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

no comments and /.ed already

[jonfromspace]

Or maybe they were using said HD.

Re:no comments and /.ed already

[www.microsoft.com]

Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future:
We're pleased to announce the newest reason for you to subscribe to Slashdot... Slashdoting!

*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*

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, thermal paper receipts disintigrate in 6 months.

So, scan one in, edit it, and use that to get maxtor to send you a new one. If the decline it, sue the store in small claims court.

Maxtor has been good but this 1 year warranty bullshit makes them no better than Fangtun.

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}

DEAR GOD

[randomdef]

WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE PORN? all those hours i spent....er...downloading...

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.

Re:Slashdoted?

[IanBevan]

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.

OMG SARS has crossed species into hard disks ? Now that's a clever virus..

Re:hey

[subzero_ice]

When you call IBM they send your HDD over to Hitachi. So I think Hitachi is basically recalling the deathstars.

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.

Re:Seagate refutes this

[Goldberg's Pants]

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.

Just as I suspected

[Michael's a Jerk!]

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.

Re:Just as I suspected

[tomstdenis]

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

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....

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

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.

Re:Just as I suspected

[CaramelCod]

I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day

One word. Upgrade.

Re:Just as I suspected

[c0d3h4x0r]

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.

Oh, come on. It's not even in the financial interest of the drive manufacturers to create less reliable products. The supposed "savings" of doing so would be easily outweighed by the decrease in reputation and sales figures, and the increase in costs to them for replacing drives that went bad during the warranty period (whatever the length).

The real reason they shorten the warranty period is so they aren't on the hook to provide technical support and replacements for drives they don't even make anymore. The costs they are trying to cut by shortening the warranty aren't manufacturing costs, but support costs.

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:Just as I suspected

[loconet]

I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

So true, I've had 2 Fujitsus HDs, 5GB and 3GB that I use every day , day in and day out, heavy trashing, Windows and Linux. They are still serving me well.

*knock on wood*

Re:Just as I suspected

[Trogre]

A good case for sticking with 5400rpm models.

Re:Just as I suspected

[letxa2000]

I do something similar. My cron job makes an incremental backup of my work every 3 hours locally. That's mostly so if I screw something up I can roll back.

Then once a night the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last 24 hours and FTPs it over to another machine. The daily incremental backups are kept for a week.

Then once a week the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last week and FTPs it over to the other machine. These are kept indefinitely (until I get around to purging them).

Finally, once a month a complete backup is made and sent over to the other system. These, too, are kept indefinitely.

I burn CDs with the backups from time to time. But I feel pretty well protected--I'd have to lose two hard drives, one in a laptop and one on a server machine, pretty much simultaneously to be SOL. And even then I have my CDs to recover from which is various degrees of SOL depending on how long it has been since my last CD burn.

Hard drives just make me nervous. They've gotten so big anymore that you have to be extremely careful that you don't put all your eggs in one basket--and with hard drives that are so many times bigger than what a CD can hold it's not easy to backup all your data on a frequent basis. That's why I've gone to the "backup to another computer" option--it happens automatically thanks to cron and it FITS, which is more than I can say for trying to back it up regularly to a CD.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Fweeky]

My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat

Well, put it this way; that 10MB drive that's been running for a decade is probably spinning quite slowly, running cooler, and has way more leeway over how far the read/write heads can be off before it starts having trouble operating correctly; probably by quite a few orders of magnitude compared to a drive where a single platter may be 8,000 times denser.

So: 1. The platter can wobble to the point at which the drive rattles like crazy and it'll still be fine. 2. The bearings can fail to this point without anything batting an eyelid. 3. The components can expand a lot more freely without worrying too much about anything becoming misaligned. 4. All these components have less stress on them due to lower RPMs and less aggressive seek times.

Compare this with your shiny new 80G drive, where if your drive's rattling, it's probably already dead, and if the bearings are going, you're probably going to see tonnes of failing sectors long before you even hear the buzz of the platter's misalignment.

Quality isn't going down; requirements are getting stricter -- You can compare it to a shooting range; you start off 1m from your target, and slowly increase the range until it's 8km away.

The quality of your gun and your aim's almost certainly improved massively during that period, but it's pretty obvious which target's easier to hit reliably, especially when you're competing in a cutthroat market where you have to do it before the other guy and at least as cheaply, or else.

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.

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:Just as I suspected

[GnarlyNome]

Well there are always the yard sales same quality drives ,but you only pay $5.00 ea.
( you mean the drive is supposed to rattle like that?)

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...

Topical?

[moehoward]

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.

Re:Topical?

[Em Emalb]

I sincerely question the Slashdot-newsworthiness of this.

Hi, I am a member of the slashdot welcome team. You must be new here.

Welcome!

Price collusion anyone?

[bergeron76]

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...

Re:Price collusion anyone?

[glitch!]

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 ]

I am pretty sure that the Sumitomo Chemical company fire was a complete lie. It's been a while (almost 10 years now?), but I seem to recal claims that this company produced half of the industry's integrated circuit epoxy, and that was the excuse for the dramatic increase in memory prices. This is the same epoxy ("plastic") that was used for all kinds of IC's, and I remember that the pricing on our 74LSxxx chips just about doubled, from maybe 15 cents to 25-30 cents each, due to the sudden price increase on the epoxy. Ouch!

Hmmm. That's interesting. The memory chips didn't use much more epoxy than our plain logic IC's, so you would expect the price to go up, what, maybe 25 to 50 cents each? So why did the memory prices nearly double instead of jumping a couple dollars per module? Hmmm.

I don't think this hard drive issue is large enough to suggest collusion, though. A few thousand drives really don't add up to much in the big picture, and in this case, there are warrantee costs as well. Interesting idea, though.

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?

So who's left?

[wulfhound]

Having just lost a bunch of time (although fortunately little valuable data) when one of my IBM DeathStars died, I went out and bought Maxtors 'cause they seemed to be the choice for reliability. So what make are we all supposed to buy now? Cheap hard drives all of a sudden aren't so cheap when you have to buy two of them and a RAID controller to get an acceptable level of reliability...

/.'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

Maxtor drives

[Psykechan]

I've got a 40GB Maxtor in this system but I haven't had any probl

From China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, those drives are suffering from SARS.

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

Hard copies of everything

[L. VeGas]

That's why I print out copies of everything once my drive is over half full. For video, I print each frame individually. For music, I print out the lyrics and sheet music for each song. I haven't quite figured out what to do about games though. Every time I play one, I have a whole different batch of screenshots to print.

Oh well, I'm sure the inkjet manufacturers will figure something out.

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 :)

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.

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

[SkArcher]

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

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.

Glad it's only 3

[siskbc]

Well, it seems that WD escaped trouble this time! Glad I've got a coupla WD drives in my box.

Wait - where's that smoke coming from? Aw, fuck.

Make that 4 hard drive manufacturers.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[thynk]

Great, My raid is 3 40GB drives. 2 Maxtor and an IBM. Maybe I should of gone mirrored instead of striped.

Now, where did I put that old tape drive?

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: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.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE IBM ALONE

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Maxtor...

[neostorm]

Just the 40 & 80 GB drives? I just grabbed one of those funky 100+20GB drives from Maxtor a month or so ago, and it took a huge crap on me two weeks into using it. Now their tech-support won't reply to my Emails and I can't seem to reach them by phone in a reasonable amount of time.

Avoid everything Maxtor, not just 40/80 GB ones. Maybe their other drives are better and you've had good experiences, but their tech support is insulting and therefore doesn't deserve the business.

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!)

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

In other news..

[CptChipJew]

it turns out these problems with the drives were occuring because the S.M.A.R.T. technology turned out to be S.T.U.P.I.D.

Re:In other news..

[EverDense]

Sucks To be U Please Insert Disk

Makes perfect sense...

[sterno]

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.

grrr

[deadsaijinx*]

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

Harddiskenal Fortitude

[EverDense]

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.

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

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

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 mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[suss]

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-

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[jandrese]

Shoot, if you're going to pay twice as much for the storage, you might as well go with SCSI.

RIAA Cheers Defective Drives, SCO to Follow

[Nom du Keyboard]

Today the RIAA cheered the discovery of defective hard drives. "Defective hard drives will not be used to store pirated songs and movies from illegal P2P networks," their spokesman said, adding, "We're calling on our paid-for friends in Congress to mandate defective hard drives for all users."

While SCO has yet to be heard from, rumors are that they will drop all suits against users who certify that they only use defective drives in their Linux systems.

Re:Wow!

[wronskyMan]

When SCO had a business model...

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.

SCSI versus IDE

[fm6]

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!

Re:so...

[macdaddy357]

Did anyone else notice that the entire hard drive industry scaled warranties back to one year from three and even five at about the same time? That's collusion, and it violates anti-trust laws. Something should be done. I suggest a class action lawsuit by owners of all these fancy looking paperweights. I know the government won't do it for us.

It's all magic to me...

[SuckyDucky]

For once, could we not just play "bash the corporations"? It's practically a miracle that they can get any of this stuff to work in the first place. Even with the defects, the ability to manipulate so many atoms at the level of reliability they have baffles my mind. But of course, I'm probably not near as smart as the average slashdotter.

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).

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.

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.

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...

Hardware At It's Limit?

[OceanWave]

Seems to me that I have seen these same things before:

• Floppy drives pushed way past their limit, when they were only stable at 720K.
  It was typical for me to format a new "good quality" floppy, and have it fail on read-error five minutes later. Never mind using these things to back up the 40MB drive I had at the time!
• Modems pushed to 56K, when they were only good to 28K.
  It is what made me switch to new technology, such as Road Runner, after dealing with the frustration of even moderate Internet use.
• CPU technology is also the same:
  The typical heat dissipation--now several tens of watts--still has that little tiny fan to pull the heat out of the fashionably small case. In the past, weren't high performance machines almost super-cooled?

It would seem to me that the customer base is the "guinea pig"--where "experimental" products are tried to test their engineering weakness-- while we have to pay these companies for the privilege of testing their products. It would seem that the roles are reversed here. The quality assurance aspect should be handled by the company before it impacts the customer.

I have found that both hardware and software are the same in this respect. And, we will have to "eat" Moore's Law, because the "testing" is never over. In conclusion, reliability will be an issue for quite some time to come. Though extensive testing would have it's disadvantage: If you were looking for that new product, you would have to wait a couple years beyond it's usual release date to enjoy the benefits.

General failure?

[cmburns69]

Whos general failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?

The first 20 gig run well

[CrazyJim0]

Scandisk crashes because my DeathStar has so many bad sectors... So I can never id the last ones...

I stay within 15-20 gig, and I'm cool... but too much and it strays into bad sectors, and all sorts of crap goes wrong

Longer Warranty != More Reliable

[fmaxwell]

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.

Get a clue!

[fmaxwell]

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?