Fujitsu may have to replace up to 300,000 faulty hard disk drives, made between September 2000 and 2001. They can be found in NEC and IBM PCs, as well as Fujitsu Siemens home-grown PCs, according to Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai, which estimates that replacement programme will cost Fujitsu 10 billion yen (approx $US 83m).

The fault lies in semiconductors used in the HDDs and is found in 2-3 per cent of the 10 million units made by Fujitsu between the Septembers, the company told Bloomberg.

We're guessing that most of the dud models are found in PCs made for the Japanese market, still the world's second or third biggest market for PCs(some analysts estimate that China will overtake it this year) despite the years of doldrums.

According to Bloomberg, the dud HDDs can be found in Fujitsu FMV desktops, PRIMERGY servers, NEC VALUESTAR and Mate desktops and IBM's NetVista, Aptiva, IBMPC and IntelliStation brands. ®