3 Major HD Makers Recalling Drives? [UPDATED]

mauriceh writes "Seems that 3 major Hard Disk companies have a problem with defective 40GB platters. A major recall is in the works." Seagate, Hitachi, and Maxtor 40 & 80 gig drives appear to be the troubled drives. Update: 05/30 12:37 GMT by M : There is apparently no recall. Digitimes has issued a revision/retraction, and TheInquirer has a story as well.

Just as I suspected

[Michael's a Jerk!]

The warrenties being lowered was a sign quality as dropping. Data densitites are so huge these these days. The question of Drive reliability [slashdot.org] has been asked before. It's good reading.

Topical?

[moehoward]

Hmmmmm. 12,000 - 15,000 drives sold in Taiwan. They have a 10% failure rate.

I sincerely question the Slashdot-newsworthiness of this.

I guess I am surprised that 3 major manufacturers use the same source. Seems weird, but I guess not too uncommon in manufacturing. But seems like a critical component to outsource to China.

There was more SCO news that just came out in the last hour and it regards Linus. How did this story make it and that not? We don't have nearly enough SCO-lawsuit news these days.

Price collusion anyone?

[bergeron76]

Does anyone else think this seems to be a little fishy?

I sure hope that one of the part distributors' factories doesn't suddenly explode out on some tiny unheard of little island in Asia or anything.
[ referring to the great memory price spike back in the mid-late 90's ]

Just imagine what the price of hard disks would skyrocket up to. It kind of makes you wonder where the storage/profit ratio begins to slope off for the manufacturer...

Re:Just as I suspected

[tomstdenis]

What's worse though is with this quick "progress" you can't buy those more rugged 10/20 GB drives any more that seem to last forever...

Yeah progress!

Tom

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE IBM ALONE

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of all your bitching about one or two stupid models of harddrives, one of the best hdd producers in the market had to jump ship and stop - the only ones providing innovation and an interesting future gone and now the market goes stagnant. Just stop already, they're already dead, leave them alone.

Makes perfect sense...

[sterno]

In all likelyhood, all three of those drive companies are buying their platters from the same vendor. They may all take those drives and put them together separately, but it's not unusualy for competing vendors to source parts from the same company.

grrr

[deadsaijinx*]

try buying either Western Digital. Or keep buying Maxtor, or even IBM. Seriously, if you people would RTFA, then you would notice that the problems only affect about 10% of the drives that shipped from a plant in china to taiwan. The IBM thing, that was just one set of drives, their new ones kick ass. Maxtor, not my favorite, but this isn't a sign of bad drives from them. Mishaps happen, always have, always will. Now stop freaking and RTFA

Re:Just as I suspected

[ColaMan]

the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years


Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise. Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.

They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

All I want is a drive bigger than 40GB that'll actually *last* 5 years. Is that so hard? Apparently yes. I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day. I don't think I'll ever see that of the new, 1 year warranty drives.

Harddiskenal Fortitude

[EverDense]

From personal experience...

Western Digital STILL offer a 3 year warranty on their drives. I've bought two WD 120Gb (8Mb
cache) disks in the last 4 days. I specifically bought WD because they are the ONLY one of the
major harddisk manufacturer that are standing behind their product.

Personally, I wouldn't touch a harddisk that the manufacturer is only prepared to offer a 1 year
warranty on.

Re:Just as I suspected

[c0d3h4x0r]

They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.

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

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

SCSI versus IDE

[fm6]

On the other hand, I'm very afraid some /.-ers will quickly point out that today's SCSI drives are as much crap as the IDE ones :-(.

Well, I don't have any numbers or even anecdotes. But if all these drives are failing because of defective platters, then what interface standard the drive uses wouldn't make much difference.

On the other hand, if it's just a matter of quality control, then it's not suprising if SCSI is more reliable. Except for a few hardware snobs that refuse to run IDE, SCSI is purchased by people who need sustained throughput: servers, developers who do a lot of builds, render farms, that sort of thing. These customers are going to pay more attention to failure rates than IDE customers, who tend to be end users. Once something becomes a consumer technology, manufacturers assume that bad units will just get returned, and don't worry about failure unless and until the failure rate gets too expensive.

Customer satisifaction? Get real. Most people assume that when their computer breaks, its because they did something wrong.

And hey, why do people buy IDE drives? Because they're cheaper than SCSI. And here's one reason why!

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[SkArcher]

I have a Maxtor 80Gb, and i'll admit to a few nervous moments while waiting for the /.ed site to load... says it only affects drives made in China, but who really knows?

Plus, I was not impressed with the service level of the people i purchased it from, and the drive does have chinese characters on it... im going to check if it was made in china, and if it was, well, i have a tape drive somewhere about - time i got around to installing it I feel

Re:Just as I suspected

[Fweeky]

My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Seagate refutes this

[Goldberg's Pants]

It does seem odd that 3 manufacturers would be having the same problem.

Why? Stands to reason there's not a plethora of places on Earth that make platters, so no doubt, of the handful that do, or at least the raw materials, they could very well come from the same place.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[suss]

Wait... so you're saying we should reward the manufacturers of crap harddisks by buying twice as many?

Would you buy a reliable harddisk that was twice as expensive? -if it was guaranteed for five years-

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[jandrese]

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

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