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Crash! Dud Fujitsu HDDs all over UK

Compaq, RM, Viglen, Hugh Symons etc

Our story today on Fujitsu's HDD-recall has prompted an immediate response from punters and system builders. In the UK, the bad Fujis have been spotted in Compaq, RM, Viglen and Hugh Symons PCs. We are publishing some of the letters sent to us within the first hour of publication of the original article. It looks like Fujitsu has a big mess to clear up.


An employee at a UK education agency:

"we use Compaqs here, and have lost (I think) six Fujitsus in the last two months. Here's Compaq's advisory about the problem.


A techie based at the UK branch of a big investment bank:

"A purchase of 600 Compaq Deskpro EN's included various HD's including Fujitsu, Seagate, Maxtor and WD. After about 2 months we had a number of failures all with Fujitsu disks. We have had to replace about 200 disks so far, with about 30% of the having failed and the rest as a precaution. It is very unlikely that we'll ever accept another PC onsite that contains a Fujitsu disk."


A Fujitsu spotter at an English university is more forgiving:

We had scads of these drives in RM Pcs delivered during 2000/1; nearly all have now been replaced by Fujitsu. The problem came to light last year after HDDs started crashing in droves. It took a little while to get this fully investigated by Fujitsu via RM, but the response and final outcome have been honourable and satisfactory.


A friend of The Register who looks after Viglens:

It's not just Japanese ones, I'm seeing failure rates like you wouldn't believe on Fujitsu MPG3204AT 20GB disks (in one case 7 out of 8 disks have died, aged ~2 years, all desktop machines). They basically lose the ability to power up.


A UK reseller who sells Hugh-Symons PCs:

We have had to replace around 20 Fujitsu Hard Drives that have failed, as mentioned in your article!!! "Limited to the Japanese Market"??? I don't think so!


The bad Fujis are in Canada too, reader Allan Stokes, from British Columbia, tells us:

I bought four of these for different machines because they had the best combination of low temperature, low noise, and reasonable performance. They were 20% slower than the IBM drives at the time so they weren't purchased for performance systems.

Two of my four drives have already failed and been replaced, rather slowly I might add. Both of them came back in five to six weeks. I was suspicious when they didn't even bother to ask about the mode of failure on the second RMA request.

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