More on Fujitsu Hard Drive Failures

[John Griffin]

I am quoting from an article in the Monday December 2nd Toronto Star @Biz
section written by Richard Morochove.

"There is a growing furor over the abnormally high failure rate of certain
hard drives manufactured by Fujitsu. The problem reportedly affects hundreds
of thousands of Fujitsu hard drives manufactured in 2000 and 2001. These
drives were incorporated into new desktop personal computers (whew!),
including those made by Fujitsu, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and other computer
manufacturers. They were also sold as replacement drives."

He goes on to say that they fail with no warning - blik! gone! No noises, no
erratic behavior - just ooops! what just happened? Where are my files?

Fujitsu is blaming chip manufacturer Cirrus Logic that makes the controller
chips for the flaky drives. Epoxy surrounding the chips could melt causing a
sudden short circuit. Apparently there is a class action law suit
(naturally) developing against Fujitsu.

If you suspect you have one of these drives, log in to
www.fujitsu.ca/download/hard.drive.html. Use the diagnostic tool Ver. 6 (for
EIDE hard drives) to test the drive. (No word about any Macintosh tools -
surprised?)

If your drive is in the Fujitsu MPG3 series, backup real quick and replace
it immediately!

You probably have to thrash around to get any manufacturer to claim
responsibility so you can get your money back. They are too busy pointing
fingers at each other.

"Fujitsu still makes 2.5" hard drives for mobile PCs and high capacity
drives for enterprise servers. However, its reputation may have been damaged
by the way it has dealt with the problem-plagued desktop drives."

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There may be some cold comfort for us in that the smaller drives don't seem
to be implicated directly, but let's face it, it is still a bit scary having
one of these drives in our otherwise awesome machines.

jg