others, two 7200 rpm maxtors, a laptop Fujitsu and a standard Fujitsu. All have still been under warranty and barely more than a year old. It's interesting that a lot of these companies have now gone to a one year warranty as opposed to the old 3 year which was the industry standard for years. My next motherboard will have intergrated raid.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I think this is a bad correlation. At the same time drives are getting more dense and/or smaller, more people are using them. The use of PCs over the last 4 years has greatly increased. There are more reasons to need more drive space, I have a 30 GB and a 120GB. I wouldn't have needed those 4 years ago, but now they are about 60% full. Hard drives are used a little harder now. People are modding cases, OCing their systems, and generally getting more out of the PC than they have in years past. I had a 4 GB drive fail 3 weeks after the 3 year warranty expired. Now you would be hard pressed to find a 4 GB drive. I think that manufacturers realized that 3 years is a LONG time in the tech industry. Compare the number of drives sold 5 years ago to the number sold today.
I don't know if there is an increase in unreliability of hard drives over the last few years, but I know that instead of 1 computer I now have about 5 running at home. Of course, all this applies until one of my drives crashes, then I'll be convinced that hard drive manufacturers don't give a damn about quality anymore. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have a 6 gig Fujitsu that has the goofiest jumpter settings. In one mode you set one jumper across a pair of pins like any other drive, in another mode you set two jumpers, one in the normal fashion and another *horizontally* across one of the pins used for the other mode, in a manner normally used to park jumpers on drives that have all jumpers open for some modes.
I neglected to do this properly -- I couldn't believe it worked that way -- when adding it as a slave drive and it corrupted the master drive, sinking my system.
It's the only drive I've ever seen that used jumper settings in this manner. I haven't used the drive much, so it hasn't failed...yet.
Highpoint chipsets are cheap, I've got two motherboards with them built in (and unused)
In a heartbeat I would buy a 40 GB drive that was actually internally mirrored 40's. Yes, I will pay a significant premium for integrity.
So, manufacturers, build me a single drive form factor hard drive, with 1 ide connector that is in fact a RAID 1 array!
About 6 months ago, a partner company in Silicon Valley wanted to send us about 30GB of source code. We decided that the easiest way was for them to ship it on a hard disk for us.
It seems they had a policy of using Fujitsu drives and we went through no less than 3 drives that arrived dead.
So I can certainly say without a doubt that Fujitsu drives are the most unreliable I have ever seen.
FWIW, the data was shipped on a WDC drive and it arrived fine. We never did get a single Fujitsu to work here.
the easiest is to put the drive as far down as you can get in the case
Interesting idea. I hadn't thought of that. For my computer, I mount my 3.5" hard drives in removable 5.25" drive bays. The bays are made of aluminium to help dissipate the heat, and they have a small fan in the back to help circulate the air away from the drive. Of course, the only 5.25" drive bays in my case are at the top of the machine.
I originally bought the drive bays years ago because I noticed how much heat there was between my two drives. Given that there was only a couple millimeters of space between them, the heat had a difficult time escaping. I wanted to put more space between the drives, but my only 3.5" bays were taken by the hard drives and a floppy drive.
The drive bays cost me about $50 each (I bought two), which seemed expensive, but as I think about it, I've never had a hard drive fail on me. These days, you can get similar drive bays for $10-$20 each.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Google results:
"never buy seagate" 2 hits
"never buy western digital" 3 hits
"never buy fujitsu" 6 hits
"never buy quantum" 6 hits
I've worked in a small lab of various vendor's systems and storage arrays, at any given time, there's probably somewhere around 1000 disks or so running there. They have arrays from Compaq, Hitachi, etc, and many PCs/Unix servers as well. My overall experience is this: Everyone's drives fail occasionally. It's a fact of life, you can't expect that something spinning at high rpm and has heads floating at miniscule distances from platters will last indefinitely.
As far as FC-AL or SCSI disks go, reliability-wise, they're all pretty much the same. I have seen an IBM, Fuji, Hitachi, Seagate, Quantum, etc pop once in awhile, but nothing major. IDE disks are a little different, the IBM 'deathstar' drives caused problems, and the older (sub 8 gig) Western Digitals seem to have a high mortality rate after a few years of use. Same goes for the defunct Seagate 'Hawk' line. Granted, this is beyond the warranty period, but many of the other seagates/ibms/etc are still going strong after several years. I normally swear by Seagate, but I just had to send back an 80gb drive from my home machine for replacement...not sure what the exact failure was, though. I have hit the random-ascii-garbage-during-boot from a 10gig Fuji, but that was an isolated incident.
Advice: Assume that your critical drive WILL fail, and plan accordingly. Now I mirror everything, AND back it up. Keeping redundant online storage is different than maintaining backups of earlier versions of data! Even in a home PC, it is really worth it to get two drives and mirror them, with software or otherwise.
You don't have to go hog-wild though....I'm a storage redundancy zealot, and I tend to go overboard. (Clustered fileservers, two fibre HBAs in each [on different buses], multipath through redundant switches to RAID arrays, power from different circuits to each array, etc. Fun stuff to play with, if you have the equipment around. :-)
man tunefs | grep fish
Although increased density perhaps makes drives a little more prone to failure, I think a big factor is how people treat their drives and where they buy them from - something that's becoming increasingly varied.
:)
If you buy cheapo "OEM" drives from some box stacker, chances are it'll be poorly packed, and/or handled badly before it reaches you. Manufacturers can't do much if the box shifters keep throwing boxes of drives about. Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.
Heat's another factor; modern drives run damn hot - you really want a fair bit of airflow around them, either from your normal case intake fans and convection, or dedicated active cooling. Just because it runs fine doesn't mean you're not cutting it's lifetime in half, or worse.
The warranty situation I think is more down to the price war that's occuring with low end drives rather than any real change in quality. You can still get higher end drives with full warranties, and in some cases purchase extended warranties for another $20 or so. The 97% of users who don't experience a drive failure are probably happy to keep their $20, while 90% of the remaining 3% will likely get a replacement from their retailer anyway. The rest of us can spend the extra on a quality drive
A long time ago, a friend of mine said to get a CD-RW instead of a zip drive and use it to do archiving. I'm glad I followed that advice since I currently have 3 working CD-RWs (including the original one from 5 years ago, a blazing 6/4/4, the two others came with each computer I bought since then). While CD-RWs aren't perfect, the medium is a lot cheaper (about a dollar a disc, millidallars per meg), and the software has been getting better at using the discs efficiently. They archive well, with tons of 3rd party products like jewel cases and racks for storage (they are CDs after all). You always have the option to use a format that all computers can read (CD-R), and with external USB burners they are as convinent (and cheap, both are $130 at best buy) as Zip Drives.
-no broken link
If it's the ondrive controller thats failed, not a head crash,
then you can take the controller off an identical model, and
copy the data off to save it. It's just usually about 5 screws,
and carefully removing the ribbon cable. BE CAREFUL!
Note that i said IDENTICAL model.
and you thought HDD fans were just for those crazy OCing kids, didn't you? I think a big part of why HDDs are failing is improper case ventalation (due to cheap-ass manufacturers not wanting to spend the extra 3 cents on a case fan, AND smaller and smaller cases beccoming more popular) combined with drives running hotter than previous ones. A few days after installing a Maxtor 60gig, i was inside the box cleaning up the spaghetti and happened to touch the top of the Maxtor.... and was scared shitless to find that it was *HOT*. 10 minutes later $7 bought me a HDD fan/drive bay mount combo. nice and cool now, and i'd bet dollars to doughnuts my Maxtor 60gig will outlast any Maxtor 60gig without a fan.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
my friends and I all have a 100% failure rate with 10 and 20gb fujitsu hard drives... i got about 4 of them for free from an auction (a computer training business went bottom-up, and i was working with the auctioneers about technical stuff), and none of them lasted more than a week. these were brand new drives. since then, i have had friends that have acquired these same model drives through similar means, and none of them have worked for more than a month or so.
the problem that would appear:
things would start to get unstable... acting flakey; so you run scandisk. bad sectors start at the beginning of the drive and continue for at least 5 gigs. not something i want to sit through... i have a friend that did a full scandisk, and it took ~6hrs for a 10gb drive. when it was through, he had ~4gb of usable disk space left.
just my experience...
Check out these articles. and here
And don't forget this
I have failed IBM drives, and a failed Maxtor. Will stick with Maxtor for now because of what IBM put me through.
Several years ago, I worked for a little company which sold PCs for professionals and individuals. During several months, we have sold fujitsu drives ranging (1.6, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3 and 6.4 GB). These models were based on exactly the same hardware, and we had lots of drives failing because they suddenly confused their type ! 1.6GB often became 2.1, and 3.2 or 4.3 became 6.4 GB. Of course, there weren't enough platters to make this work, so not only our customers lost their data, but we had to send the disk back to warranty. It was a very embarrassing situation because the hardware was OK, but we couldn't get the data back. The disk started, detected the error, then stopped. Sometimes, waiting several days allowed the disk to recover its original model. I always wondered if they stored the model on the medium itself instead of an eeprom.
That was a bad experience unfortunately, because except for this problem, these disks were relatively quiet and really fast !
Willy
It's definitely related to cost cutting. The manufacturers are perfectly capable of keeping the drives reliable at higher densities - that's just a matter of using the amount of error correction, sector sparing, interleaving, scratch detection & such to bring the error rate down to a statistically insignificant number.
The hard drive manufacturers are under intense pressure to cut costs. If they can reduce the price per unit by five cents, when that is spread out over hundreds of millions of drives, that adds up to a lot of money. Especially in this economy, this means you'll see drives made with cheaper components, with less testing done, in clean rooms that may not be as clean as they used to be, by workers that don't have the training their predecessors had, using firmware that has been hacked and rehacked until "spaghetti" doesn't even begin to describe it. (Don't ask me how I know this...)
But this is no excuse for a 90% failure rate. Making drives cheaply is one thing, but we as customers still expect them to work for at least two or three years without problems. I still expect vendors to own up to their screwups and make them right.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
I've seen 100% failure rate on a batch of 10 and 20 gig Fujitsu drives installed in the summer of 2001. They started failing after 10 months or so. This was in Norway.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
On reading your cited reference -- this guy doesn't like ANY hard drive, at least not for long, which tends to make me wonder -- after all a data recovery person isn't going to see the mass of live drives, only the dead ones. I notice he didn't make any attempt to correlate marketshare vs number of dead HDs that come into his shop. Also, recommending SCSI over IDE for reliability doesn't necessarily wash either.
:(
Frex, Micropolis -- at one time rock-reliable SCSI HDs. But their final year's worth of SCSI HDs (mostly sold by surplus dealers after Micropolis went tits-up) have had, in my observation, a near-100% failure rate. Bad handling in transit or bad HDs? We'll never know.
As to what I've heard locally about Fujitsu -- the general comment is "really unreliable", especially their SCSI HDs. I've never bought any Fujitsu HDs but at one time had been looking into 'em for consumer SCSI. No one had a good word to say about 'em, including HD dealers.
Too bad their HDs aren't as durable and reliable as their floppy drives. I've got several Fujitsu 1.2mb 5" floppies dated 1986 that still work just fine, and some were the everyday data drive for systems in the pre-HD era. Don't think I've ever seen one fail yet.
I think with the corner-cutting that all the HD mfgrs have been doing of late (cf. the recent cut in consumer-HD warranties to one year) we're going to see a steep increase in crap HDs from everyone, at every level.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've been buying W.D. HDs exclusively for a long time, for myself and my clients. At last count I had .. um .. [adds in latest salvage gleanings] 18 working W.D. HDs in the house. (The oldest is a 20mb model dated 1991, still 100% error-free.) Also have half a dozen more with age-related problems. Of course, I tend to treat 'em like raw eggs and am careful to avoid overheating too :)
:(
I've had to RMA three new W.D. HDs for DOA, plus one that died on the LAST day of the then-3-year warranty. I will say W.D. made it plenty easy. Tech support dude determined that I had already tested the HD and knew what I was talking about, and two minutes later we were done.
But the warranty cut to one year was disturbing. I'd noticed that my most recent purchase (first I'd seen made in Malaysia rather than Singapore) is visibly not as well-made as previous W.D. HDs. And that was my most recent RMA as well, having developed data errors at only a couple months old. Next time I buy some HDs, I'll be looking for last-year's models.
As to "but you can buy the 3 year warranty for $20" -- sorry, that does me no good at all if I first had to pay *double* the OEM price for a retail-boxed HD (which my clients sure as hell are not going to go for either). And I can't use the enterprise class drives (which still have the 3 yr warranty) on most of my own and clients' machines -- that big a HD isn't supported by the system BIOS.
And yes, I've ranted about this to W.D. sales, public relations, and tech support. As a SOHO integrator, it puts me in a bad spot (you think YOU have trouble making money off HDs!) and makes me wonder if maybe I should just settle for the cheapest HD if they're only going to be backed for a year anyway.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?