Have Fujitsu Harddrives Been Failing in Record Numbers? 736
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?
Hard to imagine (Score:2, Interesting)
I never thought that dependability could be much worse than for that particular line of IBM HDDs. But, this Fujitsu story sounds like it's a dire situation as well.
As a side note, I'd highly recommend (and do so to family, friends, etc.) purchasing only Western Digital or Seagate drives.
Reliability? (Score:1, Interesting)
Didn't I read this a month ago? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been wondering if the recently revealed electrolytic (ha, spelt it right that time) capacitor problem (bad taiwanese electrolytics) was related.
On a different note, Seagate's ST380023AS and ST3120023AS (Serial ATA) drives which were expected in Mid-October, then late-November, are now, according to a Cnet article a Seagate employee who shall remain nameless, pointed me to, is indicating shipping dates in Mid-December.. hopefully the two are unrelated.
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think this sort of discussion is useless just because there are people out there who have had trouble with any given manufacturer's drives.
I think a collection of real stats which were somehow reliably collected would be really useful in terms of all this commodity hardware ("Gee, those ShitCo drives fail twice as often as most others" or "Gee, there's no difference in drive reliability, so if I got IBM I'd be paying for a brand name"). I just don't see how you'd go about collecting that data.
Warranties (Score:3, Interesting)
Our experiences (Score:2, Interesting)
Definitely a problem in Ireland... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lost 2 hard drives last year (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't speak for the rest of the industry, but I can say this: none of my older (~300 MB) hard drives (which I've been using in my 486s) have ever failed. They rattle a little, they're rather slow, but never once have they let me down. Can the same be said of more recent media? I suspect not.
Fujitsu MPG3307AT (Score:3, Interesting)
What I learned working at a disk drive company... (Score:3, Interesting)
FUJITSU SUCKS! (really witty eh?) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Trends (Score:4, Interesting)
You need to watch out for clicking noises, "Drive Not Ready" messages, and 172x errors during POST.
From the official Fujitsu response regarding their hard drives, it is all how you categorize the failure. If we send back 2000 drives that have all genuinely FAILED, they will look at all the drives and will count those with scratched labels as "damaged during shipping" not a product failure. This helps them skew their numbers so they meet the 3-5% acceptable failure rate. It's a creative accounting method right out of Enron.
Not coincidentally, Fujitsu has stopped manufacturing hard drives.
Mine are OK (Score:2, Interesting)
My two cents...
Gotcha Beat (Score:3, Interesting)
> HD is still going strong.
I bought a 1.054 GB SCSI-2 Fujitsu in 1993. It cost about a grand US. It still works.
It actually performs decently, too -- 5400 RPM, 10.5 ms access time, 512 KB cache. Not bad for a piece of 9-year old hardware to still perform about as well as entry-level current stuff.
The freaky thing about that drive, is that you can use one corner of it (where the arm pivots, presumably) to pick up quarters. It will hold four if you're patient.
Re:One word... (Score:4, Interesting)
Does your mileage vary?
My ex-roomate had two 8GB Maxtors fail on him when we built his PII a few years back. The first one failed within a day of use. He called Maxtor who were very helpful on the phone and sent an advance replacement. The replacement drive lasted a little over a year.
Regardless of brand, there are only two types of hard drives out there:
1) A hard drive that has crashed
2) A hard drive that is about to
I think we're slowly reaching the end of magnetic media's life as our primary secondary storage mechanism. There are just too many delicate moving parts requiring extreme precision to even function due to the density of data we're storing. I think we'll see more and more solid state storage solutions replace hard drives and more optical solutions used for backup.
Cheap RAID in five steps!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Trends (Score:5, Interesting)
Good try but wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
Fact is both Fujitsu and IBM have been bloodied by defective product and most of the manufacturers are running for cover. Easiest way to do that is to cut your exposure by shortening warranties. I wouldn't be surprised if 90 day warranties were floated at the meetings where they decided to cut back to 1 year.
Re:Trends (bad correlation) (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is a bad correlation. At the same time drives are getting more dense and/or smaller, more people are using them. The use of PCs over the last 4 years has greatly increased. There are more reasons to need more drive space, I have a 30 GB and a 120GB. I wouldn't have needed those 4 years ago, but now they are about 60% full. Hard drives are used a little harder now. People are modding cases, OCing their systems, and generally getting more out of the PC than they have in years past. I had a 4 GB drive fail 3 weeks after the 3 year warranty expired. Now you would be hard pressed to find a 4 GB drive. I think that manufacturers realized that 3 years is a LONG time in the tech industry. Compare the number of drives sold 5 years ago to the number sold today.
I don't know if there is an increase in unreliability of hard drives over the last few years, but I know that instead of 1 computer I now have about 5 running at home. Of course, all this applies until one of my drives crashes, then I'll be convinced that hard drive manufacturers don't give a damn about quality anymore. :-)
The funky jumper settings screwed me (Score:4, Interesting)
I neglected to do this properly -- I couldn't believe it worked that way -- when adding it as a slave drive and it corrupted the master drive, sinking my system.
It's the only drive I've ever seen that used jumper settings in this manner. I haven't used the drive much, so it hasn't failed...yet.
Single Drive RAID (Score:3, Interesting)
In a heartbeat I would buy a 40 GB drive that was actually internally mirrored 40's. Yes, I will pay a significant premium for integrity.
So, manufacturers, build me a single drive form factor hard drive, with 1 ide connector that is in fact a RAID 1 array!
I guess I'm not the only one (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems they had a policy of using Fujitsu drives and we went through no less than 3 drives that arrived dead.
So I can certainly say without a doubt that Fujitsu drives are the most unreliable I have ever seen.
FWIW, the data was shipped on a WDC drive and it arrived fine. We never did get a single Fujitsu to work here.
Keeping your drives cool (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting idea. I hadn't thought of that. For my computer, I mount my 3.5" hard drives in removable 5.25" drive bays. The bays are made of aluminium to help dissipate the heat, and they have a small fan in the back to help circulate the air away from the drive. Of course, the only 5.25" drive bays in my case are at the top of the machine.
I originally bought the drive bays years ago because I noticed how much heat there was between my two drives. Given that there was only a couple millimeters of space between them, the heat had a difficult time escaping. I wanted to put more space between the drives, but my only 3.5" bays were taken by the hard drives and a floppy drive.
The drive bays cost me about $50 each (I bought two), which seemed expensive, but as I think about it, I've never had a hard drive fail on me. These days, you can get similar drive bays for $10-$20 each.
Re:Yeah (Score:1, Interesting)
"never buy seagate" 2 hits
"never buy western digital" 3 hits
"never buy fujitsu" 6 hits
"never buy quantum" 6 hits
Re:Fujistu HD's (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
I've worked in a small lab of various vendor's systems and storage arrays, at any given time, there's probably somewhere around 1000 disks or so running there. They have arrays from Compaq, Hitachi, etc, and many PCs/Unix servers as well. My overall experience is this: Everyone's drives fail occasionally. It's a fact of life, you can't expect that something spinning at high rpm and has heads floating at miniscule distances from platters will last indefinitely.
As far as FC-AL or SCSI disks go, reliability-wise, they're all pretty much the same. I have seen an IBM, Fuji, Hitachi, Seagate, Quantum, etc pop once in awhile, but nothing major. IDE disks are a little different, the IBM 'deathstar' drives caused problems, and the older (sub 8 gig) Western Digitals seem to have a high mortality rate after a few years of use. Same goes for the defunct Seagate 'Hawk' line. Granted, this is beyond the warranty period, but many of the other seagates/ibms/etc are still going strong after several years. I normally swear by Seagate, but I just had to send back an 80gb drive from my home machine for replacement...not sure what the exact failure was, though. I have hit the random-ascii-garbage-during-boot from a 10gig Fuji, but that was an isolated incident.
Advice: Assume that your critical drive WILL fail, and plan accordingly. Now I mirror everything, AND back it up. Keeping redundant online storage is different than maintaining backups of earlier versions of data! Even in a home PC, it is really worth it to get two drives and mirror them, with software or otherwise.
You don't have to go hog-wild though....I'm a storage redundancy zealot, and I tend to go overboard. (Clustered fileservers, two fibre HBAs in each [on different buses], multipath through redundant switches to RAID arrays, power from different circuits to each array, etc. Fun stuff to play with, if you have the equipment around. :-)
Re:Trends (Score:3, Interesting)
If you buy cheapo "OEM" drives from some box stacker, chances are it'll be poorly packed, and/or handled badly before it reaches you. Manufacturers can't do much if the box shifters keep throwing boxes of drives about. Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.
Heat's another factor; modern drives run damn hot - you really want a fair bit of airflow around them, either from your normal case intake fans and convection, or dedicated active cooling. Just because it runs fine doesn't mean you're not cutting it's lifetime in half, or worse.
The warranty situation I think is more down to the price war that's occuring with low end drives rather than any real change in quality. You can still get higher end drives with full warranties, and in some cases purchase extended warranties for another $20 or so. The 97% of users who don't experience a drive failure are probably happy to keep their $20, while 90% of the remaining 3% will likely get a replacement from their retailer anyway. The rest of us can spend the extra on a quality drive
Re:Trends (Score:3, Interesting)
Quick Fix to restore data. (Score:1, Interesting)
then you can take the controller off an identical model, and
copy the data off to save it. It's just usually about 5 screws,
and carefully removing the ribbon cable. BE CAREFUL!
Note that i said IDENTICAL model.
Re:Trends (Score:5, Interesting)
fujitsu hard drives (Score:2, Interesting)
the problem that would appear:
things would start to get unstable... acting flakey; so you run scandisk. bad sectors start at the beginning of the drive and continue for at least 5 gigs. not something i want to sit through... i have a friend that did a full scandisk, and it took ~6hrs for a 10gb drive. when it was through, he had ~4gb of usable disk space left.
just my experience...
As for IBM's... (Score:1, Interesting)
Check out these [tech-report.com] articles [tech-report.com]. and here [tech-report.com]
And don't forget this [pair.com]
I have failed IBM drives, and a failed Maxtor. Will stick with Maxtor for now because of what IBM put me through.
I had a same problem years ago with fujitsu disks (Score:2, Interesting)
That was a bad experience unfortunately, because except for this problem, these disks were relatively quiet and really fast !
Willy
Re:Trends (Score:4, Interesting)
It's definitely related to cost cutting. The manufacturers are perfectly capable of keeping the drives reliable at higher densities - that's just a matter of using the amount of error correction, sector sparing, interleaving, scratch detection & such to bring the error rate down to a statistically insignificant number.
The hard drive manufacturers are under intense pressure to cut costs. If they can reduce the price per unit by five cents, when that is spread out over hundreds of millions of drives, that adds up to a lot of money. Especially in this economy, this means you'll see drives made with cheaper components, with less testing done, in clean rooms that may not be as clean as they used to be, by workers that don't have the training their predecessors had, using firmware that has been hacked and rehacked until "spaghetti" doesn't even begin to describe it. (Don't ask me how I know this...)
But this is no excuse for a 90% failure rate. Making drives cheaply is one thing, but we as customers still expect them to work for at least two or three years without problems. I still expect vendors to own up to their screwups and make them right.
Re:Trends (Score:3, Interesting)
That being said, I think computing in general is progressing in quantity faster than quality - processors are getting faster, but producing a lot more heat, being more unstable, or requiring higher clock speeds to get more done (clock speed isn't everything folks), HDs are getting bigger but crapping out faster, and so on.
I can't help but think that maybe if we focused as much effort on making things efficient as we do on making them fast, we would have much better functioning computers; that being said, I think Apple provides this very well, and can justify their higher costs that way - you pay a premium, but you get quality, not quantity. Of course, most of the world wouldn't buy that, but I know I do.
--Dan
YES, 100% failure on a batch in Norway (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Drive Service Company seems to agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Frex, Micropolis -- at one time rock-reliable SCSI HDs. But their final year's worth of SCSI HDs (mostly sold by surplus dealers after Micropolis went tits-up) have had, in my observation, a near-100% failure rate. Bad handling in transit or bad HDs? We'll never know.
As to what I've heard locally about Fujitsu -- the general comment is "really unreliable", especially their SCSI HDs. I've never bought any Fujitsu HDs but at one time had been looking into 'em for consumer SCSI. No one had a good word to say about 'em, including HD dealers.
Too bad their HDs aren't as durable and reliable as their floppy drives. I've got several Fujitsu 1.2mb 5" floppies dated 1986 that still work just fine, and some were the everyday data drive for systems in the pre-HD era. Don't think I've ever seen one fail yet.
I think with the corner-cutting that all the HD mfgrs have been doing of late (cf. the recent cut in consumer-HD warranties to one year) we're going to see a steep increase in crap HDs from everyone, at every level.
Re:Trends (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had to RMA three new W.D. HDs for DOA, plus one that died on the LAST day of the then-3-year warranty. I will say W.D. made it plenty easy. Tech support dude determined that I had already tested the HD and knew what I was talking about, and two minutes later we were done.
But the warranty cut to one year was disturbing. I'd noticed that my most recent purchase (first I'd seen made in Malaysia rather than Singapore) is visibly not as well-made as previous W.D. HDs. And that was my most recent RMA as well, having developed data errors at only a couple months old. Next time I buy some HDs, I'll be looking for last-year's models.
As to "but you can buy the 3 year warranty for $20" -- sorry, that does me no good at all if I first had to pay *double* the OEM price for a retail-boxed HD (which my clients sure as hell are not going to go for either). And I can't use the enterprise class drives (which still have the 3 yr warranty) on most of my own and clients' machines -- that big a HD isn't supported by the system BIOS.
And yes, I've ranted about this to W.D. sales, public relations, and tech support. As a SOHO integrator, it puts me in a bad spot (you think YOU have trouble making money off HDs!) and makes me wonder if maybe I should just settle for the cheapest HD if they're only going to be backed for a year anyway.