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

[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

*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*

[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}

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.

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. ®

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....

[tundog]

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

/.'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

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

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

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!)

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

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: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: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: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).

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

[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.

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: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).

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.

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: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: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.

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.

Seagate Denies Recall

[Flownez]

Story here...

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.