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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?
From my experience, I've never had a hard drive that I've bought and cared for myself ever die on me for no reason. Probably about 10 hard disks from all different vendors. I have however destroyed my hard disks accidentily.
On the other hand, I've used disks second-hand, or been given disks (or stolen disks) that have died on me. But I can't vouch for their care.
Maybe you guys are just really rough with your disk drives?
One thing I have noticed about Windows users is that they're very quick to blame their problems on hardware when it's really Windows' fault that their devices don't work or their filesystems have been corrupted etc.
Anecdote: I know someone whose NIC just stopped working on their Windows 2000 box. Couldn't get it to work at all, reboots, reinstalled driver, etc. He booted Linux and it picked up the card and configured it with no sweat. How many people in situations like this that don't have Linux end up tossing their hardware because they think it's dead?