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

*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.

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.

/.'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

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 :)

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

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

[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.

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.