3 Major HD Makers Recalling Drives? [UPDATED]

mauriceh writes "Seems that 3 major Hard Disk companies have a problem with defective 40GB platters. A major recall is in the works." Seagate, Hitachi, and Maxtor 40 & 80 gig drives appear to be the troubled drives. Update: 05/30 12:37 GMT by M : There is apparently no recall. Digitimes has issued a revision/retraction, and TheInquirer has a story as well.

Comments

hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to IBM? That deathstar seems to be giving people more problems than those 3 combined.

Re:hey

[subzero_ice]

When you call IBM they send your HDD over to Hitachi. So I think Hitachi is basically recalling the deathstars.

Re:hey

[qortra]

Not the problematic ones. According to the post, this only deals with harddrives that have 40gb platters. The real problematic deskstar drives (GXP75,GXP60) had smaller platters (15 gb, 20 gb respectively i think).

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

gb? What is a gb? Or do you mean GB?

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, they send you over to Hitachi because IBM sold their harddrive section to Hitachi.

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is Slashdotted! That's just craptacular. Any of you karma whores got a google cache of it?

Re:hey

[orangesquid]

A "gb" is a groucho bit.
There are 10^30 * 8 * 2^30 grouchobits in a gibibyte.

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to worry unless you bought your drive from Taiwan:

[[
Major brand hard drive vendors recall defective products produced in China

Jimmy Hsu, Taipei; Wen-Yu Lang, DigiTimes.com [Tuesday 27 May 2003]

Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said.

About 12,000-15,000 defective hard drives are estimated to have entered Taiwan. It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said.

Local distributors said they began to see soaring return rates on the hard drives since late April. Most of the returned drives reportedly suffered from bad sectors or problems being formatted, and were found to have come from the same sources in China.

Among the top four hard drive vendors worldwide, Western Digital is the only one unaffected by the incident, as the company does not have products manufactured in China, sources said.

It is suspected that high defect rate was caused by the inexperience of certain manufacturers in China as they were transitioning to new production processes, sources said.

Local agents declined to confirm the report. While Maxtor agent Xander International denied seeing an unusual defect rate, Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products. Comments from Hitachi were unavailable.
]]

Re:hey

[letxa2000]

Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products.

So are they going to provide warranty service once the hard drive fails? That's a little late, isn't it? After all the data is toast? Seems like the correct thing to do is replace all hard drives that are at risk since it's impossible to know WHICH 10% of the hard drives are going to fail.

Offering to give a user a new hard drive after his has just died and taken the data with it is hardly any consolation to the user.

Re:hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a friend of mine loves his GXP60s he has quite a few of them and said he only lost one or two out of eighty (He works as the Network Admin of a building of of the local University.

The GXP75 on the other hand is death trap. When I worked for Dell, we had to replace more GXP75's than ANY other hard drive (which I thought was strange, since it was the one of the least common hard drives, they were only on our high end systems), and had some customers wait 3 weeks to get a replacement hard drive, that did the exact same thing. I finally requested that parts department dispacth a 40 gig maxtor UDMA 100 drives to replace the 45 gig drives since that was the closest thing we had (actually it was the only thing that we had that was similar). For the folks with the 75 gig drives, were well screwed but we couldn't do anything about it, poor guys.

HMS White Star

Re:hey

[gujo-odori]

The user is supposed to back up the data.

If the user chooses to not do this and subsequently loses said data, that's not the vendor's problem. We know that all disk drives fail: they have moving parts, and some day those parts will stop moving. You don't know if that day will come when the disk is 5 years old or 5 days old, so if you value the data, back it up.

Re:hey

[poppycat]

Ohh man he fell lucky there. We have had probably around 10 replacements of our GXP60's since we got them. The good thing is that they are always under warranty since they tend to fail inside a month but it is becoming quite normal for me to hear the scream of my husband when he realises they have died on him yet again. I do have to admit though that IBM used to make some bloody good drives and it is a shame they have gone ends up over these latest ones.

Re:hey

[letxa2000]

The user is supposed to back up the data. If the user chooses to not do this and subsequently loses said data, that's not the vendor's problem.

I agree, but if it is known that 1 out of 10 hard drives is going to fail in under a year whether or not the data is being backed up, that needs to be addressed before it happens.

Saying that it's not the vendor's problem that 1 out of 10 hard drives will fail because I should be backing up my data is like saying that Ford is not responsible if 1 out of 10 cars will explode even if I change my oil every 3000 miles.

Both the defective car and the defective hard drive need to be recalled before disaster strikes. Sure, with hard drives we backup our data but that does not avoid the downtime of a brand new hard drive failing, having to install a new hard drive, restore data, etc. While hard drives can fail at any time it is definitely not unreasonable to expect a HD to work at least 2 or 3 years--especially with the MTBF ratings we see documented.

Re:hey

[TheRoachMan]

Actually, on the site you linked to, a groucho is 10^-30, not 10^30. Where you said groucho, you meant to say grouchi, which is 10^30. Smartass :p

no comments and /.ed already

[jonfromspace]

Or maybe they were using said HD.

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not funny! This is obivous, stupid people!

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[www.microsoft.com]

Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future:
We're pleased to announce the newest reason for you to subscribe to Slashdot... Slashdoting!

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[Anonymous Coward]

what do people always post "no comments an /.ed already? does it ever occur to u guys that maybe people are reading the article and not posting comments on it?

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[deadsaijinx*]

please, we all know that no one actually reads the articles

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[bloodpet]

I disagree. It's just that i don't read all of them.

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[Goldberg's Pants]

I'm probably not alone, but I quickly checked to see my make of HD's as I could NOT remember.

Was very relieved to see BOTH are Western Digital who are explicitly mention in the article as NOT having problems due to the fact they don't manufacture in China.

Given the problems I'm had lately with the system, that was a breath of fresh air:)

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[Zork the Almighty]

If nobody reads the articles, why would they be slashdotted ?

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[Graspee_Leemoor]

The real truth is that there are 2 kinds of slashdot visitors:

1) does not read story, maybe skims top of page, starts to post inane crap

2) goes off to read story, slashdotting it, then either:
2a) reads story, looks back at /. postings, sees they are all inane crap from people who haven't read the story and doesn't bother to post
2b) doesn't get to read story because of slashdotting so reads /. postings. Even having not read the linked story, can tell this is all inane crap from people who haven't read the story but are posting anyway.

ok, so I'm really tired here at 5am and this actually believe it or not made sense (at least to me) when I started typing it.

graspee

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[gunga]

Is that my Koan, sensei?

mirrors anyone?

[ankit]

Already slashdotted...

*sigh*

[Dumb Nig]

'Tis the problem with faster and bigger drives.
I mean, a one year waranty nowadays, It's a joke.

Now I'm off to back up my data because my drive will probably fail soon.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, thermal paper receipts disintigrate in 6 months.

So, scan one in, edit it, and use that to get maxtor to send you a new one. If the decline it, sue the store in small claims court.

Maxtor has been good but this 1 year warranty bullshit makes them no better than Fangtun.

Re:*sigh*

[Blkdeath]

'Tis the problem with faster and bigger drives.
I mean, a one year waranty nowadays, It's a joke.

You should look into the Western Digital Special Edition drives. 8MB cache, fast as snot (Western Digitals seem to be kicking the rat dander out of most every other ATA drive manufacture nowadays, with or without the cache boost), and best of all, three year warranty!

40GB Western Digital Special Edition drive == $116CDN. The full warranty makes them a steal.

Speaking of fiascos {cough} Remember that Fujitsu fiasco not so long ago? Yeah yeah, we're still getting them in (two today alone). See, it's a lot easier selling these 40GB drives at $116 when people are able to RMA their 20GB Fujitsu and get a $118 cheque in return. Costs them all of $12 for a box, packing material, and shipping costs. So a brand-new drive with warranty costs them a whopping $10.

The sad part, however, is that I've had so much practice I've become good at telling customers their data is gone. {sigh}

DEAR GOD

[randomdef]

WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE PORN? all those hours i spent....er...downloading...

Slashdoted?

[www.microsoft.com]

Major brand hard drive vendors recall defective products produced in China

Jimmy Hsu, Taipei; Wen-Yu Lang, DigiTimes.com [Tuesday 27 May 2003]

Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said.

About 12,000-15,000 defective hard drives are estimated to have entered Taiwan. It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said.

Local distributors said they began to see soaring return rates on the hard drives since late April. Most of the returned drives reportedly suffered from bad sectors or problems being formatted, and were found to have come from the same sources in China.

Among the top four hard drive vendors worldwide, Western Digital is the only one unaffected by the incident, as the company does not have products manufactured in China, sources said.

It is suspected that high defect rate was caused by the inexperience of certain manufacturers in China as they were transitioning to new production processes, sources said.

Local agents declined to confirm the report. While Maxtor agent Xander International denied seeing an unusual defect rate, Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products. Comments from Hitachi were unavailable.

Re:Slashdoted?

[IanBevan]

Among the top four hard drive vendors worldwide, Western Digital is the only one unaffected by the incident, as the company does not have products manufactured in China, sources said.

OMG SARS has crossed species into hard disks ? Now that's a clever virus..

Re:Slashdoted?

[CrazyDuke]

For those who don't know:

It is generally not a good idea to purchace computer parts made in China during the Chinesse new year.

Re:Slashdoted?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

It is generally not a good idea to purchace computer parts made in China during the Chinesse new year.

On the contrary: That's exactly when I would purchace something as they were made a few weeks to a month or so previous, most likley...

Re:Slashdoted?

[The J Kid]

Well sure, but does it run on Linux?

*ouch*
*oh yeah*
*ducks*

so...

[Anonymous Coward]

now i know why my 80gig maxtor drive died a slow and painful death...
doesn't help me though, only 1 year warranty :/

Re:so...

[randomdef]

do you live in taiwan or are you just trying to get some attention?

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon my ignorance, does a recall not include out of warranty products? Somebody explain please.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't live in taiwan, but i have a nice, dead 80gig maxtor drive that i would bitchslap you with if you were around...
and yeah, obviously i'm seeking attention by posting anonymously...

Re:so...

[macdaddy357]

Did anyone else notice that the entire hard drive industry scaled warranties back to one year from three and even five at about the same time? That's collusion, and it violates anti-trust laws. Something should be done. I suggest a class action lawsuit by owners of all these fancy looking paperweights. I know the government won't do it for us.

Re:so...

[avidday]

No quite the entire industry, and not all their products. Samsung continue to offer 36 month warranties on their IDE drives, and just about all the major players still offer longer warranties on their SCSI drives.

Re:so...

[OneFix]

Umh, I know that Western Digital lets you upgrade to the 3 year warranty on all of their 1 year harddrives for $14.95.

I don't know about you, but I think the only reason they lowered the warranty period is to lower the cost of the drives by ~$15...

Wow!

[radiumhahn]

You mean to tell me that companies make non-defective hard drives! When did they start doing that!

Re:Wow!

[wronskyMan]

When SCO had a business model...

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

When they developed the newer generations of SCSI. :)

/.�ed? Dunno, but here it is�

[X-wes]

Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said.

About 12,000-15,000 defective hard drives are estimated to have entered Taiwan. It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said.

Local distributors said they began to see soaring return rates on the hard drives since late April. Most of the returned drives reportedly suffered from bad sectors or problems being formatted, and were found to have come from the same sources in China.

Among the top four hard drive vendors worldwide, Western Digital is the only one unaffected by the incident, as the company does not have products manufactured in China, sources said.

It is suspected that high defect rate was caused by the inexperience of certain manufacturers in China as they were transitioning to new production processes, sources said.

Local agents declined to confirm the report. While Maxtor agent Xander International denied seeing an unusual defect rate, Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products. Comments from Hitachi were unavailable.

Seagate refutes this

[bluegreenone]

The Register actually had an article on this in which Seagate denied this story. It does seem odd that 3 manufacturers would be having the same problem.

Re:Seagate refutes this

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone still believe The Register anymore? They've had so many over blown stories, I don't even read them any more.

Re:Seagate refutes this

[aka-ed]

What? you think the register made up a denial of a hard drive problem? Why would they do such a thing? WHat is their motivation? The Register at least attempted to contact the three manufacturers involved, which is more than you'll find in the vaguely-sourced initial story.

Re:Seagate refutes this

[Goldberg's Pants]

It does seem odd that 3 manufacturers would be having the same problem.

Why? Stands to reason there's not a plethora of places on Earth that make platters, so no doubt, of the handful that do, or at least the raw materials, they could very well come from the same place.

Re:Seagate refutes this

[Anonymous Coward]

Fujitsu refuted the problems they had, too...

Just as I suspected

[Michael's a Jerk!]

The warrenties being lowered was a sign quality as dropping. Data densitites are so huge these these days. The question of Drive reliability has been asked before. It's good reading.

Re:Just as I suspected

[tomstdenis]

What's worse though is with this quick "progress" you can't buy those more rugged 10/20 GB drives any more that seem to last forever...

Yeah progress!

Tom

Re:Just as I suspected

[deadsaijinx*]

the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years

Re:Just as I suspected

[wwwillem]

you can't buy those more rugged 10/20 GB drives any more

After spending last weekend trying to salvage stuff from my 9 month old 80GB IBM drive that went into coma, I can only 800% agree with you.... But if you (and I) think that ruggedness is more important than performance or "buck per giga", maybe we better look at SCSI drives. I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

On the other hand, I'm very afraid some /.-ers will quickly point out that today's SCSI drives are as much crap as the IDE ones :-(. But it's an avenue worth exploring....

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years


Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise. Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.

They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

All I want is a drive bigger than 40GB that'll actually *last* 5 years. Is that so hard? Apparently yes. I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day. I don't think I'll ever see that of the new, 1 year warranty drives.

Re:Just as I suspected

[deadsaijinx*]

oh, how bout Western Digital. I bought mine and it came with a Three Year warranty.

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

I've a 6 month old 40GB WD drive and it's developing unrecoverable read errors on sectors already :-(.

As far as I'm concerned , big drives are good for the "Wow!" factor, but are pretty much useless for serious data storage work. What's the point of having all that space if the damn thing dies 6 months down the track? Hard drives have to be pretty much the last "unreliable" bit of gear there is in a PC.

Increasing areal density just to get the "Wow!" factor doesn't help their reputation one bit when the error rate goes up as well.

Re:Just as I suspected

[1029]

Scientific Studies Made Simple... you only need 1 data to draw a logical conclusion.

Re:Just as I suspected

[deadsaijinx*]

then return it, that's what the warranty is for. Sorry to here about your poor hd, but bad hds happen.

Re:Just as I suspected

[tomstdenis]

I took another look at it.

a 40GB drive cost me about 90$. So what I do is backup [almost hourly] my projects [as I work on them] onto two other IDE drives and another IDE drive on another computer. Once a week I burn everything to CD.

This way when my main 40GB drive does die I don't lose anything :-) and at worse I have to buy another 90$ drive....

Fortunately "all my projects" and stuff takes up only 300MB so its not that painful to backup on the three other drives.

Tom

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

I know, it's just my Rant For The Day ;-)

It's in a server , and with the moving the data off it and the putting data back on the new one, and the warranty claim, and the sending away and all that.

Thank God it's Friday, anyway.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

damn, i misread your drive size as 80gig not 80mg. i'm sittin here thinkin to myself, "where the f*ck did this guy get an 80 gig hard drive 13 years ago."

Re:Just as I suspected

[CaramelCod]

I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day

One word. Upgrade.

Re:Just as I suspected

[c0d3h4x0r]

They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

Oh, come on. It's not even in the financial interest of the drive manufacturers to create less reliable products. The supposed "savings" of doing so would be easily outweighed by the decrease in reputation and sales figures, and the increase in costs to them for replacing drives that went bad during the warranty period (whatever the length).

The real reason they shorten the warranty period is so they aren't on the hook to provide technical support and replacements for drives they don't even make anymore. The costs they are trying to cut by shortening the warranty aren't manufacturing costs, but support costs.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise.

You mean like my Fujitsu SCSI drives with 5 year warranties?

Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.

You're looking in the wrong market. I've heard about 1 year HD warranties, but no drive I've considered buying has had one that short.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Jeffrey Baker]

You can still buy SCSI drives in reasonable sizes down to 18GB, new. The used SCSI market has many bargains, for example new Maxtor Atlas 10K III 18GB for $50 and 73GB for $150 (ebay prices). The performance is better than any IDE drive you can buy new today, WD Raptor included. I know I've posted this screed here before, but in price/performance SCSI still wins, and there are entire areas of performance that IDE does not even pretend to compete in.

5-year warrantees on SCSI gear, too. Probably not on eBay, but certainly on $10/GB equipment from CDW or similar.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Rolo Tomasi]

I think the users are a big part of the problem. If you don't cool your drive properly, it will die. Heat kills bearings. And the failure rate inreaseses exponentially with temperature. A drive that might run 10 years at 30C might die after 1 year at 60C. What percentage of people actually have active, fresh air cooling for their drives? My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat, and the manufacturers can't really control the cooling design of every individual PC, so they just shortened the warranty.

You might want to use a utility like DTemp or hddtemp to check your drive's temperature, and improve your cooling if your temps are over 35C. I've been using a Chieftec Dragon case for my home box for a few years now, which has a really nice drive cage with an integrated 80mm fan that blows fresh air directly over the drives, and my temps are rarely over 30C.

Re:Just as I suspected

[loconet]

I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

So true, I've had 2 Fujitsus HDs, 5GB and 3GB that I use every day , day in and day out, heavy trashing, Windows and Linux. They are still serving me well.

*knock on wood*

Re:Just as I suspected

[Fatllama]

But it's Thursday.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what was stopping manufacturers from doing exactly that when HD capacities were at 80MB? They were pushing the envelope back then, too.

Re:Just as I suspected

[JJahn]

I think it would be a lot less hassle for you if you used a RAID setup :)

Re:Just as I suspected

[hendridm]

> The warrenties being lowered was a sign quality as dropping.

Although I agree with you, I know Western Digital offers the ability to upgrade to their 3-year warranty for an extra $29.95. The last two WD drives I bought had a slip in the box stating this was so. In a way, it's kinda nice. For those who want assurance, they can pay more for it. For those who don't care, they get deal. It's too bad this correlates to lower quality drives... :/

PS, I like your sig, given your username :)

Re:Just as I suspected

[Trogre]

A good case for sticking with 5400rpm models.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

You want it cheap, big and fast (in this case, well-built), pick 2.

Market forces (i.e., you) have been pushing for cheap and big. Is it such a surprise that quality suffers?

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... no.
Drives now run cooler (at least the better quality ones).

Buy a Western Digital SE drive with 8 MB cache and 3 year warranty. Mine runs at room temp right now (21 C).

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

Maybe for you, fella - I live in Australia, its 11am Friday here :-)

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

one word: why? (it works)

They just run DOS for a PLC controller system. The software + DOS takes up about 8MB. Anything more is a waste really.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe. I have an old 486 DX4/100 with IBM 728MB and 1Gig ide drives. It's been running almost continuously since I bought it new when that was the hot thing. It's long since been retired to firewall status, but except for cleaning the hairballs out of it once a year its been trouble free.
I can't say that for any harddrive or machine I've had since.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Fatllama]

Likely story.

Re:Just as I suspected

[letxa2000]

I do something similar. My cron job makes an incremental backup of my work every 3 hours locally. That's mostly so if I screw something up I can roll back.

Then once a night the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last 24 hours and FTPs it over to another machine. The daily incremental backups are kept for a week.

Then once a week the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last week and FTPs it over to the other machine. These are kept indefinitely (until I get around to purging them).

Finally, once a month a complete backup is made and sent over to the other system. These, too, are kept indefinitely.

I burn CDs with the backups from time to time. But I feel pretty well protected--I'd have to lose two hard drives, one in a laptop and one on a server machine, pretty much simultaneously to be SOL. And even then I have my CDs to recover from which is various degrees of SOL depending on how long it has been since my last CD burn.

Hard drives just make me nervous. They've gotten so big anymore that you have to be extremely careful that you don't put all your eggs in one basket--and with hard drives that are so many times bigger than what a CD can hold it's not easy to backup all your data on a frequent basis. That's why I've gone to the "backup to another computer" option--it happens automatically thanks to cron and it FITS, which is more than I can say for trying to back it up regularly to a CD.

Re:Just as I suspected

[tomstdenis]

Little known fact. Tombot == poor. :-(

Throwing three IDE drives [that I had already] into an elcheapo motherboard is a bit cheaper :-)

The breakdown is as follows. 1 Drive was my system drive. 1 drive was for a class I was in [stupid cheap school] and the other was just for temp storage between windows and linux [fat32]. I bought them all when I had a job. My 30GB main drive died a month and a bit ago... [fun] so I got a new 40GB [crosses fingers].

Anyways, I'm a bit paranoid [and at this point broke] so I use three drives, info-zip and a bit of prayer to keep my stuff safe :-)

BTW for the curious, this is what I'm so interested in keeping safe.

http://iahu.ca:8080/tommath.pdf

Its my free BigNum textbook I'm writing based primarily on my LibTomMath bignum ISO C library. The text is getting rather complete and I'd hate to see it vanish...

Tom

Re:Just as I suspected

[Fweeky]

Lucky you; you obviously have good airflow around the drive bay. Most don't; ~50c is *far* more common.

Same with CPU's; some people with low output CPU's and high throughput fans will hit 30c, the rest of us will hit 55c.

Re:Just as I suspected

[appleLaserWriter]

Don't even get me started on the Seagate Barracudas overheating all the time. Oh, wait, clock says 2003 not 1993.

The differentiating factor between consumer and professional drives is now capacity rather than interface. FireWire is the new SCSI, so if you want reliability you need to stack up a bunch of IDE drives behind a RAID to FireWire bridge.

For home use, just make sure your PC is backed up to your iPod.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Fweeky]

My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat

Well, put it this way; that 10MB drive that's been running for a decade is probably spinning quite slowly, running cooler, and has way more leeway over how far the read/write heads can be off before it starts having trouble operating correctly; probably by quite a few orders of magnitude compared to a drive where a single platter may be 8,000 times denser.

So: 1. The platter can wobble to the point at which the drive rattles like crazy and it'll still be fine. 2. The bearings can fail to this point without anything batting an eyelid. 3. The components can expand a lot more freely without worrying too much about anything becoming misaligned. 4. All these components have less stress on them due to lower RPMs and less aggressive seek times.

Compare this with your shiny new 80G drive, where if your drive's rattling, it's probably already dead, and if the bearings are going, you're probably going to see tonnes of failing sectors long before you even hear the buzz of the platter's misalignment.

Quality isn't going down; requirements are getting stricter -- You can compare it to a shooting range; you start off 1m from your target, and slowly increase the range until it's 8km away.

The quality of your gun and your aim's almost certainly improved massively during that period, but it's pretty obvious which target's easier to hit reliably, especially when you're competing in a cutthroat market where you have to do it before the other guy and at least as cheaply, or else.

Re:Just as I suspected

[tnak]

Warranty on seagate ide drive == 1 year

warranty on seagate scsi drive == 5 years.

Looks to me like seagate believes they're better drives.

Samsung still has 3 year warranties on their ide drives. Only one I'l buy from now.

Re:Just as I suspected

[SmittyTheBold]

Well, you can easily get SCSI drives with 5-year warranties, whiel it's getting to be almost impossible to get an IDE drive with more than 1 year backing it up.

Companies wouldn't be willing to warrant things for that long if they weren't darn sure they wouldn't lose money in the process - and returns are very expensive.

Re:Just as I suspected

[eggstasy]

Why on earth do people bother to expand speed and size if the reliability penalty is so great?
Look... I got a "new" computer 3 years ago and kept my 486's HD. Since windows 98 only takes up 120 megs, you can do a lot with an HD that is smaller than a CD. I had some games, mp3s, pr0n, the works... i kept my 33.6 modem and only bought a 56k 'cause the 33 fell on the floor and my dog pissed on it before i could be arsed to pick it up. There wasnt such a big boost in performance anyways...
The HD died, but it was my fault. I got a 4 gig disk for free off of a friend and I couldnt fill it up either for a loooong time... and then I got broadband, and P2P apps, and I only bought my present 40 gig HD so I could stop burning CDs on a daily basis. No one really needs a lot of disk space unless they're a pirate (like me :) or some sort of professional person... reliability is far more important. The average joe never really downloads anything. The average joe doesnt do games and doesnt know what P2P is. The average joe thinks computer freaks like us are deities and honestly believes that all problems are Windows Problems, being ignorant that the hardware inside the box is highly fallible.
I believe there is a huge market for reliability-oriented parts.
Many graphics cards these days are passively cooled because people dont care about graphics power, but rather silence and reliability: Every card made in the past 5 years is just as good at running MS Office and IE as a Ti4600 or FX5900.
Many people have specifically asked me to get them a graphics card without a fan, whatever it may be, since their former card's fan failed.
Every single computer that I fixed had the hard drive nearly empty. A doctor friend of mine has had 30 free gigs of space on her "data partition" (that i made) for as long as she's had her computer.
So HD makers, read this:
Shove your shiny 320gig HDs up the nearest a-hole.
Make things that will last.

Thank you.

Re:Just as I suspected

[epine]

My file server in my basement has three of those 4G Fujitsu SCSI drives, bought them on auction as discontinued Unisys models. They do resemble boat anchors, but I've never lost a byte. And for my most important files, I've learned that 8G of reliable SCSI RAID is more than enough.

The problem with those darn reliable drives is they caused me to go out and buy a bunch of 40G Fujitsu MPG drives (which also had the virtue of being extremely quiet).

Well, that second batch of Fujitsu drives are sooo quiet now, not even the worms can hear them.

I really should have put the center of those 4G drives in upside down. The case would be more stable when the drives spin up.

Re:Just as I suspected

[GnarlyNome]

Well there are always the yard sales same quality drives ,but you only pay $5.00 ea.
( you mean the drive is supposed to rattle like that?)

Re:Just as I suspected

[Reziac]

Just as a contrary example, I have an old fullheight 1.3g Seagate SCSI HD here that was in active service for 10+ years, in a very poorly cooled case, and you can fry eggs on the thing even when it's sitting out in the air (draws 20 watts!!)

But as to overheating, usually the first symptom is read/write errors.

Re:Just as I suspected

[ForestGrump]

Well, I am parinoid of hdd failure. Had a 1 gigger die on me 5 years back, I still feel the pain (tho its gotten better with time.)

Currenetly, I have 2 60 gig maxtors sitting in my desktop. To keep them happy happy, I have them mounted in the 5.25 inch bays, with a fan blowing cool air over them. The temp? I know not. but im sure they are fine.

My laptop however, 66 deg hdd. Its kinda high. Am I worried? nah. I'm sure dell warranty covers hdd breakage. Elese, I've been fancying a 5400 rpm laptop hdd (and I thought 7200s were coming out this spring...humph!)
faster, larger! and when those start pooping out. its time for a 10k drive anyway.

-Grump

Re:Just as I suspected

[Bert64]

Fans arent too reliable either, moving parts and all.. but nowadays the death of your fan can lead to death or damage for your cpu, graphics card or psu etc.. or whatever else may be fan cooled in your machine.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed;
All of my "can't lose" data is on a 8Gb Seagate drive; maybe 5 years old? It's the large enough to hold 8 years worth of files and emails.

Big fast disks are great for video scratch disks, but if I needed another drive to store important files, I'd look seriouly at buying another old of these 'antiques' if one was available.

Segate denies claim..

[Anonymous Coward]

Article from "The Register" in the UK:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/30897.ht ml

Seagate today damned as "inaccurate" a report that the company has begun taking dodgy 40GB and 80GB hard drives off Taiwanese distributors' shelves - a move alleged to be taking place by local channel sources.

The report, published by DigiTimes yesterday, alleges that 12,000-15,000 defective drives, produced in mainland China, have been shipped to Taiwan with an unknown number shipping to other locations around the world.

However, a Seagate spokesman said there was no substance to the claims. The manufacturer isn't recalling 40GB and 80GB hard drives - or any other for that matter.

"It's ridiculous to claim that all the four major hard drive vendors have been hit by the same problem," he said.

In fact, only three of the four - Seagate, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage - were alleged to have been hit. The fourth, Western Digital, was said to be unaffected by the problem since it doesn't manufacture drives on mainland China - its manufacturing facilities are located in Malaysia and Thailand.

Actually, we're not sure Maxtor does either. The company is in the process of building a hard drive plant in Suzhou, but it's not expected to begin production until the second half of 2004. The company currently manufactures hard drives in Singapore.

According to DigiTimes local distributors claim that hard drive return rates have soared since the end of April. "Most of the returned drives reportedly suffered from bad sectors or problems being formatted, and were found to have come from the same sources in China," said the report.

Maxtor and Hitachi representatives were unavailable for comment at press time. ®

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Limited effects....

[oiuyt]

Only affects drives from a single source in Mainland China that were sent to Taiwan. May affect drives that were marketed elsewhere, but worries about YOUR drive being about to go up in smoke are, for the most part, unfounded.

Re:Limited effects....

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost 3 * 80GB drives all two weeks ago. Now i only have a
720GB RAID setup instead of the 960 I wanted.
Manufacture date Jan 2003.

Re:Limited effects....

[tundog]

Nice hypothesis, but my 80 gig Maxtor that I bought less than 2 months ago died last weekend...and I'm in Canada...

Re:Limited effects....

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, except my 40GB Maxtor died last week.

Oddly enough, when I asked if there was a recall on the drive, I was assured there was not.

Bastards.

SCO Gruop Gets Invovled

[linuxislandsucks]

SCO Group claiming ownership of hd patents sues all users who had defective drives..

Re:SCO Gruop Gets Invovled

[SonicRED]

For your sake it's a good thing they don't have a patent on misspelling words.

Re:SCO Gruop Gets Invovled

[deadsaijinx*]

SSShhhh! Don't give them any more ideas, I'm sick of every other article being about SCO

Re:New HD production paradigm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck finding a candy flavored platter!

I may not have much time...

[WeblionX]

Does anyone know if it's just a specific set of drives? I'm curious because I have one. I guess I better start backing up my things...

Western Digital is Safe...

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess I'm sitting pretty with all with my Western Digital Drives.

western digital

[rigelstar]

I have had problems with two 80gig wd drives and have read the same from several others. Strange that they were not involved in the recall..

Re:western digital

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an 80 GB WD drive that failed within a year. I came home one day to find my computer locked up with continual grinding and banging noises coming from the HD. They cross shipped me a replacement, which upon close inspection ended up being a refurbished unit. The refurbished unit began developing sector errors (with an accompanying loud head crash) within 4 months, and died, again, in under a year. Out of paranoia, and to rule out that it was a problem with some other component of the system, I bought a new high quality power supply, a hard drive cooling kit, an ATA controller card, new cables, and a 120 GB WD special edition drive. If I have problems with this one, I'm giving up.

Topical?

[moehoward]

Hmmmmm. 12,000 - 15,000 drives sold in Taiwan. They have a 10% failure rate.

I sincerely question the Slashdot-newsworthiness of this.

I guess I am surprised that 3 major manufacturers use the same source. Seems weird, but I guess not too uncommon in manufacturing. But seems like a critical component to outsource to China.

There was more SCO news that just came out in the last hour and it regards Linus. How did this story make it and that not? We don't have nearly enough SCO-lawsuit news these days.

Re:Topical?

[pz]

Indeed, there was news about Lindows and SCO (Lindows claiming they have immunity from SCO's lawsuits due to a pre-existing agreement with Caldera) this afternoon as well. Didn't make it either.

Re:Topical?

[Em Emalb]

I sincerely question the Slashdot-newsworthiness of this.

Hi, I am a member of the slashdot welcome team. You must be new here.

Welcome!

Re:Topical?

[boskone]

can't find the source right now, but I've read an interview (might have been WSJ or Forbes) that had an interview with a Chinese manufacturing chief. He stated that 10% DOA was an acceptable rate and that people would put up with it because of how inexpensively they could do the manufacturing.

Personally, this scares the crap out of me. So expect to see a lot of cheap junk (more than now) as more manufacturing is outsourced there.

If anyone can find the article, it'd be great. I can't seem to find it on google right now.

Text of the article....

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like it's slashdotted with less than 10 comments. Assuming this gets worse:

Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said.

About 12,000-15,000 defective hard drives are estimated to have entered Taiwan. It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said.

Local distributors said they began to see soaring return rates on the hard drives since late April. Most of the returned drives reportedly suffered from bad sectors or problems being formatted, and were found to have come from the same sources in China.

Among the top four hard drive vendors worldwide, Western Digital is the only one unaffected by the incident, as the company does not have products manufactured in China, sources said.

It is suspected that high defect rate was caused by the inexperience of certain manufacturers in China as they were transitioning to new production processes, sources said.

Local agents declined to confirm the report. While Maxtor agent Xander International denied seeing an unusual defect rate, Seagate agents Synnex Technology International and Taiwan Aries stressed that customers would be provided with complete warranty services if they were sold defective products. Comments from Hitachi were unavailable.

So until further notice, this may be confined to drives sold in Taiwan.

(Posted anonymously 'cuz I don't need the karma.)

That's why I buy Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheaper, longer warranty, cooler, faster...how can you go wrong? Go Samsung!

Price collusion anyone?

[bergeron76]

Does anyone else think this seems to be a little fishy?

I sure hope that one of the part distributors' factories doesn't suddenly explode out on some tiny unheard of little island in Asia or anything.
[ referring to the great memory price spike back in the mid-late 90's ]

Just imagine what the price of hard disks would skyrocket up to. It kind of makes you wonder where the storage/profit ratio begins to slope off for the manufacturer...

Re:Price collusion anyone?

[glitch!]

I sure hope that one of the part distributors' factories doesn't suddenly explode out on some tiny unheard of little island in Asia or anything.
[ referring to the great memory price spike back in the mid-late 90's ]

I am pretty sure that the Sumitomo Chemical company fire was a complete lie. It's been a while (almost 10 years now?), but I seem to recal claims that this company produced half of the industry's integrated circuit epoxy, and that was the excuse for the dramatic increase in memory prices. This is the same epoxy ("plastic") that was used for all kinds of IC's, and I remember that the pricing on our 74LSxxx chips just about doubled, from maybe 15 cents to 25-30 cents each, due to the sudden price increase on the epoxy. Ouch!

Hmmm. That's interesting. The memory chips didn't use much more epoxy than our plain logic IC's, so you would expect the price to go up, what, maybe 25 to 50 cents each? So why did the memory prices nearly double instead of jumping a couple dollars per module? Hmmm.

I don't think this hard drive issue is large enough to suggest collusion, though. A few thousand drives really don't add up to much in the big picture, and in this case, there are warrantee costs as well. Interesting idea, though.

Re:Price collusion anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing fishy about the loss of one manufacturer of crucial parts and having ripple effects throughout the economy. Many companies rely on just in time inventory which makes the supply chain quite brittle. See Unmade in America by Barry Lynn http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/unmade_in_am erica.htm

Re:Price collusion anyone?

[mnewton32]

Ahh, only in America could Taiwan be described as "some tiny unheard of little island in Asia."
True story: my parents and I were on vacation in Florida. We told friends of my uncle we were from Canada. "Canada? What state's that in?"

now what

[frovingslosh]

OK, I read the article and have a new Maxtor that seems to fit the parameters. It works OK now, but this is of concern, particularly since they recently dropped the warranty period from 3 years to 1 year. What option do I have? Is there really a recall in progress, or is it just that there should be?

holy crap

[ciroknight]

they better pay me for my lost pr0n... i had one of those drives give out about 2 months ago.. it kept losing data, so I finally said screw it. Hope I still have the receipt around...

So who's left?

[wulfhound]

Having just lost a bunch of time (although fortunately little valuable data) when one of my IBM DeathStars died, I went out and bought Maxtors 'cause they seemed to be the choice for reliability. So what make are we all supposed to buy now? Cheap hard drives all of a sudden aren't so cheap when you have to buy two of them and a RAID controller to get an acceptable level of reliability...

Re:So who's left?

[silas_moeckel]

You dont need raid to get acceptable levels of reliability just SCSI. IDE is dirt cheap and you get what you pay for dirty platters apparently.

OK withoug joking do people still run single drive machines outside of specific purpose and laptops? I havent built an IDE box that wasent raid 1 or 10 in 4 years this if for home use where backups happen every now and again at best.

Now with this said persoanly my failure rate on SCSI drives is a LOT lower than IDE drives I buy but at the same time I only get SCA SCSI drives and put them in enclosures vs IDE inside the box with no active cooling specific to the hard drive.

Re:So who's left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shutup, fucknozzle. Go somewhere and die.

Re:So who's left?

[tunjin]

Long time ago I bought a 20Gig Maxtor. Died within 6 Month. Waited around 3 month for replacement. Died within 2 weeks. Got another replacement disk (only 1 month this time). This one was already slightly damaged (paused for ~20 seconds from time to time, 'click'...). So no more Maxtor for me.

Re:So who's left?

[wulfhound]

Perhaps.. although there's probably not a lot of difference in the price of 2x IDE disk + RAID controller vs 1x SCSI disk + SCSI controller.

/.'ed already

[Ryan Stortz]

Already /.'ed, but I found some other versions of this story.

Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling
Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say there's no hard drive recalls
Seagate denies Taiwan hard drive recall claims

Looks like I got lucky with a Seagate�

[Anonymous Coward]

gig. No problems he0x0000007A: KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

Re:Looks like I got lucky with a Seagate�

[Anonymous Coward]

NO CARRIER

Maxtor drives

[Psykechan]

I've got a 40GB Maxtor in this system but I haven't had any probl

Re:Maxtor drives

[Anonymous Coward]

well, I have (had) a 40GB Maxtor, and it crashed a week ago.
How ro I know if this drive is subject to the recall?

Re:Maxtor drives

[deadsaijinx*]

*WOOOOSH!* ... hear that? That was the sound of a joke flying right over your head.

Re:Maxtor drives

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Really? Sounded more like a cliche flying overhead to me. The NO CARRIER joke is starting to get a tad old (like most of the jokes here).

Re:Maxtor drives

[Psykechan]

Yea, I know... I had to.

Truthfully though, this system has a Maxtor 40GB drive in it and it is failing. I can hear the bearings going out.

Don't call is a joke, just call it a public service annou

From China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, those drives are suffering from SARS.

Re:From China?

[deadsaijinx*]

"My son, our people have SARS, with it's 98% survival rate. You must find a cure for SARS, or only 98% of us will live!" -Southpark

Re:New HD production paradigm?

[Anonymous Coward]

In soviet russia, the platters defect

China, SARS, sick drives

[alphadingo]

Hmmm... could this be a coincidence? Maybe the workers are sneezing on the platters.

Thats funny...

[Your_Mom]

I can't find any mention of it on any of the manufacturers, and Seagate has said That there is no recall Maybe my porn stash is safe after all.

Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say No Recall

[whm]

Heh - This article on the inquirer specifically debunks the referenced Digitimes article:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9704

Enjoy....

~whm

Re:Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say No Recall

[djupedal]

Right, and it is safe to travel to Toronto, too I hear...that's what the Toronto Travel Agent said.

Re:Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi say No Recall

[djupedal]

troll? ...how shallow... Thanks for taking a run at me, but there has to be something here with a significant amount of less truth to it that needs your attention.

The real reason for warranties shortening...

[Blaede]

..is due to this guy's shenanigans.

Re:The real reason for warranties shortening...

[Anonymous Coward]

from that guy's post:

My friend's trick is to buy small sized hard drives from a big retailer that gives the 'premium' warranty, which is usually good for 2-3 years. When the warranty is almost out, he backs up his data, takes the drive out of the case and drops it from waist height onto the floor. He brings it in, and thanks to Moore's law, gets a new drive that is usually about twice as big as what he originaly had, since HD manufacturers stop making the small sized drives with time.

Hard copies of everything

[L. VeGas]

That's why I print out copies of everything once my drive is over half full. For video, I print each frame individually. For music, I print out the lyrics and sheet music for each song. I haven't quite figured out what to do about games though. Every time I play one, I have a whole different batch of screenshots to print.

Oh well, I'm sure the inkjet manufacturers will figure something out.

Re:Hard copies of everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, HP will gladly send a tanker truck full of red, green, and blue ink and run three giant hoses to your printer for the right price

Re:Hard copies of everything

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a really good idea. But where am I going to put all of that stuff? Maybe I could just mirror it somewhere on the net. Hmmmmm....

10101001010000111011010010010010100100101001 10100101001010010100101001010010101001010100 10010101010010100110101010100101010101010011
Read the Rest of This Comment...

Re:Hard copies of everything

[mysidia]

Just do

for i in /dev/hd* ; do dd if=$i |od -t |lpr ; done

And re-enter the 80gb of data onto your new disk manually when your current one dies :)

Re:Limited effects.... WRONG!

[frovingslosh]

but worries about YOUR drive being about to go up in smoke are, for the most part, unfounded.

Worries about recently purchased drives are completely founded unless and until we have a list of the affected serial numbers.

goes like this

[djupedal]

Looks like drives (3 manufs. listed) manufactured in the last 8 weeks, with country of origin as China.

If your drive/computer was made before March 2003, my guess is you aren't on the list to worry. Certainly anything from before 2003 isn't part of this discussion. Most drives from the last 8 weeks are still in the distribution channel, and just starting to surface, so again, if you bought yours even as little as a month ago, you are mostly likely clear. Also, they tend to go to the OEM's first, so raw drives would be a bit lower on the worry list, me thinks.

...as he takes comfort in only buying WD, once again :)

Recalls Not True

[Anonymous Coward]

The Inquirer has an article saying that this is just a big hoax.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9704

Made in Malaysia

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had 3 drives fail in the past 2 years: 2 IBM and 1 WD. After trying to locate a dignosis utility, I kept seeing the common theme quality problems and Made in Malaysia.

Spotted in Nicaragua too

[wolfgangoertl]

A new Maxtor 40 GB drive I bought here about two months ago has a 50 MB area of bad sectors at around 150 MB into the drive. Might be one of them...

I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[ArchieBunker]

After drive number 4 crapped out in a month I realized it wasn't worth $7 to send the bad one back in exchange for a "new" bad drive. Still on my 3 year warranty from Nov of 2000. Drive number 3 was even a sealed retail kit which tested bad out of the box. I always run diags on new drives because they can't be trusted anymore.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[ncc74656]

After going through 3 5.1GB Maxtors in as many months a few years ago, I've avoided Maxtor like the plague. There was one occasion since then where I needed a drive Right Now and all that was in stock was a 20GB Maxtor. That went tango-uniform in a month or two; the Seagate that replaced it is still running AFAIK. (The 5.1GB Western Digital that replaced the three dead Maxtors is also still going.)

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[jovlinger]

Disk diagnostics?

Recommend some good ones, appart from the ones that can be run automatically from fdisk (badblocks...?), please.

I have an old 20G drive that was losing data in an older system. I'm looking for some stress test to figure out whether it was the MB/Chipset or the drive.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Anonymous Coward]

If you started using real(SCSI) drives, you wouldn't have that problem. Cheap toys(IDE) break, get used to it.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[macdaddy]

I have yet to have a single Maxtor fail on me when bought from a reputable reseller. My only failed Maxtor (and that was a U/160 SCSI drive) came from Computer Giants. As far as I'm concerned they are a failed company. Anyone who buy sfrom them should expect problems. Back on topic, like I said, I've never had a single Maxtor failure. I have however had failed drives from Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, and Conner (oh god don't get me started on Conner). I never had a single Quantum failure before Maxtor bought them or after. As far as I'm concerned Maxtor is top-rate. Their customer service is excellent. I have yet to have a bad experience with Maxtor's CS. Perhaps your incident is fairly isolated. When you get you replacement drives, do they come from Maxtor or do they come from a reseller? Did you record the various lot numbers on the drive to look for a pattern (possibly bad batch which happens every so often)? As far as I'm concerned you can't go wrong with a Maxtor drive.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[ShawnD]

How about the diagnostics from teh manufacturers web sites.

If you can't find one for your drive, try another manufacturers diagnostics. The basic tests should work since they are based on the S.M.A.R.T. standard. I know the Maxtor daignostics will test other drives for at least the 2 minute test.

BTW I wan't to ask if any of these people who experienced failures have S.M.A.R.T. turned on, and if so did you get any warnings from it before it failed?

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Bob Zer Fish]

With my IBM Deathstar,Norton System Works informed me of a SMART failure before it broke completely. (I was on the verge of starting to lose data at this point). Also the IBM test reads the SMART logs, I think, to check whether there have been problems with it.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Bob Zer Fish]

I completely agree about the retailer here. If the retailer handles the goods well, it seems that the drives last longer. (this could just be a statistical problem though when you think of E(x))

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Anonymous Coward]

bull shit. Many SCSI drives fail / go up in smoke too.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[bobibleyboo]

I have had a simmilar experience with maxtor I have sent back the same 15 gig drive 3 times the 4th one is making a strange noise but I dont think that I will try again on top of that I have sent back bouth of the 10 gig maxtor drives that I bought. Of the 15 maxtor drives that I have bought over the last 3 years only 2 have not died a horrible noisey death a 20 in my firewall and a 60 in one of my file servers. After my maxtor experience I have switched to IBM death stars and strangeley of the 12 I have running right now (2x30,4x60,4x120 and 2 laptop drives 20G and 30G) I have not had a single problem they seem to be fast and reliable. My only complaint and it is a small one is that after a few years you notice that the laptop drives slowley become louder and louder. Anyway just wish that IBM had not sold it's HD division as they are getting harder and harder to find.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[SkArcher]

I have a Maxtor 80Gb, and i'll admit to a few nervous moments while waiting for the /.ed site to load... says it only affects drives made in China, but who really knows?

Plus, I was not impressed with the service level of the people i purchased it from, and the drive does have chinese characters on it... im going to check if it was made in china, and if it was, well, i have a tape drive somewhere about - time i got around to installing it I feel

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Luzumsuz Lazim]

That sounds like a very bad luck, or bad retailer (storing in high temperature, maybe). I'm using a Maxtor 80GB at home, and it's constantly reading and writing huge amounts of data when it's on. I experienced no problem at all. Or, maybe, you live in high radiation area :)

The same had been claimed for the 75GB IBM Deskstars. I'm using one of these in my office box. We ordered it the first week it was announced (how many years?) and it's being abused by processing 50GB of data on it, and writing the outputs, regularly non-stop since I installed it (my thesis data). The only time we had to shutdown the computers was for a repair in powerlines during the weekend. In fact, I'm impressed that it is still working, as it's definitely not a server-class disk (low speed, etc.) which are designed for this kind of load. Nevertheless, I picked this one as it was cheap (easier to justify) and can make it until I complete the thesis.

On the other hand, my friend lost a SCSI Seagate (was top of the line of its time). Fortunately, he had made a backup of his thesis only a day ago. Since that experience, I put a cron job for backing up the non-reproducible part of my thesis, and distributing it on 3 separate computers daily :)

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[parkanoid]

In my experience, maxtors sometimes tend to get a bad sector or two (which is not that bad) once in a while, but when it tries to read the corrupted region, all hell breaks loose. I am not sure if it's the HDD controller or the drive itself, but the thing just locks up the bus. However, if one does not access the file known to have been corrupted, and does not run fdisk/updatedb, everything works fine.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off. Tell that to my 25 GB MP3 collection that went up in smoke the other day on my 1 year old 36GB 10,000RPM Cheetah. I've been using all IDE in all of my other systems for years and this is my first drive failure.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Jade E. 2]

Your best bet is to try the utility from your manufacturer. They generally have to be put on a bootable DOS floppy. The manufacturer will want the results from them if you need warranty repairs anyways:

Maxtor's Powermax
Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools (You only need the Diagnostics module. There's also a Windows version farther down.)
Hitachi GS (Including IBM drives) Drive Fitness Test (Also check out SMART Defender, farther down, for a lightweight windows systray icon to monitor all your drive's SMART status.)
Seagate's SeaTools (Or try a direct link to the file to avoid registration.)

If you've got an off-brand drive, you can check the manufacturer website to see if they have one, or just try one of the above, I believe all of them can run at least basic dagnostics on any drive.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[DigiShaman]

If you have either an IBM or Hitachi drive, you can download a free utility that runs in the background called SMARTDefender. And unlike Norton, this program will monitor as many drives as you have installed. Though I'm not sure if it will see other manufactured drives regardless of the fact if you have just one IBM/Hitachi.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Lux]

We should start a support group for good people who end up with bad hardware.

I just got a Maxtor (120G) in the mail. Lost about half my day to it so far, it's not working to say the least. I'm glad it didn't fry my WD drive with 2 years worth of data on it when it was shaking like a hello-kitty massager in it's enclosure for a few minutes before I realized that it wasn't my new fan that was making all that noise. Now it's running with 5 layers of paper towels between it and my case to keep it from vibrating my entire case while I run Maxtor's diagnostics so I can get my RMA.

So I get the machine running just for this purpose, fire up the web browser, and this article is the first thing that pops up in my face. :)

*sigh*

A few years ago I bought one of those Intel-based motherboards with the faulty MMU chip shielding the week before it got recalled. I didn't have an Intel implementation of course, just the chipset. I had a SuperMicro. Their tech support people assured me that they used extra shielding on their boards, so they didn't need to honor the recall. Right. That's how they got the cheapest solution to market: extra shielding. Why didn't I think of that. And I guess that my machine freaking out at every LAN party I went to was my imagination too. I'm an AMD fanboy now. And I do more research before purchasing. Didn't save me from this disk though.

Enough venting now. I'm gonna go work on getting my RMA. And I'll start testing my disks before running them too. I had no idea I could jeopardize my _other_ drives with a faulty one.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[mvdw]

Your best bet is to try the utility from your manufacturer. They generally have to be put on a bootable DOS floppy. The manufacturer will want the results from them if you need warranty repairs anyways:

Problem: I don't build new machines with floppy drives anymore. Just more cables to route inside the box, for no advantage. Bootable, rewritable CD drives have made floppy drives redundant. I just hope the WD 40GB and 80GB drives in my main machine won't fail...

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[nolife]

I just sent back a Maxtor 80GB that I bought in January, it was one of the last ones with a 3 year warranty. Probably not related to the factory issue quoted in the article. They sent me a 120GB in return and I assume this factory issue was why (unless the 120 uses the same platters DOH!!). It worked out pretty good. Hopefully the warranty will extend to the date of my original drive.
The down time sucks when my home server drives fail but now I make full use of rsync,tgz, and cron to backup my important stuff to other drives. If they all fail at once I'm screwed!

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[macdaddy]

Quite possibly. Their reviews paint an ugly picture which leads me to believe their handling is at fault.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[jovlinger]

Thanks to all responses.

I must admit I was suprised that all the tests were by the proprietary manufacturers. I'm assuming that this means that each testing utility will use undocumented info to optimize the testing.

Which may be a good thing.

Here's why this is not 100% a happy answer: I do have a machine standing idle, but that is the same machine that the drive was behaving poorly in before, so I either have to [temporarily] decommission a real machine to run good tests, or run proprietary tests in the iffy machine (pentium 75, fwitw, and the cheapest that could be found in glasgow at the time: "Bits and PCs" home assembled brand)

However, I _was_ really hoping for a fairly cross-platform utility that simulated real-world create/read/write cycles. After all, all drives (as far as I'm concerned, should have made this clear in the parent) speak IDE, so the tester should just send a stream of IDE commands and verify that they are correct.

Basically, I want something that I can start before leaving the house in the morning, and come home to a verdict: clean, acceptable, marginal, sucks.

But since I haven't yet dl'ed the maxtor utils (should have said which, sorry) and tried 'em out, perhaps I am merely grousing about non-issues. Wouldn't be the first time.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[mordicus]

I've two fluid bearing diamondmaxes and the only problem i've encountered (not what you'd call a slight problem) is that whenever the temperature inside Das Box gets past 40degC writes start to fail disastrously. Other than that the disks work like a charm.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[waterbear]

I'm looking for some stress test ...[snip]

I'm not sure I want to stress-test my hd!
(Confession-time -- I only back up data from hd's at long intervals.)

But what makes a fragile hd fail? Is it ordinary wear and tear? I never had a hd go bad on me through ordinary wear and tear. The only one that went bad at all had been plugged in and out of several boxes often. The (flimsy?) joint between the disk's pcb and IDE connector developed conductor cracks.

Does the OS that runs off a hd have any influence on wear-rate and failure?

My impression is it could do. DOS & DOS applications used to sound quiet/moderate in hd usage. Win 9x sounded busier/noisier. I just started using Linux Debian -- and it sounds a lot quieter than W9x. But I also gave a try to Win2k, and it was very noisy. A Win2k just up fresh from install procedure without incident, repeatedly spent a while thrashing its disk every time it booted up, and gave an impression it was trying to grind the platter to powder. Various kinds of cleanup didn't help. I'd be worried about keeping something like that on my new 40GB hd.

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[#undefined]

it's kinda simplistic, and won't test the real underlying hardware (because modern drive firmware transparently masks/redirects bad sectors to other good sectors, or so i have heard), but i use badblocks.

last december when i built my most recent machine, i bought the hard drive and a few peripherals last because i was holding out on a really good deal on that stuff. so to test and use my new hardware without a harddrive, i used a knoppix live cd (and saved my config to a floppy, which didn't work perfectly for storing/reapplying my hardware configs). when i finally purchased my harddrive, i used badblocks on the knoppix cd to test my drive. it writes various binary patterns to each sector reading the sector back after each write to verify that the data is maintaining the specific binary pattern. i can't remember how many patterns there are, but assuming there are four different patterns, then each sector gets written to and read four times (once for each pattern), which itself is a pretty good stress test and burn-in.

assuming you are familiar with linux, see the man page for badblocks on the knoppix cd for how to do a destructive read/write test, repeating the test until there are no new bad sectors found. (there's also a read/write non-destructive test, where before each sector is written, it is stored in memory, and written back out after the individual sector is tested, but in my case this was a brand new drive so i had nothing to lose doing a destructive test.)

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got a Maxtor (120G) in the mail.

Lucky bastard. All I get in the mail are these crappy 600MB AOL discs.

I wish they would recall my drives!

[pair-a-noyd]

I have a pair of WD 20gigs and they suck.
A WD205AA and a WD205BA and both are big piles of panda shit.

They clonk on and off all the time, lose data often, bad sectors from hell, they just are trash.

I'd buy SCO products before I'd ever buy another WD product....

Re:I wish they would recall my drives!

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA "Seagate, Hitachi, and Maxtor 40 & 80 gig drives".

STFU about your WD problems.

Re:I wish they would recall my drives!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well dickweed, I just got a brand new Maxtor 40 in the mail today.
And as for my WD drives, they might work better if you
STICK THEM UP YOUR MOTHER'S ASS!!

Re:I wish they would recall my drives!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should just bite the bullet and buy a new drive. Or is too much fun complaining about the two you currently have?

Re:I wish they would recall my drives!

[Goldberg's Pants]

What if his mother doesn't support IDE?

Re:I wish they would recall my drives!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oi Pin Dick!
You work for Maxtor, don't you?!
Maxtor are the worst drives, EVER!

I must have one of those drives

[spectrum]

Because when I load the page, I keep getting "Operation timed out".

Yeah.. well.. someone had to say it. :)

I have replaced 2 80 gig drives since January

[Anonymous Coward]

I replaced the 10gig drive that came with my Dell last January with a 80gig one from M and had it fail. The one that I got under warranty failed on my in early April. Since then I have been using my laptop while getting through a project and just started recovering stuff onto my newly arrived warranty replacement while wondering if there was a way to find out if there were problems with bigger drives. Talk about timing.

HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Make defective HD
2. Sell defective HD
3. Recall defective HD
4.????
5. Profit!

Glad it's only 3

[siskbc]

Well, it seems that WD escaped trouble this time! Glad I've got a coupla WD drives in my box.

Wait - where's that smoke coming from? Aw, fuck.

Make that 4 hard drive manufacturers.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[wwwillem]

Make that 4 hard drive manufacturers.

Look at the First Post. I thought we all already agreed that IBM should be at the top of that list. At least I think so after my IBM 80GB disk died after 9 months. So that doesn't make 4, it's definitely 5 manufacturers.....

Re:Glad it's only 3

[dioxide]

hitachi and ibm are the same drives.

if you go to ibms site lookin for drives, you'll be sent to hitachi.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[thynk]

Great, My raid is 3 40GB drives. 2 Maxtor and an IBM. Maybe I should of gone mirrored instead of striped.

Now, where did I put that old tape drive?

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Nogami_Saeko]

I just had a WD800JB blow up a few weeks ago with bad sectors - corrupted my system drive so I had to reformat and reinstall, at which point the drive started spinning down/spinning up at random times and locking up the machine.

Got a replacement from WD (which was a refurbished drive and makes "clicking" sounds occasionally.

Took it out of my system and replaced it with a Maxtor 120gb which is quieter, faster and of course, bigger.

The 80gb refurbished drive is now in an external firewire case as a data transport drive.

I was less than impressed getting a refurbished drive back from WD on a drive that's less than 6 months old - I'm sticking to Maxtor / Seagate from now on.

N.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[zonker]

aside from my suspecting there is more to this story, or that it isn't entirely factual...

it is rather interesting that wd escaped this round. i used to reccomend and buy wd drives primarily because they were very reliable. however, i have had a number of them die in the last 7 years and for that reason, i've reccomended against them for quite some time. their standards seemed to have dropped a while back and never really recovered.

that being said, the most recent drive purchases i've made for my own machine at home were an ibm 20gig 75gxp which last year had a lot of people up in arms about them failing, though ibm claimed there was nothing wrong. knock on wood, i've not had any problems with it. i also bought a maxtor 80gig 7200rpm drive after deciding against buying another ibm drive (i bought ibm due to knowing they have some of the most sophisticated drives on the market and do most of the research in the field of high density storage technology). i like my maxtor drive and fear that it could possibly be a victim of this new batch of claimed bad drives. knock on wood again, but so far so good, and that was over a year ago.

this stuff happens, but as many folks have said, drive manufacturers need to stand behind their product, and in my book, 1 year warranties are not a good way of encouraging confidence in your product or your company...

Re:Glad it's only 3

[13Echo]

I've had Maxtor do the same thing. Then I switched to IBM. Then, two weeks ago, one of my 3 40GB IBM60GXP drives puked out. IBM/Hitachi's RMA process blows compared to Maxtor. Maxtor's replacement has the least hassle of all of them. They'll ship you a drive via next-day air, and you can send your old one back in the box they sent; prepaid. Hitachi doesn't seem interested in that kind of thing. Oh well. I won't buy from them.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Dunark]

Got a replacement from WD (which was a refurbished drive and makes "clicking" sounds occasionally.

Watch out for that "clicking" noise. I had a WD drive that did that for the first three months that I had it, then it suddenly starting turning lots of read errors. The WD diagnostics said the drive was fine until the read errors started happening. I am now quite skeptical of the usefulness of these "diagnostics" for predicting failures. I suspect all they're good for is telling you whether or not the drive is broken badly enough to qualify for an RMA.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Blkdeath]

I was less than impressed getting a refurbished drive back from WD on a drive that's less than 6 months old - I'm sticking to Maxtor / Seagate from now on.

Careful how you use that wide angled brush, my friend.

I recently examined a dead Maxtor that had been refurbished not once, but twice.

What's more offensive; refurbished, or re-refurbished? :)

Re:Glad it's only 3

[jlechem]

I had a WD 30 gig drive that just up and died, refused to be recognised by the BIOS. Got a new one which of course is refurbished which started making all sorts of cliks and grinds and eventually just quit booting and refused to be recognised by the BIOS as well. So I just bought a brand new 40 gig Maxtor TODAY! It's too much trouble to cancel the order now, I just hope it doesn't go tits up!

Re:Glad it's only 3

[ogre2112]

Welcome to the real world.

Being a reseller and having RMA'd (returned for replacement) hundreds and hundreds of hard disks from companies like Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, Seagate, and Fujitsu-- I can say with great certainty that they all operate that way.

Your best bet if you have a drive die on you is to RMA the bad drive, buy a new one to replace it. When you get the old drive back from RMA, sell it on ebay as a refurb. Someone will buy it.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Zathras11]

I always bought Maxtor, but when I built my
last system I needed a HD the day the last
parts arrived, and the best price per GB (not
always a good measure) was a WD 80GB. That
thing rattled and clicked and finally when I
saw a Maxtor 80GB on sale a few months later
I grabbed it and copied over to it. I now
leave the WD in the case and attach the power
and IDE occasionally to back up my Maxtor.
For that it seems to work okay. This news
story seems to be confined to a small number
of drives, from three companies. I've always
found Maxtor drives to be reliable. I will
personally stick with those, and recommend
them to family and friends.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Reziac]

If while idle your W.D. HD occasionally goes click-click-click for several minutes, then goes CLANK and becomes quiet, that's the self-checking mechanism at work. 6.4g and later drives do it, tho some are much louder about it than others.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Reziac]

Not only that, but to my knowledge, IBM and Maxtor have *always* sent out refurbs as warranty replacements (and I know Seagate does so with SCSI HDs, so likely with IDE HDs as well). W.D. started sending out refurbs only about a year ago; until then they always sent out new HDs for replacements.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Anonymous Coward]

On a related note..
I have bought three WD drives over the course of the last 6-8 months: a 120GB/2MB -BB model, and two 120GB/8MB -JB drives.

All appear to have a common fault.
After a certain period of operation (anywhere from 5 hours to several days) they suddenly go "CLANK" and the drive appears to lock up. The system IDE light stays on, and the PC freezes. A reset doesn't resolve it; I have to power-cycle the PC to get the drive to work again. It's almost as though the r/w armature in the drive has become stuck at one end of its travel..?

All three drives have this problem, yet strangely I can find nothing on the web about this, which suggests it isn't a widespread problem.
I have cooling over my drives from a chassis fan, and have replaced my PSU once, thinking it might be a power droop problem. No luck.

Any /.ers seeing similar problems? Anyone have an idea what might be wrong?

Re:Glad it's only 3

[PsykhoKiwi]

I literally sent back an 80Gb Seagate yesterday because it flopped out. It started running at udma33 max and also had bad sectors (sector 0 died so I had to work on data recovery, especially awkward as this was part of a two drive array).
I've checked my other drive thoroughly as the serial numbers are very close together,no sign of problems though.
Typical phnucking hard drives

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Maxtor and Seagate will do the exact same thing to you...

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Col. Panic]

I have had great experience with IBM's RMA process on hard drives. You just have to know which hoops to jump through. The magic word is "diagnostics". IBM offers free hard drive testing software here. Just run the fixed disk tests, which include:

controller

hi-low seek

track to track seek

random seek

linear verify

random verify

SMART

and if it fails any you call their parts return at (800) 772-2227 and tell them it failed $TEST. They will ship you a new one with prepaid return shipping on the old one. I usually get the replacement next day, although they only promise 5 day service.

It's ironic this came up because I am in the process of running those diagnostics on a whole box (about 50) of old hard drives to see which ones we can use and which ones are going to meet my hammer :)

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate do the same (with a similar shipping policy to IBM/Hitachi: run diags, ship the old drive back, at your expense, in high-quality packing materials or they won't accept it).

From the UK, that shipping is usually international (to the Netherlands), and if you're using parcelforce, some level of insurance is advisable...

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, striped is great for copying big files around, but believe me, you *don't* want it for anything other than /tmp.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate sends refurbs when the drive you're replacing is over 6 months old. Or something like that. I sent mine in and said it was under 6 months (true), but didn't attach a receipt like I was supposed to, cause who keeps recepits? and got a brand new drive.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I meant Maxtor, not Seagate.

I called Seagate support on this same issue

[Anonymous Coward]

And they told me that it wasn't a hardware defect, but a problem with the Linux IDE drivers.

No problems on Windows. They confirmed that they had not had a single report of this problem on NT4, 2000, XP, or any of the 9X operating systems.

Shame that Slashdot couldn't do a little research and get the real story here.

Re:I called Seagate support on this same issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux IDE drivers causing harddrives to go bad? Wow, thats a new one!

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE IBM ALONE

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of all your bitching about one or two stupid models of harddrives, one of the best hdd producers in the market had to jump ship and stop - the only ones providing innovation and an interesting future gone and now the market goes stagnant. Just stop already, they're already dead, leave them alone.

Maxtor...

[neostorm]

Just the 40 & 80 GB drives? I just grabbed one of those funky 100+20GB drives from Maxtor a month or so ago, and it took a huge crap on me two weeks into using it. Now their tech-support won't reply to my Emails and I can't seem to reach them by phone in a reasonable amount of time.

Avoid everything Maxtor, not just 40/80 GB ones. Maybe their other drives are better and you've had good experiences, but their tech support is insulting and therefore doesn't deserve the business.

Re:Maxtor...

[Arctic Dragon]

My main drive is a 40GB Maxtor I bought in Sept. 2001 and I never had trouble with it.

I have heard negative things about Maxtors, however. Something to keep in mind when I buy a new computer later this year.

Re:Maxtor...

[OcabJ]

Assuming the hd is under warranty and you can get it to return an error using the powermax software (Maxtor's util), you can easily get an RMA on the drive on the website.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/service/warrant y_ ata.htm

Even if you can't get an error code using the Powermax software, you can call up the toll free number and tell them the drive is bad and you did blah blah blah to test it and it won't return an error in Powermax, then they'll still give you a replacement.

I've return several drives to Western Digital, Maxtor, and IBM in the past, and have never had issues getting a replacement.

Re:Maxtor...

[silne]

I just got my 80gig that I bought last October replaced under warranty. All they wanted was the error code returned by the powermax software which you can download off their website.

No testing, no questions asked. I took it back to the distributor with the RMA number from Maxtor, and they handed me a new drive with a receipt that says 1 year warranty.

Pretty damn spiffy really because the drive I got was better than I what I had.

However, all this took 2 weeks, and in the meantime I bought a new Seagate 80gig with 8meg cache. Very nice.

Hopefully this all is just a hoax because I don't think my real-life karma is THAT bad that I'd have to return yet another drive for replacement.

MOD up microsoft.com? bad karma.

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, is this slashdot or have the moderators all gone bonkers?

buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy Western Digital Special Edition, that way you get 3 year warranty. Simple really. I refuse to buy any of the hard drives that only give you 1 year warranty, it's rediculous. (you too should boycott them!)

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy Samsung. 3 year warranties on all their drives, not just the expensive ones.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Sylver Dragon]

Actually, any of their drives from their Caviar line have a three year warranty.
source

Personally I swear by Western Digital already, I don't need an article of dubious validity to convince me of that.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[DynamicBits]

From your source:

Western Digital has adopted a new warranty policy effective October 1, 2002. Western Digital WD Caviar Special Edition hard drives are covered under warranty for a three-year period. All other Western Digital products will be covered under a standard warranty for a period of one year.

As the parent of your post said, the Special Edition drives have a three year warranty. The full name for the drives is "Caviar Special Edition." It is not all Caviar drives which carry the three year warranty.

On a side note, I have the 80GB Special Edition drive and the performance is amazing.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Ark42]

The IBM-Hitachi drives with 8M cache have 3-year warranties, while the 2M cache models have 1-year warrenty. I got a 120G IBM drive (sure it has a Hitachi label, but its definately the same IBM design) with 8M cache just to ensure I get the 3-year warrenty and hope that means I am getting higher quality.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Trogre]

FWIW, Samsung still do a 3-year warranty on their drives.

The drives are nice and fast too, if a bit louder than equivalent Seagate models.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Sylver Dragon]

I stand corrected, I did a quick read and apparently missed that detail. Thank goodness I own the same type of drive you do, damn good drive so far.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I am a reseller and only sell Western Digital SE drives (JB series). They have a 3 year warranty and I've not had a single failure out of several hundred drives. For servers I use Seagate SCSI and have been having good luck with them as well. Proper cooling is key.

I had horrible problems with IBM Deskstar drives from 15G-75G models. I experienced about 30% failure and did a preventive recall from my customers for any I had sold. IBM didn't take care of me or my customers. I lost alot of money and some of my customers lost data.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[sn00ker]

Buy Western Digital Special Edition, that way you get 3 year warranty. Simple really. I refuse to buy any of the hard drives that only give you 1 year warranty, it's rediculous. (you too should boycott them!)

Or you could move to a country that has proper consumer protection law - Like New Zealand.

I don't care if my new HDD fails at 18 months old, because I can just refer to the ample legal precedent that says that it must be fit for the purpose for which it was bought.
I have a 4.3GB Bigfoot in my closet, recently put there after I finally decided it wasn't worth keeping it in service. It still works. It has no bad sectors. And it's seven years old. If I were to suffer an HDD failure after 18 months, or even after 35 months, on a disk with a 12 month warranty, I could just go through our legal disputes (level below court action) process and make reference to the plentiful legal precedent saying that a device must be fit for use for the purpose for which it was sold. Obviously a brand new drive that fails, when a seven-year-old drive used in the same computer keeps going, isn't fit for its retailed purpose.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Smid]

My Western Digital one went about September.

About 3 years and 1 week after I bought it.

Not so much a warranty, but a warning.

Re:buy Western Digital Special Edition

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people who purchase the "special edition" drives may be taken for a ride. Do you really think the S.E. drives go through stricter quality control than the regular ones? I doubt it - it's too much trouble and they can use better drives for something else. I bet the companies calculated based on faliure rates how much extra it would cost them to provide another 2 yrs warranty, then added that amount + some premium just because there is a group of people that like to buy special overpriced products. Therefore, since the entire aim of buying a 3yr drive is to reduce the chance of failure (rather than actually having that extra 2 yrs to get a replacement drive), it makes no sense to buy the S.E. drive over the 1 yr drive since they have the same reliability (because they're really the same thing).

rtfa

[deadsaijinx*]

only seems to affect china

Re:rtfa

[EverDense]

RTFA yourself, Taiwan is NOT part of China.

Much to the annoyance of the Chinese.

Re:rtfa

[deadsaijinx*]

rtfa, shipped from china to tawain. i'm assuming he is part of neither

Re:rtfa

[julesh]

RTFA yourself. The products were manufactured in China, but have been sold in at least Taiwan, plus:

It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said.

So who knows where else they've been sold.

Does anyone know what models (hopefully with serial no. ranges) are affected?

Woah

[56ksucks]

It's a good thing I never use Maxtor drives.

Re: ITS A WARNING!

[JVert]

Your missing the point, without trying to cause a panic /. is trying to warn those of us that can read between the lines, that SAR's is now infecting hardware components!

I got one of these maybe

[jdhaig]

I got one of these I think, it has slowly stopped working over the last 18months, it broke totally about 2 months ago, it wouldn't format, and I managed to loose a Linux and a FAT32 partition from the end of the disk about 2 months after partitioning it.

Will Seagate be offering recalls here also?

Re:I got one of these maybe

[jdhaig]

Silly me, 'here' is Britain!

DOH!

This is not true.

[LloydSeve]

Seagate has officially issued a press release
saying this they have not issued ANY recall
regarding drives shipped to Taiwan.

Although Maxtor and Hitachi were not available
for comment, Seagate has "damned" this report
innacurate.
Here is the link to the report of Seagate
denying ANY HDD Recalls.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/30897.html

Re:This is not true.

[talks_to_birds]

There is a considerable difference between issuing a recall, and having a shit-load of drives die...

Not issuing a recall just means they're still in denial.

t_t_b

Re:This is not true.

[LloydSeve]

But that is not the issue here.. the article
said they all recalled their drives..

Which is in fact not true, since neither Maxtor
or Seagate have issued recalls.. and in fact
Maxtor does not have a manufacturing plant in China yet.. which is where the article claims the
bad Hard Drives were all produced.

So it's not the fact that their could be bad
drives, it's the fact that the article has
parts to it that are not true, and they did not
call the companies to confirm the information
they got from their "sources".

In other news..

[CptChipJew]

it turns out these problems with the drives were occuring because the S.M.A.R.T. technology turned out to be S.T.U.P.I.D.

Re:In other news..

[EverDense]

Sucks To be U Please Insert Disk

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent Up! +5 Gay

China??? How About Singapore???

[NetFu]

I don't know about anybody else, but I've got 3 failed (i.e. DEAD) Maxtor ATA-133 drives (40gb, 60gb, & 80gb) sitting in my desk waiting to become paperweights. All of them were made in Singapore and they all failed in the past year (2 in the past 5 months).

I finally gave up on Maxtor and went with a 120gb ATA-100 Seagate drive which has worked flawlessly for 3 months.

Crossing my fingers...

what do you think?

[Anonymous Coward]

what do you think would be the wise thing to do?

Makes perfect sense...

[sterno]

In all likelyhood, all three of those drive companies are buying their platters from the same vendor. They may all take those drives and put them together separately, but it's not unusualy for competing vendors to source parts from the same company.

Re:Makes perfect sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact that Seagate is completely vertically integrated on key components...they make their own heads and their own media, and they don't sell it to any competitors.

Possible Problems...

[James Littiebrant]

This lowers my trust in WD even further. I was considering getting the new 180 gig but will it have the same problems? The 40 and 80 gigs were the best selling HDDs, I am not saying no one bought the 60 gigs but the fact that it took this long to discover defects then what about my HDDs I have already? Or what about the wonderful 120s? The new 180s and 250s are going to be great, but who is going to be willing to take a risk with possible defects... I don't want to wake up one day to find that all my data is gone! Perhaps this is the the straw that broke the camal's back to the point were I am going to buy IBM hard drives...

Re:Possible Problems...

[talks_to_birds]

WD != Seagate, Hitachi, and Maxtor

I've a suggestion for you.

It's called reading.

It's a great prevention for foot-in-mouth disease...

t_t_b

grrr

[deadsaijinx*]

try buying either Western Digital. Or keep buying Maxtor, or even IBM. Seriously, if you people would RTFA, then you would notice that the problems only affect about 10% of the drives that shipped from a plant in china to taiwan. The IBM thing, that was just one set of drives, their new ones kick ass. Maxtor, not my favorite, but this isn't a sign of bad drives from them. Mishaps happen, always have, always will. Now stop freaking and RTFA

Re:grrr

[Goldberg's Pants]

You make a good point. It's only 10% of drives etc... But there seem to be a LOT of people on here with problems. What's to blame for THOSE?

Re:grrr

[Zathras11]

I agree. I read the headline, and was sweating
the 40GB Maxtor I just put into my brother's
system (not the mention the one I was about to
buy for myself), then I clicked to the article
and, well, this isn't that bad or big of a deal.
It seems isolated, and they know about it, and
they are taking steps to correct the problems.

Re:grrr

[bakreule]

Now stop freaking and RTFA

IDRTFA, and I'm still a little worried.

Excuse my hard drive manufacturing ignorance, but isn't it possible that these drives could be made in China, sold in Taiwan, and then resold in the States? If all the Maxtor drives sold in the US are made in the US from parts not made in this Chinese plant, fine, but I don't know that do I?

The article is VERY light in exact details. I have a Maxtor 80Meg drive with lots of valuable data (please spare me the "back your sh!t up, you weenie!" speeches). Until I hear from Maxtor EXACTLY which drives are affected (with serial #s!!) I WILL be worried and a little freaked...

Now, while I'm on the soapbox, I'd like to ask something slightly, but not much, off-topic: I'm thinking of adding a RAID card and two drives to my penguin system. I want that 80 meg drive to be backed up. (I was planning this for a long time, this article has just sped up the process a little bit) Can anyone reccommend which IDE or SCSI raid cards work well with Linux? I've read through some how-tos on adding RAID, but they focus mainly on "how to" as opposed what's best for the job (imagine that... ;-)) Thanks!

Re:grrr

[threephaseboy]

I want that 80 meg drive to be backed up

<sarcasm>
Have you heard of Zip drives? They hold up to 100M. Should be enough for your data.
</sarcasm>

Re:grrr

[bakreule]

Have you heard of Zip drives? They hold up to 100M. Should be enough for your data.

Ahem.... cough.. meant to type gig.... sorry...

MOD PARENT UP... Disk Diagnostic Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod parent up. I've also been looking for diagnostic tools to stress test drives. My 120 GB Maxtor is dying and I want to test the replacement.

Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a pair of Timberland dress shoes and a Seagate hard drive. Interested?

no, this is

[deadsaijinx*]

in soviet russia, the joke lames you!

news flash

[asv108]

Apple doesn't make hard drives. Drives in your Apple machine are the same as stock PC drives.

Small clone shops and swap meets

[AHumbleOpinion]

Only affects drives from a single source in Mainland China that were sent to Taiwan. May affect drives that were marketed elsewhere, but worries about YOUR drive being about to go up in smoke are, for the most part, unfounded.

Maybe. Many small local pc-clone shops and swap meet types seem to get parts straight from Asia. Lots of gray market stuff going on. Last I heard about half of PCs in the US come from small local pc-clone shops.

Your current drive may be OK but you should really think twice about the unbelievable deal on a 40G that local clone shops and swap meets will soon have. On the other hand if you are a do-it-yourself'er and the failure mode is one where it is bad on startup, not one where it goes bad over time, then it may not be a bad deal if the shop is nearby and they instantly swap the drive.

Re:Maxtor...sux

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Their manual is good, as is the website troubleshooting, but they no longer send an additional jumper or mounting brackets (cheap bastards) with their hard drives. A 20 GB hard drive I have from them was very unstable. Plus, the 1 year waranty vs. 3 year is just ludicrous.

Harddiskenal Fortitude

[EverDense]

From personal experience...

Western Digital STILL offer a 3 year warranty on their drives. I've bought two WD 120Gb (8Mb
cache) disks in the last 4 days. I specifically bought WD because they are the ONLY one of the
major harddisk manufacturer that are standing behind their product.

Personally, I wouldn't touch a harddisk that the manufacturer is only prepared to offer a 1 year
warranty on.

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[dokebi]

Try Samsung drives. They have 3 year warrenty's as well, and they hold up very well in reliability too. See here: http://www.redhill.net.au/d-rel.html

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[Theovon]

Western Digital's 3 year warranty is a smoke screen. They're slow to replace defective drives and when they do, you get a refurbished drive with a 30 day warranty, regardless of how long you've had the drive that died.

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[mieses]

This is a subjective comment... but my limited experience has been that Western Digital drives fail much more often than any other drive. I've owned 2 WD SCSI drives in the last 3 years and they have both failed. All my SCSI and IDE Seagates, IBM's and Maxtors are ok. I've had one SCSI Quantum fail also.

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[EverDense]

Western Digital's 3 year warranty is a smoke screen. They're slow to replace defective
drives and when they do, you get a refurbished drive with a 30 day warranty, regardless of
how long you've had the drive that died.

Maybe where you are, but here in Australia we have laws that would make their "30 day warranty" on the replacement drive illegal.

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[RaZ0r]

Too bad you have to pay extra for the 3 Year Warranty from Western Digital. We only support this idea of 1 year warranties by paying more for the "Special Edition".

I say we stop buying hard drives all together! Just use one big ram-drive and a UPS. At lest most ram comes with a Lifetime Warranty.

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[z4ce]

I have a WD drive, I thought that it went bad. But I actually discovered it was a buggy chipset. I sent for a replacement and I had a new drive cross-shipped, that arrived in about 3days. Not bad.

By the time it arrived however I realized that my current drive was fine. So I sent back the drive they sent me. When I called and explained the situation they explained how the waranty works becauxe I was interested in maybe just keeping the extra drive.

The drive they send you has a 30 day waranty, however when they receive your old drive its waranty is transferred to the new drive. So if you wanted to, you could actually call for another RMA on your 3yr waranty harddrive. Pretty cool.

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[Reziac]

30 days? and slow?? Since when?

W.D. will ship you the drive and let you send back the bad one afterward. I've never seen the process take longer than 5 days. And I asked specifically about the 60g that I had a problem with last year, since that was about when they switched to refurbs for replacements, and was told the warranty was up to when the *original* HD's warranty would have expired. (This one came with the 3 year warranty, being from before the drop to 1 year on consumer drives. Note that their enterprise drives, i.e any of those with 8mb cache, still carry 3 yrs.)

Re:Harddiskenal Fortitude

[Theovon]

I believe you are misinformed about that transfer of warranty. I know people who build systems for a living (whether for resale or as sysadmins who have to build and/or repair systems), and in their experience, WD does NOT transfer the warranty. When the drive goes bad, you get a replacement with a 30 day warranty. Period.

I got one of these

[RonenKauffman]

I got it from U a company called Upgrade Solutions. They sold me a Maxtor 80 GB 5400rpm ata100 and it registered half capacity. The vendor told me they had a whole bunch of bad drives from Maxtor as well as Seagate (sorry guys) and that they would send me a replacement because this was a wide-spread problem. dammit, when will they shit the thing so i can have my xbox up and running? (heh)

Lost Maxtor

[stevenp]

I lost one 80GB Maxtor IDE disk three weeks ago, it was JUST 3 monts old.

Hopefully the disk was not full with important information (it was a backup disk). Most of the info I recovered, but anyway a 3 months old disk just FAILS, no warning, no nothing - just one morning it makes a nice sound GRRRRR and the BIOS says HDD failure

My next disk is going to be SCSI

And Then Again, Maybe Not.

[HopeOS]

Seems they may have reversed that stance:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9740

An excerpt:

Hard drive makers' stories start unravelling

Warp and woof and wefting
By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 29 May 2003, 09:55
MAXTOR AND HITACHI don't have factories in China, right?

Well only half right. Yesterday, a Hitachi representative in Europe called us to say reports of problems with high capacity drives couldn't possibly be true "because Hitachi doesn't manufacture drives in China".

One reader pointed out to us that as he was penning his email he was looking at a high end Hitachi drive which bore the clear message "made in China".

Should be interesting to see how this really pans out.

-Hope

Re:And Then Again, Maybe Not.

[Jeffrey Baker]

Interesting. I have a small pile of (failed) Hitachi hard disks on my shelf, all from April '00 to December '01, and all marked as made in the Philippines. Anecdotally, Hitachi drives are just crap. I'm always pulling their 10,000RPM SCSI gear and sending it for RMA. Seagate's 15,000RPM equipment never fails (knock on wood).

Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[naelurec]

Hard drives are cheap .. hard drives are big .. lots of motherboards come with hardware mirroring .. there is software mirroring .. use it. Pretty much every system I build that has any type of important data on it, I'll throw in two drives (RAID 1). I don't treat this as my ultimate backup (critical data still gets stored offsite on some other medium) but I have seen so many drives fail (IDE & SCSI) that the extra upfront cost to assure against a hard drive failure is minimal compared to the rebuilding of a system from scratch (loading software, recreating documents, downloading stuff.. yada yada yada) Lets face it, with todays drive prices at around $1/GB (cheaper with rebates) it just makes sense.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[glwtta]

lots of motherboards come with hardware mirroring

They do? Maybe higher end SCSI ones, but I don't think I've ever seen an IDE motherboard with hardware RAID.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[scrotch]

I think the issue here is that people want the products they purchase to last. It's not necessarily a matter of losing data, because that can happen a number of ways and we all know to make backups. It's a matter of hard drives becoming less and less reliable. Which leads to computers in general getting less and less reliable.

Most of us here, you too I bet, would like to think that computers would get better and better. Meaning more capable and more reliable as well as faster and cheaper. This community invests a lot of time learning about, using, and abusing computers. We would like to feel confident that manufacturers will produce reliable equipment that will repay that investment.

I would like to think that my hard drive will last longer than it takes me to get my computer customized to my desired state. I would like to think that computers won't become so commoditized that when some part malfunctions they are just thrown away like televisions, vcrs, radios, etc. I would like to think that my purchase will last until it is obsolete - it's not like that takes that long these days.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to pr0n, you inevitably fill up all available space. I had an 8 gig a few years ago, had to upgrade to 30 when I got cable. When I found eDonkey, I had to buy a 40. Then I just bought a really fast CD burner. Now I'm running out of space to store the CDs.

Maybe I should put the energy that I expend on pr0n into finding a girlfriend...

Nahhhh...

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[imsabbel]

Have you seen any recent ide-board? A short list of ide motherboards with raid onboard. (only socket A, else it would be too long) Abit AT7 Max2 Abit KD7G Abit KD7RAID ASus A7N8X Deluxe Chaintech 7KDD Chaintech 7NJS Zenith ECS K7VTA3 V5 (yes, even a ecs 64 MB) ECS L7VTA EPOX EP-8K9A3+ GIGABYTE 7NNXP GIGABYTE GA-7DPXDW+ LeadTek K7NCR18G-PRO-I MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR MSI K7N2G-ILSR MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU MSI KT4 Ultra-SR Soyo SY-KT333 Dragon Ultra All this MBs are currently selling. Heck, even 2 years ago ide raid was on most "premium" boards.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[utlemming]

So your saying that I should not check out PriceWatch.com right now for a 80gig? Damn...

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[suss]

Wait... so you're saying we should reward the manufacturers of crap harddisks by buying twice as many?

Would you buy a reliable harddisk that was twice as expensive? -if it was guaranteed for five years-

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[jandrese]

Shoot, if you're going to pay twice as much for the storage, you might as well go with SCSI.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[naelurec]

If the drive was guaranteed to not fail within five years, then sure .. sounds great. However, I think your scenario is completely theoretical and not applicable to current real world usage where even the most reliable models still have some units that simply fail far too soon (just like anything) Given the current state of drives and costs of other backup mediums (tapes, CD-RW, etc..), the costs of throwing in another hard drive and mirroring makes sense to me. Throw it in, setup a mirror and your set. Do incremental backups to the mirror and rotate a CD-RW for critical data and I'm sitting happy.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[Reziac]

"Would you buy a reliable harddisk that was twice as expensive? -if it was guaranteed for five years-"

Within limits, yes. Maxtor have always been about 20% cheaper than W.D. hereabouts, but W.D. are more reliable (and I expect to get a good 5 years of error-free use from a HD, and some junker use beyond that). Hence I have a houseful of W.D. drives.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[id09542]

The consumer has forced the unreliability and the one year warranties. We insist on a $50 80Gig drive ... well something has to give and it is quality. I doubt enough people would pay an additional $100 to get reliability to justify the manufacturer expense. RAID 1 is the best trade-off, even using the psuedo software/hardware RAID controller.

Re:holy crap-You said a mouthfull.

[Anonymous Coward]

"they better pay me for my lost pr0n... i had one of those drives give out about 2 months ago.. it kept losing data, so I finally said screw it. Hope I still have the receipt around..."

Well I guess the actuator kept sticking.

RIAA Cheers Defective Drives, SCO to Follow

[Nom du Keyboard]

Today the RIAA cheered the discovery of defective hard drives. "Defective hard drives will not be used to store pirated songs and movies from illegal P2P networks," their spokesman said, adding, "We're calling on our paid-for friends in Congress to mandate defective hard drives for all users."

While SCO has yet to be heard from, rumors are that they will drop all suits against users who certify that they only use defective drives in their Linux systems.

IBM - Inventor of Broken Machines

[Anonymous Coward]

At least theres publicity about this. Remember IBMs shameful debacle over their DeskStar (DeadStar) hard drives? They denied there was a problem for months, all the while gigs of data were lost around the world. I had a DeskStar. I had backups, but some stuff is inevitably lost and I wasted several days copying stuff off and reinstalling it on the new drive. I had to wait seven months for a replacement drive, the same size exact size (no compensation for the inconveneince) and also made in Romania. The IBM Brand name isn't worth shit.

And when IBM got out of the hard drive Biz, who did they sell the unit to? Hitachi.

third-world order

[hr33]

Funny... our 40 gb Maxtor failed just two days ago. Inaccessible sector and the whole bit (pun unintended). Guess I shouldn't have bought from Cyberpower... appears the hard drives are only affected after being exposed to third-world country conditions... (try calling their tech support and talking to the immigrant on the other end, you'll see what I mean. not to slander mexicans, but at least get someone that speaks english)

Re:You are a fucking idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant!, absolutely brilliant!

Keep up the good work!

doze solution: mirror the drives

[scubacuda]

For the *few* on this site who use Windows, take advantage of Windows RAID. Install Windows 2000 server, mirror the drive, then put a modified boot.ini file on the hard drive. When the one drive takes a shit, you just pop in that disk w/the boot.ini file to boot to your known good hdd.

Re:doze solution: mirror the drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, is Microsoft's volume manager really so retarded that it just always tries to boot from drive #1 instead of trying to boot from whichever drive is still working? On a "server" operating system!?

I guess this might just be a function of the fact that PCs have such a crappy boot system to begin with. Still, could it really suck more? I mean, the purpose of RAID on your server is to keep your data around and increase reliability. If you have to hold its hand all the time (such as by manually telling it which drive in a mirror set to boot from), how is reliability increased? *sigh*

Re:doze solution: mirror the drives

[multiplexo]

Wow, is Microsoft's volume manager really so retarded that it just always tries to boot from drive #1 instead of trying to boot from whichever drive is still working? On a "server" operating system!?

Well actually HP/UX's volume manager isn't any different. You can create bootable mirrors but if one disk goes bad you have to reboot the system, get to the prompt, stop the boot and then tell the system to boot off of the other drive in the mirror.

If I lose a drive on a server then I don't want the box to boot to whatever drive is still available, I want to take a look at what is going on.

Re:doze solution: mirror the drives

[Anonymous Coward]

If each drive always has the same kernel and boot loader, what's wrong with booting off another drive? At least that way you can "look at what is going on" remotely, instead of suffering unplanned downtime until you get a chance to dig up the key and drive out to the wiring close in Hoboken....

Ironically...

[NeuroManson]

I just had my Maxtor 60Gb drive die on me over a weekend, halfways through it's 3 year warrantee. The one drive still chugging along and surviving that crash is my 40Gb model.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:You are a fucking idiot

[whirred]

Fairly harsh, but 100% true.

SCSI versus IDE

[fm6]

On the other hand, I'm very afraid some /.-ers will quickly point out that today's SCSI drives are as much crap as the IDE ones :-(.

Well, I don't have any numbers or even anecdotes. But if all these drives are failing because of defective platters, then what interface standard the drive uses wouldn't make much difference.

On the other hand, if it's just a matter of quality control, then it's not suprising if SCSI is more reliable. Except for a few hardware snobs that refuse to run IDE, SCSI is purchased by people who need sustained throughput: servers, developers who do a lot of builds, render farms, that sort of thing. These customers are going to pay more attention to failure rates than IDE customers, who tend to be end users. Once something becomes a consumer technology, manufacturers assume that bad units will just get returned, and don't worry about failure unless and until the failure rate gets too expensive.

Customer satisifaction? Get real. Most people assume that when their computer breaks, its because they did something wrong.

And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!

Re:SCSI versus IDE

[Penguin Follower]

And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!

I've always liked my SCSI drives better, although they cost me an arm and a leg. ;) This is one case where (especially in servers, etc...) where the phrase you get what you pay for still holds true.

Re:SCSI versus IDE

[talieos]

Customer satisifaction? Get real. Most people assume that when their computer breaks, its because they did something wrong. Ha! What planet are you on? When their computer breaks most people assume the crashes aren't KaZaa, Gator, and every other thing they can't resist clicking on. No, not that! It's their computer sysadmin buddy who showed them how to plug in their USB flash drive. Me? Bitter? No, not at all. :)

Re:SCSI versus IDE

[bogie]

"These customers are going to pay more attention to failure rates than IDE customers, who tend to be end users. "

So your saying the 90% of hard drive market which uses IDE in its PC's doesn't pay attention to the failure rates? Considering the vast majority of corporate and consumer desktops run IDE I find that highly improbable. I wouldn't call that market end users, I would call that market Users period.

Re:SCSI versus IDE

[puppet10]

And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!

Most of the cost difference isn't in the level of quality control.

The additional host adaptor and possibly more importantly the additional testing required to perform quality control on it is a significant part of the cost difference.

Also SCSI being a niche market and lower volume adds a bit more.

Finally and more recently, likely partly because of reason two, the additional warranty time adds a bit more to the price (or decreases the price of an IDE a bit for not having the same level).

It would surprise me if the basic quality control on the platters in SCSI and IDE was different (possibly different for the higher speed SCSI drives for obvious reasons, with a possibility of higher reliability - or lower because of the increased mechanical stresses).

my take on that one...

[zogger]

.. and I read it here awhile back, was that they seemed to be putting attention on an entirely new kind of storage, some cubed action with individual drives all linked together. Not sure if it was what is considered raid or not. I forget the name of it or I'd look it up on a search engine and provide a link to it. So them selling off to hitachi is no big deal, they also maintained some sort of partnertship with them, IIRC.

They have plenty of other projects to deal with, I'm sure they are staying busy...and making money...

Besides, you HAVE to admit, "deathstar" really is a funny name, it would have happened to any company with a similar snafu, or even a product with just a funny name that could be morphed into something funny. We used to call kawasakis (mach IIIs mostly) in detroit "kowalskis"*, 3 guesses why, first two don't count.

*note-you need to know the demographics of detroit 30-40 years ago before it turned into something like beirut.

Re:my take on that one...

[JJahn]

Deathstar *is* a funny name, this coming from someone who owns at least one of them. Oh well, if it dies I'll have an excuse to use my feeble amount of money to buy a nice shiny new drive.

Re:my take on that one...

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

this coming from someone who owns at least one of them.

I found a Death Star too! I used to have one when I was a kid, but my parents sold it at a garage sale sometime in the 80's. I found one for my Son to play with now. 25 years old and still can withstand a 4 year old. They don't make stuff like that anymore.

Oh... wait... err... nevermind...

Screw the flying car...Wheres my Static RAM drive?

[Bowie J. Poag]

...I can buy a 1GB compact flash for, what, $100? 1GB of storage contained in something the size of a poker chip.

What the hell is stopping someone from coming up an CF-based IDE drive?

(Yes, technically, I know the answer. But you have to admit, the most antiquated piece of hardware in a modern PC is the hard disk. It's friggin *mechanical*, for cryin' out loud. What the hell is that doin' in there?)

Cheers,

Playing the online Stock Game

[TerraByte13]

Anyone who has been watching drive stocks lately can see that this suspiciously negative press release coincides with the surge in drive stock prices. Is someone screaming fire in a large theatre?

Drive handling is everything. Treat your drive like an egg! I can't help but to laugh at those who use a screw driver drill to install a drive then wonder why it does not work reliability.

Two things

[mwillems]

What is stopping your ctatic RAM drive? In principle nothing, but in today's reality, two things:

1. Cost
2. Speed

I think 5-10 more years.

-=Michael

Just adding my story...

[digitalhermit]

I knew there was something wrong with my recent crop of Maxtors. I went through *FOUR* defective units in a row. Luckily, I bought a $10 extended warranty at CompUSA (though I never bought them before). After the second failure I contacted Maxtor and they denied that there was anything wrong with the 40G units, though the technician hinted that the one I bought was a "low end" model. It was almost as if he was saying, "You get what you pay for. Tough."

macs

[zogger]

just as an observation, all my mac drives going back to the 80's all still work quite well. Of course most of them are under 1 GB, but still...stout stuff it appears. You have to change the clock batteries on the MOBOs like once or twice (I don't know, that's as often as I do it) a decade or so,but that's it to keep the drives and the boxes they are in running just fine. I'd have to check again, but I *think* most of them are scsi, though.

Re:macs

[JJahn]

Its not just macs, its most older drives that were built better, and have much lower densities. I have lots of 1GB DEC drives still in use, and they work fine. I'm sure when they were purchased they were used heavily too.

Drives just aren't made the same these days.

Re:macs

[lightcycle]

Yes and the older the drives are, the better. I equipped my firewall with a 80 MB drive (Think it was a Maxtor, btw). Previous to this it had been sitting in a public computer at a school, and lying in a cardboard box at a friends. After having used it to carry data around, I put it in the firewall, and it's now on 24/7, with no signs of problem.

Re:macs

[Bert64]

DEC drives are awesome.. i have a 104mb drive in a VAXstation here, It`s been running 24/7 for well over 10 years with no problems whatsoever, when it was bought 104mb was considered large.
I wonder if today`s 200gb drives will still be working in 10-15 years time.
I also have some 4 and 18gig DEC drives, all of which still work perfectly... despite having been mistreated at times (run with inadequate cooling in a room that was very hot already)
During that period, i had the drives and machines lock up due to the heat.. but never suffered any data loss or physical damage to the drives.

IBM 75GXP

[borgasm]

Boy am I glad I bought 3 IBM 75GXP's....Never had a problem with them.

Oh wait, 4 of them failed. Yes, the one I got back from the manufacturer died as well, in addition to the 3 I purchased.

Just a loud clicking sound, and no data.

But that's nothing, my friend is running a RAID 0 of 4 IBM 75GXP's. Now, I have taken my share of probability courses. A serial connection of 4 drives doomed to fail - bad idea. Anyone want to do the MTBF numbers?


Its too bad this happened though, I have my old Seagate 200MB drive still functioning in my computer. This is from the early 90's. Seagate is one manufacturer that I have never had problems with.

Re:IBM 75GXP

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happens when you use your computer for dirty sinful business. Go to chick.com right now and repent.

Re:IBM 75GXP

[AvengerXP]

I have a GXP60. It made the dreaded click of death but...

Magically, once at the CPU store, it worked perfectly. Never failed since. Pixie dust is magic, i think IBM put a little on those HDDs... Mana powered maybe?

Re:IBM 75GXP

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a GXP75 (maybe? Not sure...) Anyways, one of the doomed drives.
The thing worked great for the longest period of time.

Then I got the click of death. Turned the machine off, turned it back on to verify that the problem was still there, and nothing happened (OK, not nothing. There was a group of bad sectors in the first 50 MB, so I just created an empty partition there)
Would have replaced the thing but it was out of warranty by then and I wasn't able to afford a new hard drive.

Works fine for 6 months.

About a month ago the thing does it again, this time there's no way around it. It is royally screwed.
So I go out and grab myself a new hard drive. Only one I can find on such short notice, it's a Maxtor 80GB.
Lately either it or the motherboard has been acting up. This article isn't making me too confident that my new drive hasn't died.

Re:Screw the flying car...Wheres my Static RAM dri

[Anonymous Coward]

CF-based IDE drives are already in use. They don't hold much, but they're nice and quiet, and with no moving parts, you have that much less to worry about. Search google for CF-to-IDE adapters. I believe Kingston makes one too, poke around on their website. The one thing to watch out for is that some CFs do not like being booted off of. Consult someone who has tried a few brands (I know www.solarpc.com used to list the ones that worked for them).

Feds want to see your data

[CaptainAx]

What a better way for the Feds to gain access to tons of information on the population. All to collect information about you under the guise of terrorism. Don't under estimate the power of the dark side...

I can confirm

[tundog]

My second HD started to 'wig out' making all kinds of funny noises last weekend. I unplugged it and havn't got around to tinkering with the cables yet. When I read this story I pulled it out and, sure enough, a maxtor 80 Gig...

make sure your warranty is in

[tarzan353]

That has been my philosophy since about 1996, and it has served me well. Having a notebook also helps to making sure that important data is duplicated.

I buy a new HD about every 18 months, it usually gives me enough room to dump my (full) previous HD, and still have an equivalent amount of free space. It takes me about 18 months anyways to fill up what's left on the new hard drive.

My friend's trick is to buy small sized hard drives from a big retailer that gives the 'premium' warranty, which is usually good for 2-3 years. When the warranty is almost out, he backs up his data, takes the drive out of the case and drops it from waist height onto the floor. He brings it in, and thanks to Moore's law, gets a new drive that is usually about twice as big as what he originaly had, since HD manufacturers stop making the small sized drives with time.

Re:make sure your warranty is in

[dumboy]

Wait, why does it cost so much for a hard drive?

Wait--- You work for HP, right?

[Grog6]

Think of the cost of the inkjet cartriges to print 40GB of porn^H^H^H^H er...Files!

Branding.

[saintlupus]

The article is loading (slowly), but I just have to hope that the Maxtors in my home server aren't affected. After all, I'm using them to back up all the data on my Quantum Fireball and my IBM Deskstar 75GXP.

Is it possible for me to purchase hardware that isn't utter shit any more?

--saint

Reliable HDD

[Anonymous Coward]

I am interested in purchasing at least a 80 GB hdd, but want one that is quality. I need it to be IDE not SCSI. Since I'll be paying for quality I don't expect the hdd to have a low price like Maxtors. Any recommendations?

From the "oddly enough" dept...

[Loki_1929]

As I'm sitting here reading about Maxtor et al's drives failing, my 160GB Maxtor is resetting the heads once again. Having already replaced my 160GB Maxtor through an RMA, I'm quite annoyed to have the same problem only a few months later. So here we are, within a year of original purchase, and I've got two defective units of the same model. How nice.

Oh well, I'm now off to waste a bunch of time and money backing up the data from it to DVD+RWs.

I hate hard drives.

One Acronym...

[Anonymous Coward]

HDSARS!!

Re:Maxtor..., drop it then test it

[Anonymous Coward]

Just drop it about a 3 inches flat onto a hard (wood) surface. Then run the tests, you will get an error, if not try 4 inches, do not slam down or you will damage it.
I do this all the time with they are obviously bad and show no code, its the most efficient thing to do to get your drive replaced

It's all magic to me...

[SuckyDucky]

For once, could we not just play "bash the corporations"? It's practically a miracle that they can get any of this stuff to work in the first place. Even with the defects, the ability to manipulate so many atoms at the level of reliability they have baffles my mind. But of course, I'm probably not near as smart as the average slashdotter.

we recycle about everything......

[zogger]

--you sound just like us, PROUD dozenaires! Proud I say!!! Like that new tax cut they just signed, that means I get to keep an extra...quarter? something like that... hhehhehehehe

My BIG drive, that I am using right now, is an 8 gigger fujitsu, running in my freaking red and dripping blood bleeding edge 1996 IBM 365, 200PP.....the drive that came with it is a 1.6 GB IBM drive that sounded from day one like acorns in a blender. I mean, it's like it was designed for audio monitoring, you can HEAR it work.. It's still plugged in on the cable, no idea what's on it anymore, mostly borked leenux experiments in noob kernel compiling.. yes, I still suck really well on that....

The funny part is, you can be running antique stuff like this, and e-vile haxors STILL want in. I should leave a welcome mat and just let them in, in exchange for occasional IRC tech support and help with my SPAM problems... I mean, as long as I would be hosting them and all....

Good thing...

[setzman]

that I just paid $150 for a Western Digital Raptor with a 5 year warranty.

Maxtor Going strong

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is my hard drive:

Master: ad2 Maxtor 34098H4/YAH814Y0 ATA/ATAPI rev 6

Had it for 2 years, is on more often than it's off, doesnt get hot. Best money ever spent.

crap asian dealers rarely have good deals on hd

[Anonymous Coward]

The crap asian whitebox dealers nearly never have bargains on harddrives. Probably because you can't remark of bootleg a harddrive very easy.

Overreact much?

[Zed2K]

How about a little fact checking before articles are posted and made to sound like its a worldwide problem? What is this fark?

From the article:
"Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said."

KEY WORDS: "sold in Taiwan"

About 12,000-15,000 defective hard drives are estimated to have entered Taiwan."

More key words:

"It is unclear whether the same groups of products, with an estimated defect rate of 10%, have also been marketed in other parts of the world, sources said."

So unless you do your shopping in Taiwan for HD's to use in the US don't get your panties in a bunch.

I've had a Maxtor 80GB ata 133 drive for more than a year now and haven't had a single problem with it.

IN COMMUNSIT CHINA...

[Anonymous Coward]

...defective hard drives recall YOU.

Sorry, this one is readable

[imsabbel]

Have you seen any recent ide-board?
A short list of motherboards with ide-raid onboard.
(only socket A, else it would be too long)
Abit AT7 Max2
Abit KD7G
Abit KD7RAID
ASus A7N8X Deluxe
Chaintech 7KDD
Chaintech 7NJS Zenith
ECS K7VTA3 V5 (yes, even a ecs 64 MB)
ECS L7VTA
EPOX EP-8K9A3+
GIGABYTE 7NNXP
GIGABYTE GA-7DPXDW+
LeadTek K7NCR18G-PRO-I
MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR
MSI K7N2G-ILSR
MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU
MSI KT4 Ultra-SR
Soyo SY-KT333 Dragon Ultra

All this MBs are currently selling. Heck, even 2 years ago ide raid was on most "premium" boards.

Re:Sorry, this one is readable

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's time you learn the difference between hardware and software raid controllers. Hardware raid are the huge expensive controllers (usually SCSI that support lots of RAID modes, not just 0 and 1), that also have a lot of extra logic to speed up disk transfers. "software" controllers are nothing more than IDE controllers with raid 0 and 1 capabilities. It's better than nothing, sure, but we were discussing "hardware" raid controllers here.

Re:Sorry, this one is readable

[imsabbel]

It maybe time that you learn the difference between Hardware Raid 0/1 and Hardware Raid5.
Not needing any real computating power ( no need for to XOR 4+datastreams) and only 2 channels Hardware Raid 0/1 is dirt-cheap.
You MAY call it software-raid because the actual work is done by the driver. But I call it hardware-raid as soon as the raid is recognized at bios-level (in contrast to REAL Software Raid like the one in Win2000 Server or WinXp pro).

And you would be surprised (if you had a clue) how damn slow even "real" ide-hardware-Raid controllers can be. Yeah, the 600$ 3Coms are 100% faster than software stripeset, but in Raid0/1 they can be slower than your "i dont have processing power onboard to speed up datatransfers" ide-controllers with added raid functionality.

btw:
How should a card use "additional Computing Power" to speed up a raid 0 or 1?

Not Quality, Profit Margins

[shoemakc]

Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise. Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.

It's not clear that's the case at all. One thing that :::is::: clear is that profit margins on EIDE drives are the lowest they've ever been with both competition and the increased technology required to maintain the capacity race.

Warranty service and replacement is a :::big::: expense for OEM's. Not only do you have to stock replacement drives, but also maintain the staff and infastructure to handle those returns. Reducing the warranty period from 3 to 1 years significantly lowers an OEM's expenses.

The other thing that hasn't been brought up is the stratification of the EIDE market into two tiers. Maxtor for instance has out their Maxline II series, with the full 3 year warranty, and MTBF's previously researved for SCSI drives. If you wan't something better, you pay a bit more. This satisfies everyone; those who need to replace a drive in their dell for as little as possible, and those who host porn off their machines 24/7.

-Chris

Product lifecycle

[appleLaserWriter]

As drive capacity increases, reliability per megabyte-hour increases as well. However, the industry has shifted towards cheaper and cheaper consumer PCs. Ten years ago when 7200 RPM SCSI Seagate Barracudas were all the rage, a single drive could set you back almost $1000. Now entire PCs cost less than that and we haven't even considered inflation!

More likely, manufacturers are reducing the warranty so they can shorten product lifecycles and keep fewer warranty replacemnet units in inventory. The industry is focusing on Dell's success at just in time manufacturing and would like to see warehouse space used more like a cache then long term storage.

Re:Screw the flying car...Wheres my Static RAM dri

[quantum bit]

They don't hold much, but they're nice and quiet, and with no moving parts, you have that much less to worry about. Search google for CF-to-IDE adapters.

The adapters are usually really cheap since CF is actually just a miniture ATA connector. There are a couple problems with it though:

• Flash works in cells that have to be erased a whole cell at a time, so writes that don't cover an entire cell are slow (copy existing data to empty cell, write new data, erase old cell). If the OS is smart enough, this can be mitigated by lazy cache writes and using the right block size for your filesystem.
• Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles. This is usually in the millions, but at an average rate of one write every 5 seconds (for say, /var), cells will start failing after a couple of months of use. Putting busy data like swap on a CF card will burn through it much quicker.

That said, I use a CF-to-IDE adapter in my router/firewall and am very happy with it. It's extremely useful for embedded systems where you don't need to store anything and can treat the flash as a read-only media while the system is running. Combine with ramdisks for best results. Even my 486 with 20 MB of RAM can handle router/firewall/VPN/DNS server duty under FreeBSD without needing a swap disk.

Better yet, get a fanless mini-ITX board with DC power brick and have everything be solid state -- it'll last pratically forever (well past obsolescence anyway).

Remember, Neo...

[Squirrel of Doom]

Seagate boy: Do not try and return the drive. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Seagate boy: There is no recall.

Neo: There is no recall?

Seagate boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the drive that dies, it is only yourself.

Re: Problems with Western Digital

[Vegan Pagan]

"...as he takes comfort in only buying WD, once again :)"

WD seems to not be using their own medicine.

Why not WD?

[LinuxInDallas]

I wonder why these big three manufacturers are recalling drives and Western Digital isn't? My guess is that they should be recalling drives but instead have decided to stick it to the customer. At least the other guys are being honest.

Whoa! Deja vu!

[freeze128]

I used to work for a small computer company (ten years ago, mind you). There I saw all brands of hard drives fail, but the brand that failed the least seemed to be Western Digital. I would recommend WD drives to anybody at that time.

Connor drives were still around, before they were bought out by Seagate, and they even had compatibility problems WITH OTHER CONNOR DRIVES. Maxtor drives boasted 8k of internal cache (try not to laugh too much) which made them faster than most drives, but I found that they were the most fragile.
I first saw a Quantum drive when a customer specifically ordered one. He had read a review that said it was a really high performance drive at the time. Sadly, it was a FIREBALL, and it was returned 3 months later because one of the ASICs burned up. (It literally turned into a Fireball!)

When places like Wal-Mart started to carry hard disks, it seemed that the only brand they had was MAXTOR. I thought maybe they LIKE to get returns, or maybe Maxtor had become a little more reliable. This incident just makes me feel better about my decision to use WD only.

Not fucking again.

[Anonymous Coward]

First, Western Digicrap, then International Bombing Magnetics. Now Seagate?

Fuck it. Fuck it all, I'm going back to 412 mb hard drives. At least those don't fucking get recalled every god damned three months.

Re:Not fucking again.

[^_^x]

No kidding... Hard drives should be made to better standards considering the value of the data on them. In 20 years, I've lost 3 hard drives. 2 WDs a few years ago, and a Quantum that still worked, but got so loud it was painful to use.

I have a 5.25" 40MB Seagate in my basement in an old XT, and it still runs like the day it was new.

Western Digital

[yamcha666]

Hmmm, maybe I made a good choice by trusting my data to Western Digital drives and only WD drives. To this day I have never bought a Maxtor (or Seagate) even though it was cheaper than Western Digital. So far, I've purchased 300GB worth of hard drive space from WD ... Good choice I have made, it seems.

eek! must check 40gig in my server...

[WebCowboy]

...lets see... /var/log/dmesg says:

.
.
.
hda: C/H/S=19158/16/255 from BIOS ignored
hda: WDC WD400BB-00CLB0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-5602B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=77545/16/63, UDMA(100)
.
.
.

*whew!* was worried there for a second. Makes me glad I gave Western Digital a second chance after they put out a bunch of potenially defective 1.6 gig Caviars out a number of years ago (personally witnessed one undergo the "clunk of death" at the time).

I think with the insanely rapid advancement of HD technology (and the equally insande decline in prices) over the past few years, every HD manufacturer is going to have their turn doing damage control and learning from the experience.

Re: Problems with ASP

[djupedal]

hehehe....not fair...that's a software issue. hehehehe

Western Digital!@#!

[soupmaster]

Yikes, back in the mid 90's, WD drives were amongst the most unreliable IMHO. Plus I recall some kind of crazy compatibilty issues on the IDE & EIDE bus. Wasn't there a compatibilty jumper or something? I never recovered from the generalization that WD's were the worst of breed. Same goes for brussell sprouts. I'm still convinced they suck even though I haven't had one since I was 8.

Re:Western Digital!@#!

[Anonymous Coward]

they had a 20gig 7200 model that was basically recalled(and maybe the 40 G model, too, at the same time) . That must have been about ad2000 as I recall...

I own some WD caviars from just prior to that time that would not accept being secondary on either IDE channel. They would reset the IDE bus. Clunk, clunk. Very aggravating. I swore em off and decided to buy mainly Maxtors. Well, I've had 3 Maxtor drives (including 1 Quantum-sold-by-Maxtor) fuck up and die since that time -- which is fucking atrocious. So now I'm altogether off Maxtor, and back to Western Digital. Meanwhile Western Digital have taken a lead in IDE drive performance and IBM has developed as sorry a record in reliability as Maxtrash, leaving WD alone at the top of the heap. It's funny, you nap for a year, wake up, and then you find out that last year's screwed pooch is this year's top dog.

Next IDE drive: WD Raptors !

ram based ide drives?

[ratfynk]

Just as a matter of curiosity what ever happened to the brilliant idea of ram based ide drives. I cannot for the life of me remember the company that brought out an ide card with a bunch of ram and a battery on it. For that matter why not an
IEEE flash card boot?
Certainly a bios can be written to boot from either firewire or usb2. Again someone is holding up the real progress of computer tech, any suggestions as to suspects. Maybe the same people who held up the release of 64bit PCs for 10 years!

You would think that if you could ever get a bootable ram based ide then that would make platter drives great only for storage. I hate the idea of booting from a hard drive. Running critical system files on a mechanical device sucks, always has and always will. You could concievably store backups of your os boot on any hard drive then restore the ram drive in the event of battery failure.

I guess the cheap cost per gig of junky
hard drives is one reason why this idea never took off. Also the artificially inflated price of ram might be the kicker as well. Wouldn't Microsoft and Intel have kittens if they had to make their os base structure different, I do not think Phoenix or AMD could care as they could easily adapt. You can bet BSD and Linux would beat Redmond out of the gate if a ram based master first ide ever caught on! Maybe these are the real reasons ram ide went away real quick. Not any technical hurdles.

Whew! Dodged that bullet...

[MsGeek]

80GB Maxtor in my flagship machine. Headline got my heart pumping fast. Took the drive out of the drive caddy, slid the cartridge open. Made in Singapore. Sigh of relief. 3 year warranty. Quantum used to be good. Then they went downhill. Started buying IBM. IBM went to hell. Then I started buying Maxtor. Now Maxtor is laying an egg.

Before Quantum was crappy, Seagate and Western Digital were the drives you loved to hate. First Seagate got their act together. Western Digital seems to also be getting their act together. Now I hear from more than one poster on this article that SAMSUNG is OK now. Samsung used to make the bottom-of-the-barrel sucky drives (Well, JTS was worse, but they aren't around anymore) and I helped a friend out of a treadmill of constantly replacing Samsung drives and into a Quantum.

Funny how things change so fast in the storage sector.

No shit!

[archnerd]

I've lost two Maxtors in the past four months!

SCSI's not perfect either

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I've never been let down by my Seagate or Quantum (RIP) SCSI drives, I recently dismanteled two IBM 9GB UltraStar drives that failed on me a year ago. Both had visible scarring and discoloration on the top platter in a mostly radial arc about a cm long and a mm wide. I bought those drives because they had a 10x higher MTBF than the IDE drives at the time, and I still got boned. Now days, I don't run a system without RAID or nightly backups to a RAIDed server.

Bootable Diagnostic CDs

[Jade E. 2]

Problem: I don't build new machines with floppy drives anymore.

Of the 4 programs I listed, 2 of them (SeaTools and PowerMax) use a proprietary disk creation program (Ontrack's Diskette Maker), so you're SOL for them.

The third program, Western Digital's DLG, comes (if you just download the diagnostics module) as just a .zip file containing the actual program (a single .exe). You should be able to add that to the CD portion of any standard DOS boot CD. (Disclaimer: I've used that guy's tools to make Win2K boot CDs, but haven't tried his DOS images.)

The fourth program is the easiest, however. IBM/Hitachi's DFT, comes in 2 flavors. The 'Windows' package uses an Install-shield based diskette maker program, so you could theoretically grab all the files from the temp directories it unpacks them too. Even easier, though, is to just download the 'Linux' package, which is an actual 1.44MB boot disk image, suitable for direct use with your favorite burning software (see: mkisofs -b, or Nero's "CD-ROM (Boot)" type.).

HTH.

Re:Bootable Diagnostic CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

DFT is pretty nice, and works on non-motherboard IDE controllers and most functions work with non-IBM drives. However, it's best to use the software from the relevant manufacturer if possible, because they usually know how to read proprietary error-logs on the drive.

Software using proprietary imagers can always be written on a box with FDD and read with dd or "rawwrite for windows" before being put onto a bootable CD (this sounds like a good candidate for a toolbox multi-boot CD, along with other such useful tools as BootIt NG).

Seagate Denies Recall

[Flownez]

Story here...

Hardware At It's Limit?

[OceanWave]

Seems to me that I have seen these same things before:

• Floppy drives pushed way past their limit, when they were only stable at 720K.
  It was typical for me to format a new "good quality" floppy, and have it fail on read-error five minutes later. Never mind using these things to back up the 40MB drive I had at the time!
• Modems pushed to 56K, when they were only good to 28K.
  It is what made me switch to new technology, such as Road Runner, after dealing with the frustration of even moderate Internet use.
• CPU technology is also the same:
  The typical heat dissipation--now several tens of watts--still has that little tiny fan to pull the heat out of the fashionably small case. In the past, weren't high performance machines almost super-cooled?

It would seem to me that the customer base is the "guinea pig"--where "experimental" products are tried to test their engineering weakness-- while we have to pay these companies for the privilege of testing their products. It would seem that the roles are reversed here. The quality assurance aspect should be handled by the company before it impacts the customer.

I have found that both hardware and software are the same in this respect. And, we will have to "eat" Moore's Law, because the "testing" is never over. In conclusion, reliability will be an issue for quite some time to come. Though extensive testing would have it's disadvantage: If you were looking for that new product, you would have to wait a couple years beyond it's usual release date to enjoy the benefits.

humidity to blame?

[that _evil _gleek]

I wonder if they did 24 burn in, or some other operational testing in rooms with no AC and 90%relative humidity ( or more).
*laugh* What if it's mold.. growing on the disks... spreading sector by sector...
Does your k-rad case mod, include a hygrometer?.. maybe it should....

General failure?

[cmburns69]

Whos general failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?

I second That

[Nazmun]

A very similar story happend to me and I got a refurbished drive that just doesn't seem to be operating as smoothly as the previous one (when it was still functioning).

Been there, done ...... *yawn*

[bizitch]

My wee little home server o' pr0n has crapped out 2 Maxtor 40gb'rs in the last 2 years...

To Maxtor's credit - both have been replaced relatively painlessly

false story

[Anonymous Coward]

According to other articles http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=usa&q=se agate+recall - this story is completely false.

RTFA

[aechols]

Three major brand hard drive vendors - Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies - have started recalling some of their 40GB and 80GB products sold in Taiwan due to similar defects identified in the products, Taiwanese channel distributors said.

Taiwan. Not here. Unless you're in Taiwan and I'm an insensive clod.

R is for Redundant

[wirelessbuzzers]

it's not a RAID if it's striped. that's why you do a real RAID.

Re:R is for Redundant

[AdTropis]

so i guess the RAID in RAID-0 is not really RAID? last i checked, RAID-0 (aka, striping) was an actual RAID configuration though not necessarily in the mindset of RAID as you hinted at. maybe you were thinking of concatentation?

Re:R is for Redundant

[sirsnork]

I suspect what he was thinking was that the "R" in RAID is for Redundant.. and a stripe has no redundance, so technically speaking it is not RAID

Re:R is for Redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it stands for "R-type." That's what makes it faster. If it's still not fast enough, try painting your drives yellow.

Re:China, SARS, sick drives(It'S A PLOT)

[GnarlyNome]

IT'S A PLOT to shut down /.(it's a plot I tell you)

cool enough?

[muyThaiBxr]

Are you people who are seeing all these hard drive failures actually keeping the drives cool enough? My drives run around 28-30C and I've never had a problem with ANY of them. BOTH of them are 7200 RPM 8MB Cache Maxtors right now, but all my previous drives have been maxtors as well and I've never had a problem.

Basically I'm anal about keeping the case cool so I have lots of fans (with a fan controller so I can sleep with the computer on) but my drives always have a lot of airflow over them.

The first 20 gig run well

[CrazyJim0]

Scandisk crashes because my DeathStar has so many bad sectors... So I can never id the last ones...

I stay within 15-20 gig, and I'm cool... but too much and it strays into bad sectors, and all sorts of crap goes wrong

Fuck

[RevSmiley]

99.9% of all OEM drives and at least 90% of all other dirves are installed with a power driver. It has nothing to do with drive failures at all. Keep hold of your lucky rabbits foot whilst you install one it has about a much effect. Another fucking expert.

Re:Fuck

[TerraByte13]

Yet another who does not know the difference between a HDD approved driver and a home depot power drill with vicious torque.....another head bites some dust... resulting in a Support call like this -

Tech support: How may I help you?
RevSmiley : What the Fuck? I was just drilling this Fuckin drive in like 99.9% of all OEMers on this planet and now the fucking thing makes this spring snapping/clicking like noise after a month of downloading porn!
Tech support : What kind of drill were you using sir?
RevSmiley : What the fuck does that fuckn matter!? I was stroking my favorite fucking rabbit foot while installing it! FUCK YA!
Tech support : Well sir incorrect drive handling is the number one reason of drive failures in the field.
RevSmiley : FUCK! You sound just like that guy who told me I must ground myself when installing a new motherboard because invisible charges of electricity my body collects can cause shit to break 6 months down the road! I don't stroke my rabbit's foot that much you fucker! That's all a bunch of Bullshit!! Another fucking expert!

Longer Warranty != More Reliable

[fmaxwell]

Warranty on seagate ide drive == 1 year

warranty on seagate scsi drive == 5 years.

Looks to me like seagate believes they're better drives.

Please tell me that you don't actually intend to pass that off as a logical conclusion.

Seagate 80GB IDE drive: $99.99
Seagate 73.4GB SCSI drive: $459.99

How the hell is Seagate supposed to provide a five year warranty on a drive that's being sold to consumers for $100? It's pretty easy to see that there is enough profit margin to cover a 5 year warranty for a $460 73GB SCSI drive.

Samsung still has 3 year warranties on their ide drives. Only one I'l buy from now.

Good for you. You can get a slower, less reliable drive with a longer warranty (I have experience on a project that used Samsung drives in over 3,000 systems). And when that $99 drive dies, you can stop working on your computer, send it back, wait for a replacement, put that in, install the OS and try to reconstruct your data. Good luck.

Hyundai and Kia cars have 10 year/100,000 mile powertrain warrantees. I guess you think that Hyundai and Kia cars are the most reliable in the world.

Re:Longer Warranty != More Reliable

[Reziac]

Samsung built Conner* HDs. Seagate bought Conner. I have an older refurbed Seagate IDE HD here that is reported as a Conner at bootup. Draw your own conclusions.

* Conner HDs had a common problem where if they sat idle for a few months, they would lose the ability to boot (this could be fixed by having FDISK "make the partition active"), and sometimes would lose all the files as well (the files were gone forever). Anyone know what causes this? I've seen it happen on several different models (and more than one of each).

China

[RevSmiley]

As in Taiwan teh island?

Jesus Christ!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 'i', people! Ridiculous! This has to be not only one of the most misspelled words, but one of the most obviously misspelled.

Re:Jesus Christ!

[deathcow]

Interesting Point. Lets ask Google.

"Rediculous" and "Ridiculous" were found a total of 1.629 million times.

Of those:
96.38% were spelled ridiculous.
03.62% were spelled rediculous.

So, it looks like people spell it well on the average.

Get a clue!

[fmaxwell]

They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

Maybe they have accountants, engineers, and marketing staff working for them and, thus, have the ability to determine what the optimum mix of warranty and sales price is. A five year warranty does not mean that the company offering it expects zero failures in five years. It means that they expect to be able to sell the drives and provide warranty service for five years and still make a profit.

All I want is a drive bigger than 40GB that'll actually *last* 5 years. Is that so hard? Apparently yes. I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day.

So all you want is a drive that is the same physical size or smaller, holds at least 500 times the amount of data, spins 50% faster, transfers data an order of magnitude faster, costs about 1/3 as much, and lasts 5 years. Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

Tell you what: I'll sell you a 70GB drive for $450 and warranty it against failures (other than those caused by abuse) for five years. Oh, wait, that's how they offer the five year warranty on SCSI already, isn't it?

Great.

[Dthoma]

So...which drives are safe? Smaller drives? Drives with lengthier warranties? Older drives? Slower drives? All of the above? I need some hints here!

(Though so far my family's been lucky; three computers and no hard disks crapping out. Admittedly, though, the most recently purchased computer was bought about eight months ago.)

Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you have never owned a Seagate ST-238, or the similar ST-225.
These drives had an unbelievable failure rate...

I tricked 'em...

[harborpirate]

40 GB and 80 GB drives are crapping out all over.

I bought a 60 GB drive!
Muhuahahahahahahaha!

At least until the press release next week:
"Oh yeah, 60 GB drives failing also, being recalled."

Re:Yea, but for $20...

[Reziac]

Note that the warranty extension is available ONLY for retail-boxed drives, not for OEM drives.

The price diff for retail box can be enough that you might as well wait for a rebate on one of their enterprise drives that still carry a 3 yr warranty.

Made in China - What did you expect ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Made in China. What did you expect from a labor force fill with angry peasants, working to get their daughters back from the party overlords?

and I thought...

[dotpl]

...it had to do with the drive not being able to handle all the pr0n...

One word: STICTION

[Anonymous Coward]

One word:

STICTION

The act done without badly-needed KY2 jelly for the disinterested B.

In SOVIET RUSSIA...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. HARD DRIVES crash YOU!!! :P

Re:Dont stick to maxtor

[Smid]

Maxtor 120 Gig, 1 broken before plugged in, another broken after 6 months. Probably a rebadged Quantum.

At the moment, I'm backing Seagate, but thats might be wrong too...

Second time. No Maxtor.

[Smid]

Lost 2 120 Gig drives in last 6 months from them.

Western Digital in the 20-40 gig range have been clicking on out if used regularly too. My IBM 40 gig one seems to be going strong, Ironically had lots of Quantums go on me recently (but my home one keeps rolling), and the seagate 120Gig one seems ok so far.

Re:Screw the flying car...Wheres my Static RAM dri

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate have for some time been producing a CF drive. It has a backup battery that holds the data for up to 3 years. Luvverly, bus speed access, anyone? Seek time in the order of nanoseconds..! No thermal problems, totally silent. I have a pair of 8GB drives in a workstation, and another 16 drives on order.

WANTED: Drives with programmable speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be easy to provide firmware mods so I can wind them down to run at 3600RPM in READ mode(or slower) for the stuff I rarely access. Seems to be a geek firmware marketing opportunity going begging.

There again, failing drives are needed to support future sales.
CPU Overdrive has a heat sensitive clock halver, and it makes sense to have speed/temperature regulated drives (constant temp, variable speed).

Bout time someone sold a 'datagard' disk drive.

Recall?! Gibber.

[BlightThePower]

I'm not into anything dodgy or illegal (beyond a stable, and hopefully in future, managable mp3 habit) but am I only the only one who doesn't like the idea of sending a Harddrive thats been living in my machine for months back to the factory? (especially given the risk it may be reconditioned and flogged on ebay without being properly scrubbed. someone is supplying that particular market). Seems a bad idea to me. My view is a harddrive either works in my machine or its hung, drawn, quartered, stamped on, zapped with magnets, zapped with laser beams, tactically nuked and *then* and only *then* launched into the sun itself. I'm exaggerating (erm slightly, who'd stamp on a HD?), but you get my point.

Whats new

[Anonymous Coward]

Fujitsu was pumping out crap 10-20GB 1.5 years ago i was working at an oem and they where coming back in droves
bios either no longer seeing them or looking like someone had seasoned the drive with bad sectors like sugar on a slice of bread.
etc etc. no suprise really. But all those years convinced me of one
thing NASA must have faked the moon landing hardware and software even today is such that i would not trust my life to it , thats for sure.

DigiTimes = Journalism-(Integrity+Responsibility)

[mnemotronic]

Who do they think they are? NY Times?

Re:hey: Hitachi = IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

If my memory serves me correctly Hitachi purchased IBM.

Also, I have 4 computers each with different IBM drives (60GXP, 75GXP and 120GXP) in product they've naught had any problems.

IDE = commodity hardware

[siskbc]

it is rather interesting that wd escaped this round. i used to reccomend and buy wd drives primarily because they were very reliable. however, i have had a number of them die in the last 7 years and for that reason, i've reccomended against them for quite some time. their standards seemed to have dropped a while back and never really recovered.

Yeah, isn't it? I was only half kidding, as I have had issues with WD in the past as well (intermittent seek failures and such) The problem with the IDE mass storage market is that margins are so tiny that no one can afford to offer frills like longer warranties - you might see the wisdom in it, but OEM's could really care less about your HDD warranty as long as it's as long as their base warranty.

The way I look at it is defective components are the price we pay for having good computers available for less than $1000. Problem is for people like me, where I have over 1GB of priceless data (gonna be my thesis in about a year), and your employer (I'm assuming). These days, it seems like the only way to have any data security is to go SCSI (which seem to have better quality still, owing to the higher margins they make on them), or go with a big ol' redundant RAID. That and backup like a fiend, obviously.

Re:hey mtbf

[tomhudson]

... but now they're changing the definition of MTBF

1. Maximum Time Before Fuckup.
2. Megabytes Trashed Beyond Finding.
3. Millisecs To Borked Files

new Seagate IDE drives stink, literally

[Potent]

Early this week, I bought a new Barracuda ATA 40GB drive, and was shocked to see a new plain-looking white label that says "Made in China". The drive is amazingly quiet, and very fast, but man... IT STINKS!

For two days after is was powered up, it emitted a foul odor - something like the smell of a transformer burning up. It was enough to stink up the whole room and the ones adjacent to it! No part of it seemed to be running hot.

I used another one of these several months ago, and it did not have that problem. It also had the earlier black label (with the cool Barracuda graphics) that didn't say "Made in China"!

I loved the way the last one worked out, so I didn't hesitate to buy another one - and paid more for it than I would have paid for other brands. Seagate: I'm disappointed in you!

The *stank* from it has finally subsided, but DAMN! It was NASTY! I'll buy a Maxtor next time.
--

Anyone try Serial ATA from Western Digital?

[rcliv]

They've gotten good reviews over at www.storageview.com. Only 36GB right now, but for $160, that's not a bad price. Plus they have a 5 year warranty.

ummm...

[Deflagro]

I only read the articles for the pictures anyways.

Just went through tech support.

[Lux]

Just got off the phone with tech support, and the Maxtor guy was great. All I had to do is put my HDD on the phone, and the guy sent a replacement unit + a box to return the defective unit with.

Zero hold time, and the phone menus were straight forward. I think I pressed all '1's. How often does that get you to a human these days?

Too Late

[X-wes]

Ah...hehe...damn

Sorry about that

x.x

I just had a Maxtor Calypso 120gig die on me

[NerdENerd]

I bought a Maxtor Calypso 120 gig about a month ago and the other day Windows would not boot. Reformatted the drive and there were 16k of bad sectors which were not there the first time I formatted it.

maxtor 40 gig failed today

[Anonymous Coward]

My maxtor 40 gig failed today. At least I've had the smart warning for a while. It's 2 years old, in a 3 yr warranty. My old 8 gig is still running.