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3 Major HD Makers Recalling Drives? [UPDATED]

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the backup-the-pr0n dept.

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.

8 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Just as I suspected by Michael's+a+Jerk! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    I'm not Seth.

    1. Re:Just as I suspected by tomstdenis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

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    2. Re:Just as I suspected by ColaMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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  2. Price collusion anyone? by bergeron76 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

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  3. Makes perfect sense... by sterno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. grrr by deadsaijinx* · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

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  5. Harddiskenal Fortitude by EverDense · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    http://jesus.everdense.com/
  6. SCSI versus IDE by fm6 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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!