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

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.

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?

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

[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.

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: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....

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.

[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 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: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:Just as I suspected

[Trogre]

A good case for sticking with 5400rpm models.

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.