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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.
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.
I'm not Seth.
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.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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.
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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
YOU SUCK BALLS!
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.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
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!
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
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
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.
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-
Shoot, if you're going to pay twice as much for the storage, you might as well go with SCSI.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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?