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

Trends

[swordboy]

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...

Re:Trends

[runenfool]

Its probably related to the increasing drive density - but it may also come from companies cutting costs to move more units to stay alive in the soft economy.

Just looking down the list of comments, it does seem that everyone has noticed the increasing number (or at least it seems that way) of massive drive failures from certain manufacturers.

Re:Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Trends

[squarefish]

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.

Re:Trends

[Killall -9 Bash]

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.

Re:Trends

[meldroc]

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.

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.

Re:Trends

[0x0d0a]

Fortunately, there's a fix. You can buy server-class drives SCSI drives if you're uncomfortable with cheapo ones. Sure, they're going to cost you more, but that may simply be the cost of reliability.

It really comes down to how much you're willing to pay for peace of mind about your data. A monitor failing is no big deal. A hard drive failing can cost you years of work, source code, everything.

Unfortunately, "backing up" is no longer a really good option for most people. Perhaps buying a second drive and mirroring, but tapes (except for the very most expensive) and CD-Rs are simply too small compared to drive size to be very useful for backup. It's actually cheaper to use a second drive to back things up these days (compared to tape). Writeable DVDs still are expensive, still aren't popular or standardized, and even when they get so, are very fragile and likely to require at least ten discs to back up a complete hard drive.

If anyone knows of a less expensive, large-amount-of-data-per-unit backup system, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Hard drives got too big too fast. They outstripped CPUs and Moore's law. They outstripped all competing storage devices. They actually outstripped consumer demand in the last two years or so. The people doing the research on them are *too* good. I remember buying an 80MB drive not-so-many years ago. Slow. Physically huge. Cost something like $3 per megabyte. Now drives have a price/performance ratio 6000 times better. No other product in any field I know of has come anywhere close to this.

Re:Trends

[twilightzero]

I don't know what HD company you're referring to in this, but it's obviously not the one I work for. And I just happen to work for WD, in tech support/RMA's, so I think I'm qualified to write a rebuttal ;)

Drive manufacturers require you put up the (supposed) retail cost of the drive before they issue an RMA. Why do I say supposed? Because it's more than twice what I would pay for the same drive from the shop down the road. And way over their current MSRP.

When setting up an advance replacement (where we send the HD out to you first), we do require a credit card # but we do NOT charge it. We do an authorize operation, which checks that the card is valid and that it has at least enough available on it at that exact moment to cover the drive should you not return it. And we do not charge double fair market value for the drive, in fact we get a lot of comments that our authorize amounts are VERY low - about $25 for a 20 gb drive and $31 for a 40 gb (both 7200 rpm) to give you a quote off the top of my head.

Then they ship you the replacement.
You return the crapped-out drive.

Standard practice.

Then, if they determine that the drive is buggered outside the warranty, you've bought yourself a "new" (because they reserve the right to ship you a used drive as a replacement) drive at twice the cost that you paid for the damn thing. And you're paying the shipping.

We do indeed test the bad drives when we get in, however we don't wait for the testing to get done before sending out the replacement, mostly in the interest of time. And if your old drive tests out with NDF (no defect found), big deal, you won't hear about it or get charged for it. And if you've managed to damage your drive outside the warranty, I'm sorry I have no pity for you. Almost the only way it's damaged outside of warranty is if it's physically damaged, and if that's the case you're the stupid one for even thinking you'd get it replaced. On the off chance this would be the case, the drive would be rejected back to you and you would have the option of returning the replacement or purchasing it, see my note above about fair market value. Yes you would pay shipping back of the replacement drive back, as I said physical damage is one of the only ways to get it rejected back and if you're dumb enough to send it in like that, you deserve what you get.

As far as sending remanufactured drives as replacements, yup we do, as well as I believe every other IDE manufacturer (scsi I'm not as familiar with so I don't want to conjecture). And repeat replacements from failed refurb drives are actually more rare than you'd think. Sorry I don't have any numbers, just personal experience. And sorry for the long-windedness but either you're REALLY dealing with the wrong company or you're stretching the truth like Gumby on a taffy machine.

we need...

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

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.

Re:we need...

[Camel Pilot]

It seems these days every manufacture wants you to "register". And we all know the registeration process is just a marketing ploy to get your personal information so they can profile you and stuff your mailbox/e-mail/phone with advertising.

Didn't I read this a month ago?

[ackthpt]

I wish I could remember where, but I've read about this already somewhere some time ago.

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.

Thats why I like Maxtor......

[vertical_98]

But seriously, I have a 5400rpm 1.2g Maxtor that has been in use for over 4 years. I had a 7200rpm 20g Seagate that crashed after 14 months in a machine. I think the combination of high rpms with super dense platters is what is causing the most problems.

Of course, My father thinks that people just don't give a shit about quality any more.....

Vertical

Re:Thats why I like Maxtor......

[bogie]

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.

Re:Thats why I like Maxtor......

[Zathrus]

I think the combination of high rpms with super dense platters is what is causing the most problems

Well... kinda...

A vast number of problems are being caused by the side effect of high rpms and dense platters -- heat. Modern drives get really, really hot, and most people don't adequately cool them. Heck, they don't even adequately cool their CPUs.

Look at the operating temperature of your drive. Get a probe thermometer and read the ambient temperature of your case. Then realize that the air around the drive is probably 5-10 degrees C hotter than the ambient temperature, and unless you've specifically addressed it there's little or no ventilation of the drive cage.

So most people end up operating the drives in excess of their rated operating temps... and they fail.

There are some easy things you can do for drive ventillation - the easiest is to put the drive as far down as you can get in the case. Most cases vent from bottom front to top back. Take advantage of that. More extreme measures involve mounting a heat sink on the drive or even fans (either on the drive bay or to the sides).

Yeah

[Tsar Ivan IV]

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.

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:wha?

[IvyMike]

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.

had 2 fail in 4 months

[shomon2]

Yes, I had this problem on my puter: I have a compaq that comes with "same day support" - which in spain can mean a lot of things. One day my drive broke down. It was a fujitsu. The tech guy came the next day with a new one and even let me keep the old one for a few days while I submerged myself in hardware trying to mount it and copy my stuff out. Yes I do keep backups, but it's nice to just copy stuff back exactly how I had it.

Second time, same problem: hard disk just stopped. Same exact one as before (although I don't remember what it is just now exactly). The same day technician this time was a few days later than last time, because they'd "had to order the part from madrid". The guy didn't even check the drive. He just changed it. He said: All these fujitsu's just crash on us. I don't even check them anymore to find out why. We ordered in a seagate. This time everything was lost. The computer couldn't even read the broken drive.

Ale

IBM DeskStar

[T-Kir]

When doing my internship a friend at work recommended IBM drives, mainly on the principle that they had the best record for reliability. I have been buying IBM drives for years now (apart from a nice quiet Maxtor) with now problems whatsoever.

But about two years ago, my uni housemate got an IBM DeskStar drive which died on him after 3 weeks from getting it. Turns out he got the drive where they had the glass platters, and the heads on the drive literally crashed and cracked the platters. He had all his Uni work on there, although we kept yelling the work 'backup' to him. I don't know how many of these drives had this problem, but IBM pulled the drives as soon as they found out about the problem.

Bad News for Sun

[niola]

This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun. At Princeton University, every time I order a hard drive for my Sun servers, it is actually a re-badged Fujitsu as of this past summer. Prior to Fujitsu all Sun drives were actually Seagate, and they were very reliable.

Though I find this news disturbing, I have to say I have personally not had a failure of any of my Sun/Fujitsu drives yet. Knock on wood...

Perhaps this problem is not in the higher-end 10k RPM SCSI drives?

Here we've had TONS of them fail

[docstrange]

One of the desktop models that we ordered for widespread deployment in our enterprise was the compaq ipaq desktop. The 10GB Fujtsu drives that came in the 866mhz ipaq desktop. "Hard Drive Model MPG3102A" are failing left and right. I would estimate that I have had to replace on average 2 of these drives a week for the last few months. The drives started to magically fail after about a year of use. Fujutsu says that the drives should be covered under compaqs warranty. (which is only 1 year, and since gone), and refuses to help us replace their defective drives. The funny thing is that these drives have a known hardware flaw, and there is a firmware out there that tried to fix it. All of our drives have the alleged "fixed" firmware, yet they still are failing. If anyone wants a box of the 50 or so fujitsu paperweights that I've got over here please let me know. I really wish we didn't have to eat the cost of all these drives.

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.

Re:Hard to imagine

[Zathrus]

I think a collection of real stats which were somehow reliably collected would be really useful in terms of all this commodity hardware

Storage Review had such a database at once upon a time. It was widely hailed as the most comprehensive database of the kind, and pretty accurate (given that "reliable collection" is an oxymoron when it comes to the net).

Then their hard drive crashed and they lost everything.

Yes, it's horribly ironic. It also struck me as really freaking idiotic that a website dedicated to storage wouldn't back up their own data. I'm not an SR regular, so I didn't follow the story that closely at the time.

As it happens, SR is now restarting the reliability database. It'll take time to get accurate data, of course, but it's better than nothing. Here's hoping they succeed.

And that this time, they have backups.

Re:One word...

[Fugly]

.....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.

MPG3 - MP3

[xenofalcon]

we are having severe problems with Fujitsu drives, especially ones beginning with the serial MPG3

Must be one of those new RIAA-compliant hard drive models.

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.

Unfortunately I've Suffered

[Psychotext]

I work for a large soft drink making company that through a third party contractor ended up with Fujitsu hard drives in all of the equipment that we use to control the blending and dosing (Putting in bottles) of our drinks. About 6 months ago we started noticing failures of these machines in large numbers but could not work out what was causing them.

We initially put it down to heat (Surely these drives can't all be naturally broken) and fitted expensive cooling gear. They kept failing.

We then thought that it was the contractor messing with the machines that caused the failures so we put in better access control (Simple key to allow dial in). This didn't fix it either.

It was only when I ordered 80 western digital hard drives and started replacing the Fuji's once they broke that we started noticing that the WD drives were not breaking. We are currently scheduling downtime of the plant to replace the rest (Not easy given it all runs 24x7 and we are always behind schedule).

Needless to say we are not happy at all. I would hate to think how much money all that downtime has cost the company, and how much lost sleep the IT team has had to endure from the endless call-outs.

Which models?

[Wakko Warner]

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.

The funky jumper settings screwed me

[swb]

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.

Re:Trends (bad correlation)

[Matey-O]

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.

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.

No Surprise - We Get what We Pay For

[GroundBounce]

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.

Re:Trends (bad correlation)

[swordboy]

I think this is a bad correlation. At the same time drives are getting more dense and/or smaller, more people are using them.

I work in tech support for a company where the population has been largely fixed (so it doesn't matter if the rest of the world is using more than usual - I have my own data). I have LOTS of hard drives going through my hands so I'm familiar with failure rates. They have been increasing. Certainly, there are lots more drives out there, but they are failing at a higher rate.

In years past, it was easier to deal with tech support if you could let the drive "speak" to the technician on the other end of the phone. Usually, the techs were button monkeys that didn't realize that *I already knew* the drive was bad and needed to be replaced. So in the end, I'd usually just power up the drive and give it a few good whacks on the counter. Then I'd call up support and put the phone up to the drive. This reduced call times to only a couple minutes rather than the typical 20 - 30 minutes that it took the monkey to run through the flow chart.

Me: Here THAT? It's broken!
Tech: Your shipping address, sir?

Today's drives don't take much whacking as they are much more delicate. This is also evident by IBM's new Thinkpad Shock Absorber (page 2, feature #5). With my old Thinkpad, I once (forgive me...) had a near car accident while it was powered up. The damn thing flew across the car and smacked into the dash with nary a problem. It still works today.

Tip: for the new one year warranty's, just buy two drives and mirror them. Whack one at 10 months and the next at 11.

Cheetos,

swordboy