Have Fujitsu Harddrives Been Failing in Record Numbers?

Michael_Angel asks: "If your hard drive has started to show garbled characters in the BIOS at boot, or just does not pick up. You may be victim to what could be the biggest hard drive manufacturer failure rate yet! Our company is small OEM system builder and we have been hit by a failure rate of %90 of the hard drives we purchased a year ago. We might be lucky because we stopped buying after rumors of hard drive issues 3 months after Fujitsu Limited made some major changes. IBM had a pretty crazy rate of failure and was telling people to turn off smart mode. I've called Fujitsu and they said that there is no problem! However, a simple search for bad fujitsu hard drives on any search engine will point to some angry folks. One notable link is this Register story." Has this problem followed Fujitsu drives into other countries, or might they be limited to the UK markets? Have you noticed an unusual failure rate in Fujitsu drives compared to hard drives from other manufacturers?

Fujistu HD's

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the help desk coordinator at a school district in WA. Just guessing, I'd say we are at about 35% failure for drives bought in the summer of 2001.

Yep

[koogydelbbog]

All our desktops (Compaq Deskpro ENs) had fujitsu drives in and we were getting a failure every week last summer. IT department wasn't happy about having to swap out and re-Ghost over 100 drives... Replaced them with a mixture of Western Digital and, i think Seagates.

(this is in the UK btw)

Thats why I like Maxtor......

[vertical_98]

But seriously, I have a 5400rpm 1.2g Maxtor that has been in use for over 4 years. I had a 7200rpm 20g Seagate that crashed after 14 months in a machine. I think the combination of high rpms with super dense platters is what is causing the most problems.

Of course, My father thinks that people just don't give a shit about quality any more.....

Vertical

The Register and Fujitsu

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

This isn't the first time The Register has fried Fujitsu' sushi. Check out an article from this past September entitled PCA attacks 'shabby' handling of Great Fujitsu HDD fiasco [theregister.co.uk].

It makes me wonder if The Register, or at least one of the writers there, didn't get stuck with a few sand grinders doubling as hard drives.

One word...

[dannycim]

Maxtor. We have over 5000 PC Workstations at my previous job. We've had problems with just about every manufacturer (Quantum, Seagate, Fuji, WD, etc...) except one: Maxtor. Personally, I've got around 8 of them at home, 3 up and spinning 24/7 and one actually trashing all around the place continously (compiles, builds, rendering, etc...) and never had a bad block.

Does your mileage vary?

Lotsa Fujitsu Drives

[truffle pig]

I don't know I have a bunch of Dell Servers that are using Fujitsu Hard Drives in RAID Arrays. In the past year and a half of using the dells with Fujitsu drives, we have only had one drive our of about 40 go bad. I can't speak to their IDE drives but the hot plug SCSI's are working pretty well.

First thing I found in a google search...

[Evro]

http://www.classactioncounsel.com/fujitsu-litigati on.htm [classactioncounsel.com]

These cases are being brought on behalf of purchasers of the MPG3xx series hard disk drives, irrespective of the entity from whom it was purchased. Additionally, Hewlett-Packard is sued in connection with its sale of the hard drives as components in certain HP computers and its processing of warranty claims. Please note that the MPG3xx hard drives were also distributed to retailers and to other computer manufacturers, although none of them have been made a party to the litigation at this time.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5666 [theinquirer.net]

This took me 5 seconds. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=fujitsu+hard+drive+failure&btnG=Google+Search [google.com]. I'm not sure what the point of this "Ask Slashdot" is, is the person just trying to inform everybody that there is a problem with Fujitsu drives? I didn't see an actual question in that "Ask Slashdot" except for the ones Cliff tacked on.

I've only lost one...

[BenTheDewpendent]

I have about 60 fujitsu drives at work. One failed a couple weeks ago. However my friend with same job at another location has sent back around 20 drives if not more, in the last few years. While hearing from yet another friend who worked for the state that he had fujitsus failing all over.

Problem
I think so.

Failed Drives

[Tha_Big_Guy23]

The company I work for built and installed 15 systems with identical configurations, all having a 20Gb Fijitsu hard drives. Each system was installed within the same week. Approximately 10 weeks later, each of the hard drives failed, in almost the same order they were installed.. I'd say this is definately a problem they need to look into.

IBM 300PLs

[Mechamse]

I work for a large Oil Company in the North West US. We have roughly 1500 IBM 300PL systems in our inventory. Of those 1500 we have had to replace 700 or so Fujitsu HDDs due to various problems. Fortunately for our sake, IBM was using a mixed hardware pool when our systems were built because out of 1500 systems, all of the Fujitsu drives have now been replaced. Now we are suffering through Maxtor drives, but that is a tale for another day. This to me seemed to be a huge problem. We filed a complaint with IBM on this issue for not having a recall of the effected drives. IBM and all of the service centers in our area know of the problem, but that doesn't seem to be of importance.
Not only is this the largest mass failure of a product, but also probably the largest cover-up to protect all of the parties involved.
What really takes the cake on this whole issue is the pure audacity of Fujitsu in making this appear to be within the bounds of standard failure. That will keep me from ever using their equipment.

Drive Service Company seems to agree

[Brett Glass]

Before I buy a hard drive, I always ask data recovery companies what they think of the most recent models. This page [driveservice.com], created by Drive Service Company says the following about Fujitsu:

Fujitsu (Desktop drives only) Their 10, 15, 20 and 30gb desktop models have been failing left and right with either servo loss or electronic failure. Notebook drives are only so-so but are no longer manufactured. They have had so many returned drives, that they have stopped making drives all together.

It then goes on to say:

Fujitsu Notebook drives of any kind are prone to head crash, desktop drives are bad now too, sorry. Again, they have stopped making drives and now barely support what is left out there.

Believe it or not, their most recommended brand is now Seagate (the high end models). And they strongly recommend anything with a SCSI interface over IDE -- not for performance reasons (there's really not that much difference if you cache) but for reliability.

I can tell you from personal experience, YES!

[19Buck]

I recently ended a Contract position i was working as a Service Technician for Gateway. My job was basically to perform diagnostics and replace parts on the systems (duh!).

I can tell you from experience, that Fujitsu drives were easily, by far and the way the most failed brand of drive that we replaced. It used to be Maxtor's that died in record numbers some time back, but the difference there is that Maxtor's were much more widely installed.

A majority of the time that we had a system in with a bad HDD failure, we'd say "I bet it's a Fujitsu".. 90% of the time, that's exactly what we'd find inside the computer. After a while, we just stopped doing diagnostics troubleshooting on Fujitsu drives..we'd just close the system up and order a new drive.

And if we got a Fujitsu drive back as a replacement, we wouldn't even install it, we'd close it up and send it back requesting another replacement HDD.

They stopped us from doing that, said we couldn't send back drives that were working fine just because we didn't like the brand. So.. we said "ok", and resigned ourselves to the fact that the unlucky customer who got a Fujistu replacement drive would be back within a month.

And guess what? A majority of the time.. they were.

Re:The Register and Fujitsu

[beanerspace]

You may have a point there. Add to your list the following Register articles reagrding Fujitsu:

• Crash! Dud Fujitsu HDDs all over UK [theregister.co.uk]
• Ouch! Fujitsu to replace 300,000 faulty HDDs [theregister.co.uk]

Dell Inspirons had bad Fujitsu drives

[Kheldar99]

I had a Dell Inspiron with a Fujitsu drive that used to make clicking noises all the time. When I asked Dell about it they sent me an IBM drive to replace it... they didn't say if they were having massive problems with them but they did indicate that there were a lot of these swaps going on.

Fujitsu Drives - Bad for some time

[CrackHappy]

I owned a small computer shop for three years. We used Fujitsu drives for about one of those years. The main reason was to drive down our costs. However, it turned out that it cost us more in the end. We had a failure rate around 60%. Most of the failures were not spectacular, which made it worse! Strange things would happen. This was about 6 years ago, so I'm not surprised to see that they're having even worse trouble now. I also recommend Western Digital. They have been quite reliable for a long period of time for me and my users.

Re:Hard to imagine

[ekrout]

Here's just one example of an unhappy owner of a large IBM DeskStar drive:

I have bought 4 75GXP drives all of the 60 GB variety. Initially I bought two to connect to a RAID system but one failed after only 5 months. Just as well I had my RAID set to mirror otherwise all would have been lost. I have in excess of 25 GB of MP3 files which have taken years to collect hence my need for reliable storage. I then contacted the suppliers of my drives and asked about replacement. I was told it would take at least 6 weeks as they had to go back to IBM.

Given the importance of backup I bought a third drive whilst the 1st was being checked by IBM. Guess what 6 weeks later a second drive failed. BY this time I received back a drive from IBM. This was a second hand drive that had been returned by another customer under warranty. I know this because I was able to unerase the data on the drive and the former user was from Germany. This drive failed after only 4 weeks.

The second drive to fail was also replaced by a second hand drive. This also is making ominous noises.

In fairness when they work they are fast and very quiet but the uncertainty about when they will fail has left me very unimpressed. Of the 4 purchased 2 are new and working fine 1 is broken and I can't be bothered to send it back as I know they will send me another dodgy 2nd hand drive and the final one is noisy and I am sure would fail if it were used as a RAID drive.

My advice therefore is to look elsewhere. When I upgrade my system shortly I shall buy 2 120GB drives from another supplier but I shall research carefully first.

-- From http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/computers/hard_disk_drives /ibm_deskstar_75gxp/_review/393167/ [dooyoo.co.uk]

had 2 fail in 4 months

[shomon2]

Yes, I had this problem on my puter: I have a compaq that comes with "same day support" - which in spain can mean a lot of things. One day my drive broke down. It was a fujitsu. The tech guy came the next day with a new one and even let me keep the old one for a few days while I submerged myself in hardware trying to mount it and copy my stuff out. Yes I do keep backups, but it's nice to just copy stuff back exactly how I had it.

Second time, same problem: hard disk just stopped. Same exact one as before (although I don't remember what it is just now exactly). The same day technician this time was a few days later than last time, because they'd "had to order the part from madrid". The guy didn't even check the drive. He just changed it. He said: All these fujitsu's just crash on us. I don't even check them anymore to find out why. We ordered in a seagate. This time everything was lost. The computer couldn't even read the broken drive.

Ale

IBM DeskStar

[T-Kir]

When doing my internship a friend at work recommended IBM drives, mainly on the principle that they had the best record for reliability. I have been buying IBM drives for years now (apart from a nice quiet Maxtor) with now problems whatsoever.

But about two years ago, my uni housemate got an IBM DeskStar drive which died on him after 3 weeks from getting it. Turns out he got the drive where they had the glass platters, and the heads on the drive literally crashed and cracked the platters. He had all his Uni work on there, although we kept yelling the work 'backup' to him. I don't know how many of these drives had this problem, but IBM pulled the drives as soon as they found out about the problem.

Bad News for Sun

[niola]

This is not a good turn of events for anyone who buys hard drives from Sun. At Princeton University, every time I order a hard drive for my Sun servers, it is actually a re-badged Fujitsu as of this past summer. Prior to Fujitsu all Sun drives were actually Seagate, and they were very reliable.

Though I find this news disturbing, I have to say I have personally not had a failure of any of my Sun/Fujitsu drives yet. Knock on wood...

Perhaps this problem is not in the higher-end 10k RPM SCSI drives?

Had 100% failure rate on Fujitsu drives

[msoftsucks]

I had bought 15 such drives 1 1/2 years ago for custom clones. All of these drives have since died. Never again will I buy Fujitsu. Its not that they died (other vendors are no better). Its the fact that they lied, and gave me no support in resolving the issue. They didn't even care that their products were failing with such a high rate. In that same period of time, I had bought some Western Digital drives, that have since died also. But when I called WD, and gave them the S/N they sent me a replacement drive, no questions asked. Compare the two and tell me who you would like doing business with. Vendors who don't stand by their products should be run out of business. Would I buy a Western Digital drive today? You betcha! Would I buy another Fujitsu? No way! Not even if they paid me!

Re:Fujitsu makes hard drives?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two Fujitsu drives and both have been working flawlessly for over 2 years. BTW, Maxell has been making batteries for a long time. They aren't any worse than the "big names", and besides they are a big name.

Re:Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only comment form personnel experience on this one, but I don't think that this is the case.
Drive companies for the most part produce very reliable hardware as long as that is their primary concern. Seagate, WD, Maxtor all produce drives as their main product. IBM has been doing it since the beginning. These companies don't try to touch all of the market, IBM excluded; they only try to be the best in a niche. That is where the good get separated form the mediocre. Fujitsu has never been one to shine in the HDD market, only just make par.

RAID

[mrroot]

As the quality of drives is getting worse, more people will be turning to RAID to protect their desktop storage. It's no coincidence IDE RAID is becoming more common on motherboards, and the hard drive manufacturers aren't going to shed a tear about selling twice as many drives.

Here we've had TONS of them fail

[docstrange]

One of the desktop models that we ordered for widespread deployment in our enterprise was the compaq ipaq desktop. The 10GB Fujtsu drives that came in the 866mhz ipaq desktop. "Hard Drive Model MPG3102A" are failing left and right. I would estimate that I have had to replace on average 2 of these drives a week for the last few months. The drives started to magically fail after about a year of use. Fujutsu says that the drives should be covered under compaqs warranty. (which is only 1 year, and since gone), and refuses to help us replace their defective drives. The funny thing is that these drives have a known hardware flaw, and there is a firmware out there that tried to fix it. All of our drives have the alleged "fixed" firmware, yet they still are failing. If anyone wants a box of the 50 or so fujitsu paperweights that I've got over here please let me know. I really wish we didn't have to eat the cost of all these drives.

Re:Is it silly not to do RAID/0?

[Loki_1929]

"does it even make sense not to install drives in pairs with RAID/0 mirroring?"

Well, in all honesty, that statement doesn't make much sense as is. ;)

RAID-0 is striping, meaning there's no redundancy. RAID-1 is what you're looking for; that's mirroring. As for your question, it makes sense if you have valuable data and need maximum uptime to run a RAID-1 array. Extra costs are somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 for the card and the extra drive, unless you go el-ultracheapo, in which case you probably don't care anyway.

The short answer is for the vast majority of home users, it doesn't make sense. For anyone running a home office, it should be one of a couple different backup methods, as it only guards against physical failure.

Re:Hard to imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Western Digital has been one of the crappiest of disk manufacturers -
Maybe you don't remember their massive recall in 1999 - 2000 ?
I have a couple WDs that refuse to be slave drives on an ide channel EXCEPT with another Western Digital drive as master.

Maybe they've had to clean up their act since the big recall but I haven't been willing to be the guinea pig to settle that question. I've also seen some Maxtor drives crapping out within 12 months of purchase.

In general the reliability of product in the IDE drive market has sucked as margins have declined further and further with the tech slowdown. IBM leaving the market was very demoralizing to see; if anyone could have turned the trend around - started making drives with high QC and charging more and getting it, it would probably have been them. There aren't too many makes that have not experienced a quality crisis like theirs with the 75gxp deskstar product and stayed in. But they left I am sure, because they concluded that margins would never bounce back.
And we're all gonna keep suffeing for the shortsighted cheapness of the consumer.

75% for me

[koancomputers]

I would say that the two year failure rate for Fujitsu harddrives sold in my shop was as high as 75% up till 2001 - when I stopped selling them because the RMA's were driving me nuts. I'd also say under %10 for Maxtor and Western Digital, the other drives I sold...

Theres is no such thing as "the best HD manf".

[MFHFozzy]

There is however, good bad and best LINES of HD products out there. Ive been running a test lab of over 100 computers, and supporting another 100 or so for 7 years. In all that time, i have dealt with just about every line of HDs from every manufacturer. Every single one of them has a line of HDs that suck. Had one shipment from Seagate once where 17 out of 20 HDs went bad within 6 months. In all the yeras, the only IDR drives i trust now are the Seagate U series drives. They arent the fastest, but they are built to last. And they are quiet. Ive bought hundreds of them for work by now, and have never regretted it. Out of all of them, maybe 5 have gone bad.

Fujitsu HDD Failures are quite common

[SkankhodBeeblebrox]

Until recently I worked as a technician in a retail computer shop, and we had terrible luck with Fujitsu hard drives, the MPG3204AT in particular. Some drives wouldn't detect at all on POST, most just had the "click of death", and as a result were subjected to the "freezer of doom" so we could try and rescue some of the customer's data (not that it usually helped)

Maxtor/Seagate/WD drives seem to be quite a bit more reliable, but one of the OEM's we were buying premade systems from was using "Fush*tsu" drives, so we encountered quite a few of them (I'd say at least 50% failure rate)

We also had problems with MSI K7T Pro mainboards we recieved from the same OEM, so it could just be we were getting shafted w/ known-bad product.

In any event, in the past few months I've seen the same articles on The Reg and other spots, and I'm not at all surprised to have seen it.

It may be news to some of you that Fujitsu has subsequently pulled out of the desktop HDD business (they still manufacture laptop and enterprise drives) Fujitsu's Hard Drive Lineup [fujitsu.com]

Re:Thats why I like Maxtor......

[Zathrus]

I think the combination of high rpms with super dense platters is what is causing the most problems

Well... kinda...

A vast number of problems are being caused by the side effect of high rpms and dense platters -- heat. Modern drives get really, really hot, and most people don't adequately cool them. Heck, they don't even adequately cool their CPUs.

Look at the operating temperature of your drive. Get a probe thermometer and read the ambient temperature of your case. Then realize that the air around the drive is probably 5-10 degrees C hotter than the ambient temperature, and unless you've specifically addressed it there's little or no ventilation of the drive cage.

So most people end up operating the drives in excess of their rated operating temps... and they fail.

There are some easy things you can do for drive ventillation - the easiest is to put the drive as far down as you can get in the case. Most cases vent from bottom front to top back. Take advantage of that. More extreme measures involve mounting a heat sink on the drive or even fans (either on the drive bay or to the sides).

Check those part numbers..

[Dynamoo]

We too have had a failure rate of over 50% on 10Gb Fujitsu HDs about 18 months old fitted to our early Compaq DeskPro EXDs. Compaq have a BS firmware fix [compaq.com] that doesn't work. We insisted that Compaq give us replacements for ALL the HDs, which they did, but they won't admit to the problem.

If you've got a installation of more than a couple of these HDs you'll *know* about the failure rate. If not, then the 10Gb unit is part MPG3102AT dated early 2001 - if you have one of these replace it NOW. I guess that MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT are faulty too.

There's an interesting thread here [tek-tips.com]. But trust me, if you have a home PC with one of these units in, replace it right now.

Unfortunately I've Suffered

[Psychotext]

I work for a large soft drink making company that through a third party contractor ended up with Fujitsu hard drives in all of the equipment that we use to control the blending and dosing (Putting in bottles) of our drinks. About 6 months ago we started noticing failures of these machines in large numbers but could not work out what was causing them.

We initially put it down to heat (Surely these drives can't all be naturally broken) and fitted expensive cooling gear. They kept failing.

We then thought that it was the contractor messing with the machines that caused the failures so we put in better access control (Simple key to allow dial in). This didn't fix it either.

It was only when I ordered 80 western digital hard drives and started replacing the Fuji's once they broke that we started noticing that the WD drives were not breaking. We are currently scheduling downtime of the plant to replace the rest (Not easy given it all runs 24x7 and we are always behind schedule).

Needless to say we are not happy at all. I would hate to think how much money all that downtime has cost the company, and how much lost sleep the IT team has had to endure from the endless call-outs.

Re:One word...

[0xA]

Well I too have seen it with every manufacturer including Maxtor.

Maxtor 1.2 GB to 2.0 GB models were horrible, I was a tech in a retail store at the time and we sold a bunch of NEC desktops with Maxtor drives. Got a lot of them back with dead drives.

I've seen bad drives or batches of drives from every manufacturer, there is no best brand IME.

Sounds like you've been pretty lucky.

Number from a hardware reseller

[Taurim]

Here are the failure rates from a big French hardware reseller (LDLC) : IDE 7200 rpm 20 Gb : Seagate : 1.3% (448) Western Digital : 8.8% (1506) IDE 7200 rpm 40 Gb : Seagate : 1.6% (7643) Maxtor : 1.9% (8052) IBM 120GXP : 3.1% (4790) Western Digital : 7.2% (1726) IBM 60 GXP : 22.9% (1068) !!!!!! IDE 7200 rpm 60 Gb : Seagate : 0.7% (284) IBM 120 GXP : 2.5% (722) Maxtor : 2.5% (1791) Western Digital : 8.6% (490) IBM 60 GXP : 16.1% (932) !!!!!! IDE 7200 rpm 80 Gb : Seagate : 2.4% (1248) IBM 120 GXP : 2.8% (2131) Western Digital : 3.1% (1676) Maxtor : 3.3% (2060) IDE 7200 rpm 120 Gb : Western Digital Special Edition : 3.0% (132) IBM 120 GXP : 3.1% (708) Western Digital 100 Go : 4.3% (470) Western Digital : 5% (120)

Re:Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk to your supplier (you probably purchased them through someone else, or HP/Compaq directly if not the case).

They helped us with over 400 drive failures by providing utilities to predetermine failures, and by giving us a stock of replacement drives so we could replace them proactively. Better than waiting 4-6 weeks for Fujitsu to send a replacement.

This was in Canada, btw, but I would suspect HP UK would help you similarly.

Yes, I've noticed problems with Fujitsu drives

[Faramir]

I cannot give you any kind of meaningful data, except this: in the last three years, in environments that are probably equal mixtures of Fujitsu, IBM, and Maxtor (in terms of IDE drives), I've seen far more Fujitsu drives die than anything else. At my current company, I've had 75% of my Fujitsu drives die, without a single other failure.

Re:Trends

[buckeyeguy]

More info on the Zip drives can be found here. [grc.com] There are apparently known problems with the Zips, hope this helps (check bottom of linked page for the info).

Re:Thats why I like Maxtor......

[Jucius Maximus]

"So most people end up operating the drives in excess of their rated operating temps... and they fail. There are some easy things you can do for drive ventillation - the easiest is to put the drive as far down as you can get in the case. Most cases vent from bottom front to top back. Take advantage of that. More extreme measures involve mounting a heat sink on the drive or even fans (either on the drive bay or to the sides). The world is run by idiots because they're more efficient than hamsters."

I think that power is also an issue. Some power supplies have very weak +5V channels that often drop more than 10%. (*cough*Enermax*cough*) This can also kill a nice HDD.

About heat: One other good strategy for keeping your drives cool is to use a cooling bay. Instead of having 2 x 40 GB maxtors right on top of each other due to the small amount of room in my case, I put one in a 5.25" cooling bay with an integrated fan to get good airflow. This can also prolong the life of your drives.

The cooling bad was pretty cheap (only CAD$10 refurb) but the suction is definitely present through the unit and since it's front loading, I can easily swap drives without opening my machine.

Some modern cases now adays have a cooling fan right next to the HDD mounting area, which is also good for keeping things frosty.

Re:Hard to imagine

[nelsonal]

Mostly because they never made any money at it [ibm.com] (The PDF is much easier to read). It just got worse last year when all the news about their 75GXP line having quality issues. They lost $423 million on the hard drive business in 2001, and almost $100 million in the first three months of this year. The hard drive business is in the middle, adjustment, column and the division's total loss can be found in the line net income from continuing operations. Because it is an adjustment column, all the numbers are of the opposite sign. Hitachi hopes that by focusing on harddrives they can return the division to profitability, or it can gain an advantage of EMC in storage arrays, I'd assume. IBM will probably continue to do some R&D to get licensing income, although I don't believe that the final transaction has taken place so the drive business might still be a part of the company.
They have also been focusing on services, their high end server business, storage, and semiconductors, and getting out of most of their other businesses. They fully removed themselves from PCs and the like, licensing their name and selling the products only to those who ask for it. If you wanted to be an IBM only shop or something similar.

Compaq & drivers

[toby360]

With Compaq aka The new HP [hp.com] computers in our office, which almost all had fujitsu or maxtor drives, the fujitsu drives [fujitsu.ca] have almost all died out from our 2001 computer batch. Computers prior to 2001 seem to be far more reliable. I would say 80% of our 2001 fujitsu's have needed the hard drive replaced.
Here [classactioncounsel.com] is a lawfirm with a class action lawsuit regarding several models:
The Fujitsu hard disk drive model numbers that are a subject of this litigation include, among others, MPG3204AT; MPG3307AH; MPG3102AT; and MPG3409AH. Continue to monitor this page for the addition of other model numbers.

Re:Hard to imagine

[slaker]

I *am* a Storagereview regular (I post there as Mercutio, the second non-admin user whose account was re-created after the crash).

The issue was *not* a disk crash, but the fact that SR's colocation facility wanted to charge $x more to run proper backups, and SR couldn't afford it. During a regular upgrade to either MySQL or phpBB (don't remember which), their DB got dumped on accident. Eugene, SR's admin, posted very early after the site came back up that he has a small stack of DDS and DAT drives sitting around his home that he would've loved to install, if only their ISP would've let them.

Incidently, Storage Review's [storagereview.com] self-reporting reliability database is back up and running now, if you'd like to participate, feel free, but I'm convinced that self-reported statistics are of fairly little value.

Also, a lot of SR's regulars, including myself, chose to create our own community, distinct from SR, in case Storage Review either shuts down or loses its database again. We can be found at Storage Forum [storageforum.net]. SR's general membership is not aware of our site - we don't advertise it there out of courtesy to SR's admins, but if you spent time on SR's forums and wonder where Tannin, Clocker, P5_133XL, JamesW, time and some of the other mainstays went, well, now you know.

Two good Fujitsu's here, and six failed IBMs

[Dr. Ion]

I've been pretty happy with my sample of *two* Fujitsu MPG3409AT drives. They're silent, run cool, and serve up 40GB each without hassle for about three years so far.

My beef is with the IBM Deathstar GXP drives.. the 60 and 75GB drives last 1 to 6 months, and then get read errors. I have one drive that has been RMA'd four times. I don't dare install the replacement drive.

Re:Bad News for Sun

[autocracy]

Sun buys from a different pool of hardware than the rest of the world. A Fujitsu drive bought from Sun will be better quality than one straight from Fujitsu... it's part of the deal they have. Fujitsu can't afford to have Sun come crashing down on their heads either. Same things goes for pretty much any part from Sun. If you've ever wondered why a 128 MB stick of RAM costs so much, it's because Sun will guarantee it...

I have no connection with Sun other than I want to own some of their equipment...

Re:Which models?

[FBCrack]

In my case it's and MPG3409AT and it's rev. no. is 4. I have another disk with a higher rev. no (6) and it hasn't failed (yet). I have also heared of some other people having problems with this model too. The problem with this disk is not with the "moving" parts but with the cirucit board as I have tried to change it by the other disk and it worked perfect. I have noticed the tho boards differs in some of the SMD components.

Re:Trends

[rw2]

If the drives are so reliable (MTBF of a million years my ass!), then the extra cost would be $0.00 per unit.

1) I hope your joking, but to be pedantic the MTBF is only 500K hours, not years, of course.

2) The extra cost, even if the drive itself is fine, still exists as you vet problem reports from your customers. In fact, the cost of vetting the problems is probably about the same as the drive itself, so even if they make perfect drives that never fail their warranty support costs would still be half of what they are if the make drives where not a single one lasts for the entire three years.

Now, that said, re-read my note. Nowhere do I say that drive quality is as good as it used to be. I only point out that there are valid reasons, market based reasons, to reduce the warranty that have nothing to do with the quality of the drive.

Oven chips ;)

[Epsillon]

OK, I have a Fujitsu MPG-3102AT date coded 2001-03, right smack bang where the problem occurred. It's also dead, an ex-drive, if it wasn't screwed to the drive-bay it'd be pushing up the daisies... The problem is reported to be with the controller chip, one Cirrus Logic's CL-SH8671 batch coded 450E on mine. I contacted Fujitsu (being unfotunate enough to have purchased mine from a computer fair, silly sod) and found that they DON'T hono(u)r the warranty for end users! The b@stards! Last time I buy a Fujitsu drive. The problem with the chip is that Cirrus, in their infinite wisdom, changed the material they use to encapsulate this huge QFP IC without telling anyone (so Fujitsu's story goes) and subsequently the reflow ovens in the SMD process were not reprofiled to take into account the new properties of the material they used. So the *chip* ended up either cooked to the point that ingress of moisture became possible during heat-up/cool down cycles or didn't reflow properly so ended up with dry joints on the legs because the new material leeched the heat away from the joints. I tried reflowing mine on an SMD rework station and no joy so I suspect the former. Can't believe they say there isn't a problem, especially when they're rumo(u)red to be currenly in dispute with CL over this batch of ICs which they claim were sub-standard. If they were so sub-standard, how di they get through QC, humm? IS ther a QC dept.? Draw your own conclusions!

Re:Trends

[meldroc]

Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.

Let me give you a bit of perspective on what a "300G shock rating" really means. If you drop a can of pop on your counter from three inches, that will induce a shock on the can greater than 1000Gs. When I worked in the HD industry, I learned that simply tapping a drive with a pencil induced a momentary shock of 40-50Gs. I could fire up some diagnositic firmware on the drive, and watch the drive detect and fix errors as I tapped it with a pencil.

Moral of the story, hard drives are fragile The only reason why they seem so tough is because the firmware detects and fixes thousands of errors that you don't even see.

Re:Trends

[0x0d0a]

Fortunately, there's a fix. You can buy server-class drives SCSI drives if you're uncomfortable with cheapo ones. Sure, they're going to cost you more, but that may simply be the cost of reliability.

It really comes down to how much you're willing to pay for peace of mind about your data. A monitor failing is no big deal. A hard drive failing can cost you years of work, source code, everything.

Unfortunately, "backing up" is no longer a really good option for most people. Perhaps buying a second drive and mirroring, but tapes (except for the very most expensive) and CD-Rs are simply too small compared to drive size to be very useful for backup. It's actually cheaper to use a second drive to back things up these days (compared to tape). Writeable DVDs still are expensive, still aren't popular or standardized, and even when they get so, are very fragile and likely to require at least ten discs to back up a complete hard drive.

If anyone knows of a less expensive, large-amount-of-data-per-unit backup system, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Hard drives got too big too fast. They outstripped CPUs and Moore's law. They outstripped all competing storage devices. They actually outstripped consumer demand in the last two years or so. The people doing the research on them are *too* good. I remember buying an 80MB drive not-so-many years ago. Slow. Physically huge. Cost something like $3 per megabyte. Now drives have a price/performance ratio 6000 times better. No other product in any field I know of has come anywhere close to this.

Re:Trends

[twilightzero]

I don't know what HD company you're referring to in this, but it's obviously not the one I work for. And I just happen to work for WD, in tech support/RMA's, so I think I'm qualified to write a rebuttal ;)

Drive manufacturers require you put up the (supposed) retail cost of the drive before they issue an RMA. Why do I say supposed? Because it's more than twice what I would pay for the same drive from the shop down the road. And way over their current MSRP.

When setting up an advance replacement (where we send the HD out to you first), we do require a credit card # but we do NOT charge it. We do an authorize operation, which checks that the card is valid and that it has at least enough available on it at that exact moment to cover the drive should you not return it. And we do not charge double fair market value for the drive, in fact we get a lot of comments that our authorize amounts are VERY low - about $25 for a 20 gb drive and $31 for a 40 gb (both 7200 rpm) to give you a quote off the top of my head.

Then they ship you the replacement.

You return the crapped-out drive.

Standard practice.

Then, if they determine that the drive is buggered outside the warranty, you've bought yourself a "new" (because they reserve the right to ship you a used drive as a replacement) drive at twice the cost that you paid for the damn thing. And you're paying the shipping.

We do indeed test the bad drives when we get in, however we don't wait for the testing to get done before sending out the replacement, mostly in the interest of time. And if your old drive tests out with NDF (no defect found), big deal, you won't hear about it or get charged for it. And if you've managed to damage your drive outside the warranty, I'm sorry I have no pity for you. Almost the only way it's damaged outside of warranty is if it's physically damaged, and if that's the case you're the stupid one for even thinking you'd get it replaced. On the off chance this would be the case, the drive would be rejected back to you and you would have the option of returning the replacement or purchasing it, see my note above about fair market value. Yes you would pay shipping back of the replacement drive back, as I said physical damage is one of the only ways to get it rejected back and if you're dumb enough to send it in like that, you deserve what you get.

As far as sending remanufactured drives as replacements, yup we do, as well as I believe every other IDE manufacturer (scsi I'm not as familiar with so I don't want to conjecture). And repeat replacements from failed refurb drives are actually more rare than you'd think. Sorry I don't have any numbers, just personal experience. And sorry for the long-windedness but either you're REALLY dealing with the wrong company or you're stretching the truth like Gumby on a taffy machine.

Re:Trends

[Proc6]

Might it also be related to drive "usage"? Think about it. When there was Windows 3.1, an operating system that fit in 8 megs of RAM, and the average person probably opened 10, 50k Word docs a day. What about now? Games that take 2 gigs of drive space, and probably load half that during play? Playback of 600 meg DiVX movies, web browsing that writes, deletes files absolutely constantly. Streaming hundreds of megs of MP3's off the drive while you work on your 128 meg OS, editing 3gigs of digital video?

Seems to me they also work harder. Not saying the manufacturers aren't at fault but we may be overlooking just how vastly different today's harddrive usage is.

drives have a 100% failure rate; matter of time

[madbrain]

Every hard drive I have owned has failed at some point, it doesn't matter which brand. The difference has been how long it has taken for them to fail.

Over the last 12 years, I have owned in my various computers such brands of hard drives as Miniscribe, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, CDC. I probably owned about 25 drives.
You may not recognize all the names because some of the manufacturers are defunct. During about 4 years, I ran a BBS 24/7 and kept the drives running. I remember maxing out the capacity of the narrow SCSI card (7 devices).

I have not resold any of the hard drives, rather, I have just kept using them. All of them ended up dying, except the 3 I'm currently using, which are all less than 2 years old. Most of the drives failed between the third and the fifth year. Since they were nearly all SCSI drives that carried 5 year manufacturer warranties, they were eligible for free replacements, but of course by then the capacity of was ridiculously small.