Slashdot Mirror
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.
Or maybe they were using said HD.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE PORN? all those hours i spent....er...downloading...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
I've got a 40GB Maxtor in this system but I haven't had any probl
Obviously, those drives are suffering from SARS.
Heh - This article on the inquirer specifically debunks the referenced Digitimes article:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9704
Enjoy....
~whm
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.
Best Windows Freeware
Looks like drives (3 manufs. listed) manufactured in the last 8 weeks, with country of origin as China.
...as he takes comfort in only buying WD, once again :)
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.
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.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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!)
I sincerely question the Slashdot-newsworthiness of this.
Hi, I am a member of the slashdot welcome team. You must be new here.
Welcome!
Sent from your iPad.
Seagate has officially issued a press release
l
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.htm
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.
Vonal Declosion
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/
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9740
An excerpt: Should be interesting to see how this really pans out.
-Hope
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.
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.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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!
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}
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.