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.

Seagate refutes this

[bluegreenone]

The Register actually had an article on this in which Seagate denied this story. [theregister.co.uk] It does seem odd that 3 manufacturers would be having the same problem.

now what

[frovingslosh]

OK, I read the article and have a new Maxtor that seems to fit the parameters. It works OK now, but this is of concern, particularly since they recently dropped the warranty period from 3 years to 1 year. What option do I have? Is there really a recall in progress, or is it just that there should be?

So who's left?

[wulfhound]

Having just lost a bunch of time (although fortunately little valuable data) when one of my IBM DeathStars died, I went out and bought Maxtors 'cause they seemed to be the choice for reliability. So what make are we all supposed to buy now? Cheap hard drives all of a sudden aren't so cheap when you have to buy two of them and a RAID controller to get an acceptable level of reliability...

I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[ArchieBunker]

After drive number 4 crapped out in a month I realized it wasn't worth $7 to send the bad one back in exchange for a "new" bad drive. Still on my 3 year warranty from Nov of 2000. Drive number 3 was even a sealed retail kit which tested bad out of the box. I always run diags on new drives because they can't be trusted anymore.

Maxtor...

[neostorm]

Just the 40 & 80 GB drives? I just grabbed one of those funky 100+20GB drives from Maxtor a month or so ago, and it took a huge crap on me two weeks into using it. Now their tech-support won't reply to my Emails and I can't seem to reach them by phone in a reasonable amount of time.

Avoid everything Maxtor, not just 40/80 GB ones. Maybe their other drives are better and you've had good experiences, but their tech support is insulting and therefore doesn't deserve the business.

This is not true.

[LloydSeve]

Seagate has officially issued a press release
saying this they have not issued ANY recall
regarding drives shipped to Taiwan.

Although Maxtor and Hitachi were not available
for comment, Seagate has "damned" this report
innacurate.
Here is the link to the report of Seagate
denying ANY HDD Recalls.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/30897.html

Re:Just as I suspected

[wwwillem]

you can't buy those more rugged 10/20 GB drives any more

After spending last weekend trying to salvage stuff from my 9 month old 80GB IBM drive that went into coma, I can only 800% agree with you.... But if you (and I) think that ruggedness is more important than performance or "buck per giga", maybe we better look at SCSI drives. I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

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 :-(. But it's an avenue worth exploring....

Re:I've gone through 5 Maxtors

[jovlinger]

Disk diagnostics?

Recommend some good ones, appart from the ones that can be run automatically from fdisk (badblocks...?), please.

I have an old 20G drive that was losing data in an older system. I'm looking for some stress test to figure out whether it was the MB/Chipset or the drive.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, thermal paper receipts disintigrate in 6 months.

So, scan one in, edit it, and use that to get maxtor to send you a new one. If the decline it, sue the store in small claims court.

Maxtor has been good but this 1 year warranty bullshit makes them no better than Fangtun.

Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[naelurec]

Hard drives are cheap .. hard drives are big .. lots of motherboards come with hardware mirroring .. there is software mirroring .. use it. Pretty much every system I build that has any type of important data on it, I'll throw in two drives (RAID 1). I don't treat this as my ultimate backup (critical data still gets stored offsite on some other medium) but I have seen so many drives fail (IDE & SCSI) that the extra upfront cost to assure against a hard drive failure is minimal compared to the rebuilding of a system from scratch (loading software, recreating documents, downloading stuff.. yada yada yada) Lets face it, with todays drive prices at around $1/GB (cheaper with rebates) it just makes sense.

Re:Price collusion anyone?

[glitch!]

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 ]

I am pretty sure that the Sumitomo Chemical company fire was a complete lie. It's been a while (almost 10 years now?), but I seem to recal claims that this company produced half of the industry's integrated circuit epoxy, and that was the excuse for the dramatic increase in memory prices. This is the same epoxy ("plastic") that was used for all kinds of IC's, and I remember that the pricing on our 74LSxxx chips just about doubled, from maybe 15 cents to 25-30 cents each, due to the sudden price increase on the epoxy. Ouch!

Hmmm. That's interesting. The memory chips didn't use much more epoxy than our plain logic IC's, so you would expect the price to go up, what, maybe 25 to 50 cents each? So why did the memory prices nearly double instead of jumping a couple dollars per module? Hmmm.

I don't think this hard drive issue is large enough to suggest collusion, though. A few thousand drives really don't add up to much in the big picture, and in this case, there are warrantee costs as well. Interesting idea, though.

Re:Just mirror it .. seriously you guys.

[scrotch]

I think the issue here is that people want the products they purchase to last. It's not necessarily a matter of losing data, because that can happen a number of ways and we all know to make backups. It's a matter of hard drives becoming less and less reliable. Which leads to computers in general getting less and less reliable.

Most of us here, you too I bet, would like to think that computers would get better and better. Meaning more capable and more reliable as well as faster and cheaper. This community invests a lot of time learning about, using, and abusing computers. We would like to feel confident that manufacturers will produce reliable equipment that will repay that investment.

I would like to think that my hard drive will last longer than it takes me to get my computer customized to my desired state. I would like to think that computers won't become so commoditized that when some part malfunctions they are just thrown away like televisions, vcrs, radios, etc. I would like to think that my purchase will last until it is obsolete - it's not like that takes that long these days.

Re:so...

[macdaddy357]

Did anyone else notice that the entire hard drive industry scaled warranties back to one year from three and even five at about the same time? That's collusion, and it violates anti-trust laws. Something should be done. I suggest a class action lawsuit by owners of all these fancy looking paperweights. I know the government won't do it for us.

Re:Just as I suspected

[Rolo Tomasi]

I think the users are a big part of the problem. If you don't cool your drive properly, it will die. Heat kills bearings. And the failure rate inreaseses exponentially with temperature. A drive that might run 10 years at 30C might die after 1 year at 60C. What percentage of people actually have active, fresh air cooling for their drives? My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat, and the manufacturers can't really control the cooling design of every individual PC, so they just shortened the warranty.

You might want to use a utility like DTemp [peterlink.ru] or hddtemp [coredump.free.fr] to check your drive's temperature, and improve your cooling if your temps are over 35C. I've been using a Chieftec Dragon [chieftec.com] case for my home box for a few years now, which has a really nice drive cage with an integrated 80mm fan that blows fresh air directly over the drives, and my temps are rarely over 30C.

Re:Glad it's only 3

[Nogami_Saeko]

I just had a WD800JB blow up a few weeks ago with bad sectors - corrupted my system drive so I had to reformat and reinstall, at which point the drive started spinning down/spinning up at random times and locking up the machine.

Got a replacement from WD (which was a refurbished drive and makes "clicking" sounds occasionally.

Took it out of my system and replaced it with a Maxtor 120gb which is quieter, faster and of course, bigger.

The 80gb refurbished drive is now in an external firewire case as a data transport drive.

I was less than impressed getting a refurbished drive back from WD on a drive that's less than 6 months old - I'm sticking to Maxtor / Seagate from now on.

N.

Re:Just as I suspected

[loconet]

I've couple of those Fujitsu 4GB drives around that could function as a boat anchor. Real engineering stuff.

So true, I've had 2 Fujitsus HDs, 5GB and 3GB that I use every day , day in and day out, heavy trashing, Windows and Linux. They are still serving me well.

*knock on wood*

Re:Just as I suspected

[Trogre]

A good case for sticking with 5400rpm models.

It's all magic to me...

[SuckyDucky]

For once, could we not just play "bash the corporations"? It's practically a miracle that they can get any of this stuff to work in the first place. Even with the defects, the ability to manipulate so many atoms at the level of reliability they have baffles my mind. But of course, I'm probably not near as smart as the average slashdotter.

Re:Just as I suspected

[letxa2000]

I do something similar. My cron job makes an incremental backup of my work every 3 hours locally. That's mostly so if I screw something up I can roll back.

Then once a night the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last 24 hours and FTPs it over to another machine. The daily incremental backups are kept for a week.

Then once a week the system makes an incremental backup of everything changed in the last week and FTPs it over to the other machine. These are kept indefinitely (until I get around to purging them).

Finally, once a month a complete backup is made and sent over to the other system. These, too, are kept indefinitely.

I burn CDs with the backups from time to time. But I feel pretty well protected--I'd have to lose two hard drives, one in a laptop and one on a server machine, pretty much simultaneously to be SOL. And even then I have my CDs to recover from which is various degrees of SOL depending on how long it has been since my last CD burn.

Hard drives just make me nervous. They've gotten so big anymore that you have to be extremely careful that you don't put all your eggs in one basket--and with hard drives that are so many times bigger than what a CD can hold it's not easy to backup all your data on a frequent basis. That's why I've gone to the "backup to another computer" option--it happens automatically thanks to cron and it FITS, which is more than I can say for trying to back it up regularly to a CD.

Western Digital

[yamcha666]

Hmmm, maybe I made a good choice by trusting my data to Western Digital drives and only WD drives. To this day I have never bought a Maxtor (or Seagate) even though it was cheaper than Western Digital. So far, I've purchased 300GB worth of hard drive space from WD ... Good choice I have made, it seems.

Hardware At It's Limit?

[OceanWave]

Seems to me that I have seen these same things before:

• Floppy drives pushed way past their limit, when they were only stable at 720K.
  It was typical for me to format a new "good quality" floppy, and have it fail on read-error five minutes later. Never mind using these things to back up the 40MB drive I had at the time!
• Modems pushed to 56K, when they were only good to 28K.
  It is what made me switch to new technology, such as Road Runner, after dealing with the frustration of even moderate Internet use.
• CPU technology is also the same:
  The typical heat dissipation--now several tens of watts--still has that little tiny fan to pull the heat out of the fashionably small case. In the past, weren't high performance machines almost super-cooled?

It would seem to me that the customer base is the "guinea pig"--where "experimental" products are tried to test their engineering weakness-- while we have to pay these companies for the privilege of testing their products. It would seem that the roles are reversed here. The quality assurance aspect should be handled by the company before it impacts the customer.

I have found that both hardware and software are the same in this respect. And, we will have to "eat" Moore's Law, because the "testing" is never over. In conclusion, reliability will be an issue for quite some time to come. Though extensive testing would have it's disadvantage: If you were looking for that new product, you would have to wait a couple years beyond it's usual release date to enjoy the benefits.