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CAVEAT EMPTOR - FUJITSU HARD DRIVES

Alan Crease

It all started when the Council's Health & Safety Advisor's PC crashed a week or so ago, with an error message something like "cannot write to disk".

A faulty hard-drive was diagnosed and replaced with one of a similar type!

This week I hear of a FUJITSU problem concerning 10 and 20gb drives manufactured between September 2000 and September 2001. The codes for the drives are MPG3 20x Ax (x is variable) and presumably MPG3 10x Ax.

They have only just admitted to the problem a year after the last of the suspect drives were made. It is estimated that 300,000 faulty drives were distributed, mainly into the Asian market, but a considerable number have found they way into Europe and are showing a failure rate of between 30 and 50%!!!! Many have been found in Fujitsu "Scenic" PC's as well as a number of Compaq Deskpros and some RM PCs. Once more it's chips which are letting down the product, not the platters. The cause is put down to the failure of a controller chip on the circuit board. There are no warning symptoms, just a failure to boot up when turned on or, if already "on", an error message such as the above. Data recovery is difficult because there were many minor revisions to the chip code over the production period. A replacement board would need to be identical to the original, otherwise there would be a lack of communication between the circuit board and the low-level format information on the disk platters.

Check your hard-drive and pray it works when you next turn it on. Be afraid, be very afraid. Thank goodness Fujitsu have now got out of the IDE hard-drive business. With quality standards and ethics like that, who needs them.

The Fujitsu hard-drive business as an entity was sold earlier THIS year to Western Digital who must now be wondering about the damage it will do to the "brand".

At the same time as this news was announced Maxtor reduced the guarantee on their basic IDE drives. Within two days, Seagate and Western Dig followed suit, although in the case of the latter, the reduced guarantee only applies to their bottom of the range products. Potential purchasers should check the individual web sites.

It was reported on the 'The Register' that a UK government agency recently had to replace over a quarter of their 8000 Compaq Deskpro EN machines, ordered last year, owing to this problem.

Further web references:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27136.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27140.html

http://213.219.40.69/?article=5403

http://www.cw360asp.com/eb/eb.asp?b=1251&a=115837&f=1&i=246452

UPDATE 12TH October 2002

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/51/27268.html

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