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?
Trends (Score:4, Insightful)
As drives have gotten smaller/increased data density, they've become increasingly unreliable. I'm pretty sure this coincides with the new 1 year warranties (versus the older 3 year standard warranties).
Laptop drives especially...
Re:Trends (Score:5, Insightful)
Just looking down the list of comments, it does seem that everyone has noticed the increasing number (or at least it seems that way) of massive drive failures from certain manufacturers.
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:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you about the ease and cost of using another hard drive for backup, though, as long as they are physically separated (at least not in the same machine, and the farther the better). I frequently copy files from my laptop to my desktop and vice versa. I also consider the local copy of my website to be a backup of the remote copy, and vice versa. I think most businesses nowadays use hard disks for most backups and only use tapes for old archived stuff.
Re:Trends (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, for Aunt Minnie's email, on a box where the only stuff that ever has to work at all are Windows and Outlook, reinstalling the software is not such a big deal, and you really only need archive the user data. But not so at all for a complex system that does a variety of tasks (especially if those tasks are interconnected).
I don't have any good solutions either, given the size of current HDs and how much data a person can accumulate (both programs and documents -- BTW my sister routinely works with documents in excess of 4gigs). A RAID server with the sole task of keeping the network backed up seems the least impractical for large setups.
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.
Re:Trends (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Trends (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :-)
Re:Trends (bad correlation) (Score:5, Insightful)
Between my laptop, fileserver and workhorse, plus the other oddball products, I've got 7 drives a spinnin. and three or four in a box somewhere that were too small to continue using.
That said, i've NEVER had a drive fail that I didn't addicently cause myself. I've had a few with niosy bearings, but have found that as long as I didn't power cycle the machine they were in, they continued to run faultlessly.
Re:Trends (bad correlation) (Score:5, Funny)
I work in tech support for a company where the population has been largely fixed (so it doesn't matter if the rest of the world is using more than usual - I have my own data). I have LOTS of hard drives going through my hands so I'm familiar with failure rates. They have been increasing. Certainly, there are lots more drives out there, but they are failing at a higher rate.
In years past, it was easier to deal with tech support if you could let the drive "speak" to the technician on the other end of the phone. Usually, the techs were button monkeys that didn't realize that *I already knew* the drive was bad and needed to be replaced. So in the end, I'd usually just power up the drive and give it a few good whacks on the counter. Then I'd call up support and put the phone up to the drive. This reduced call times to only a couple minutes rather than the typical 20 - 30 minutes that it took the monkey to run through the flow chart.
Me: Here THAT? It's broken!
Tech: Your shipping address, sir?
Today's drives don't take much whacking as they are much more delicate. This is also evident by IBM's new Thinkpad Shock Absorber [194.158.4.251] (page 2, feature #5). With my old Thinkpad, I once (forgive me...) had a near car accident while it was powered up. The damn thing flew across the car and smacked into the dash with nary a problem. It still works today.
Tip: for the new one year warranty's, just buy two drives and mirror them. Whack one at 10 months and the next at 11.
Cheetos,
swordboy
Re:Trends (bad correlation) (Score:3, Funny)
Perhaps if you werent surfing slashdot when you were driving you wouldnt have had the accident
Re:Trends (bad correlation) (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, me too.
Anyone know which is considered the most reliable drive manufacturer out there? Is there any brand that is famous for not crashing?
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:5, Informative)
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 (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
Re:Trends (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Trends (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Trends (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Trends (Score:4, Informative)
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 (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.
Oh, good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh, good. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's real simple - either you trust marketing or you trust what fellow people in the industry have observed. Failure rates and reliability are very very hard to get reliable, objective and accurate specs on. This works for praise as well as trashing a company. Look at Cisco's sterling reputation.
I don't totally rely on it - I know a company where a dozen MySQL/Linux/Intel databases have had much better uptime and reliability than the same number of Oracle/Sun systems (make of that what you will). That dosen't mean I think Oracle sucks and MySQL is great[2].
[1] I used WebSphere because I have heard no opinions on it, good or bad, so I can't slur or praise.
[2] For the record, I think MySQL is better than it's reputation among DBAs and not as good as it's reputation among hobby site builders. That gives me a range somewhere between PERFECT! and CRAP! to place my position. :)
--
Evan
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.
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.
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:5, Funny)
Storage Review [storagereview.com] had such a database at once upon a time. It was widely hailed as the most comprehensive database of the kind, and pretty accurate (given that "reliable collection" is an oxymoron when it comes to the net).
Then their hard drive crashed and they lost everything.
Yes, it's horribly ironic. It also struck me as really freaking idiotic that a website dedicated to storage wouldn't back up their own data. I'm not an SR regular, so I didn't follow the story that closely at the time.
As it happens, SR is now restarting the reliability database. It'll take time to get accurate data, of course, but it's better than nothing. Here's hoping they succeed.
And that this time, they have backups.
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:5, Informative)
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_drive
IBM DeskStar (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Hard to imagine (Score:3, Informative)
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.
we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
hard drives are so important, they should be the most quality product of a computer... you can replace a cpu, motherboard, etc... but without backing up, you can't get everything on a hard drive back.
Re:we need... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Fujistu HD's (Score:5, Informative)
Yep (Score:2, Informative)
(this is in the UK btw)
Warranties (Score:3, 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.
Thats why I like Maxtor...... (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, My father thinks that people just don't give a shit about quality any more.....
Vertical
Re:Thats why I like Maxtor...... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sucks that your Seagate died and I'm not trying to convince you to buy another one, but in general the reliability for Seagate, Maxtor, and WD's consumer drives are all about the same. If you had bought a defective Maxtor you'd be saying the same about Maxtor and praising the new Seagate you just bought.
Re:Thats why I like Maxtor...... (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:Thats why I like Maxtor...... (Score:3, Funny)
I have found that an effective way to ventillate an entire computer, including hard drives, is to remove a side of the case an position a desk fanto blow directly into the case at full power. In all seriousness, it's *very* effective. It may be a little noisy, though.
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:Thats why I like Maxtor...... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
wha? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:wha? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is 90% a failure rate? 100% of all hard drives are going to fail sometime.
To paraphrase Twain, the difference between "90% failure rate in a year" and "90% failure rate sometime" is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.
I've probably already shortened my one's life (Score:2, Funny)
The Register and Fujitsu (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The Register and Fujitsu (Score:5, Informative)
One word... (Score:3, Informative)
Does your mileage vary?
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.
Re:One word... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Lotsa Fujitsu Drives (Score:3, Informative)
Our experiences (Score:2, Interesting)
First thing I found in a google search... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:First thing I found in a google search... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, judging by his user details [slashdot.org]:
User #624901
Michael_Angel has posted 0 comments.
has submitted 1 stories.
Have Fujitsu Harddrives Been Failing in Record Numbers? on 12/11/02 18:06
that's exactly what he's trying to do.
Sounds a bit fishy to me. He wouldn't happen to work for a competitor, do you think?
I've only lost one... (Score:2, Informative)
Problem
I think so.
Failed Drives (Score:2, Informative)
IBM 300PLs (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I for one am happy with my Fujitsu harddrive... (Score:2)
Drive Service Company seems to agree (Score:5, Informative)
It then goes on to say:
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.
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.
I can tell you from personal experience, YES! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
After some research... (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently they are very allergic to PrOn and the more PrOn you have the more likely they are going to die.
And from all of the horror stories posted here on
Definitely a problem in Ireland... (Score:3, Interesting)
MPG3 - MP3 (Score:5, Funny)
Must be one of those new RIAA-compliant hard drive models.
Fujitsu Drives - Bad for some time (Score:5, Informative)
had 2 fail in 4 months (Score:4, Informative)
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
It's Our Own Fault, To Some Degree (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM and Fujitsu hard drives used to be the best -- really really solid and reliable. But they cost more. I remember when, several years ago, Fujitsu dropped their drive prices to bring them in line with seagatemaxtorquantumwesterndigital... -- I was surprised that Fujitsu could build a much better drive than their competition, at the same price. Turns out that they actually could not -- Fujitsu drives quickly started getting ungood.
Sigh. I'll gladly pay a little more for quality, but since few others will -- I'm hosed.
Is it silly not to do RAID/0? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it silly not to do RAID/0? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Cheap RAID in five steps!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad News for Sun (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:Bad News for Sun (Score:3, Informative)
I have no connection with Sun other than I want to own some of their equipment...
Had 100% failure rate on Fujitsu drives (Score:3, Informative)
Fujitsu MPG3307AT (Score:3, Interesting)
What I learned working at a disk drive company... (Score:3, Interesting)
RAID (Score:3, Informative)
Here we've had TONS of them fail (Score:4, Informative)
Check those part numbers.. (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Which models? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please be more specific.
- A.P.
Serious IBM notebook drive problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever we turned the system on, there would almost always be some drives (roughly 3 or 4) that made 'clunking' sounds for about 20 seconds. Consequently, the system that one of those drives was in would not boot because it couldn't read from the drive. It wouldn't always be the same drives, but some would do it more frequently than others.
Originally we ran these systems with a in-house written BIOS, but in the end we where able to reproduce the problem without a BIOS chip at all (that is, the clunking would happen, of course the system would never boot). We looked at the power up voltage and it was well within spec.
IBM engineers came over to look at the problem and took a drive with them to analyze it. Nothing came out of that exercise and we ended up swapping all the drives for Toshibas, after which the problem never occured.
What amazed me was that IBM recognized the problem and never came through with an explanation, let alone a fix.
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!
Re:Single Drive RAID (Score:3, Insightful)
And, when one drive fails, you want to replace both together instead of just replacing the bad one and remirroring??
Yes, I've noticed problems with Fujitsu drives (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Two good Fujitsu's here, and six failed IBMs (Score:3, Informative)
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.
No Surprise - We Get what We Pay For (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked for several years for a company which designed and manufactured ICs for hard drives (I worked on read channels, but the company made other chips as well, such as preamps and servo controllers). There has always been competition and downward price pressure in this market, but early on, both the ASPs and the product lifetimes were somewhat reasonable.
Over the last 5-10 years, things have changed a lot. The lifetime of a drive product is very short (sometimes as short as 6 months), and each new generation is so much faster and denser than the last that many of the critical components require a from-the-ground-up redesign with very little being borrowed from the previous generation. This, combined with lower ASPs than ever, have made it more and more difficult to be highly profitable as maker of chips for hard drives. Companies that are successful have engineers working very long hours to do it. Several companies have left the market entirely, or have taken on other product lines as well
And this is just the ICs. I'm sure manufacturers of other drive components (platters, heads, etc.) have seen similar erosion of product lifetimes and ASPs.
The end result of all of this it that there will be an inevitable hit in quality and reliability. There's really no other choice. When customers are once again willing to pay $200-$300 for a current technology drive, you will see the quality go backup. Even today, SCSI drives, which are generally more expensive then IDE drives are also more reliable, as many posters have pointed out.
Oven chips ;) (Score:3, Informative)
Poll? (Score:3, Funny)
-----------
(o) I own a Fujitsu and no problems.
(o) Fujitsu 0wned my harddrive
(o) I don't own a Fujitsu and no problems.
(o) I don't own a Fujitsu but many problems.
(o) I want a Fujitsu so I can get problems.
etc etc
Sheesh... Everyone listen: BACK UP. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hard drives fail.
They always have, they always will. They're mechanical, and even better than that, they're magnetic. That's how it is. You should plan to have to replace your hard drive every 1-3 years at least, if not more often than that, depending on workload and conditions. That's how it's always been. For the people saying 'but... I've never had a hard drive fail...' -- you're lucky as hell, but someday your luck will run out.
Even backup solutions fail.
Removable storage is mechanical as well. There are a lot of variables. Years of experience taught me the following lessons:
This may all seem excessive for the "home" user, but if you're anything like me (these days I'm a writer/photographer), being a "home" user can often mean that your entire livelihood and household are tied up in your data.
As for me, myself, personally, right now I keep my nightlies on a rotating group of 14 8mm tapes using an Exabyte 8505XL drive. I use only data-grade tapes from major manufacturers. I run drive diagnostics often. I never use a tape through more than 10 passes. For my really important data, I also use 9.6GB DVD-RAM for redundancy. I would never consider working without backups, simply depending on this brand of hard drive or that one to not fail. I've lost too many hard drives over the years (ever seen a platter on an 10" drive crack and bits go flying everywhere, cracking the other platters and half the windows in the room?!) ever to be naive enough to trust one again.
Point of post: BACK UP YOUR DATA. Never think of a hard drive as anything other than short-term storage. Never think of any magnetic media as anything other than short-term storage, or you'll be crying sooner or later.
YES, 100% failure on a batch in Norway (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fujitsu makes hard drives? (Score:2)
Right on, man. Bigger [microsoft.com] is always better [realng.com] (not!)
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.