We've been having horrendous reliability problems with these drives at work - more than 30 of them (out of 3 batches totalling 86 machines) have died in the last few months. They either start reporting bad clusters in scandisk (before turning up their toes) or simply dying on boot (not detected in the bios). None of our older Fujitsu IDE drives have had this trouble, nor their SCSI drives (I've got two in my home box, and They're superb) - just this model. I've heard rumblings that we're not the only ones to have this bother, so I'm curious if anyone else here has suffered with 'em.

I have just started getting trouble with this hardrive, it's been working fine for about 10 months but now It's started reading at 1.5 meg/sec but still writing at 14 meg/sec.This is causing windows to take about 10 minutes to load and s.m.a.r.t is registering that the fitness of the drive has halfed in the last 2 days. Tried norton disk doctor but no good. run out of ideas now.

I built my system about a month ago and used this hardrive from my old system.
Windows XP pro
Athlon 1.33Ghz,
ecs k7s5a motherboard,
ge-force 2 mx 400,
256 sdram

If that's the case, I'd back up your data real quick as that's the early signs of impending failure that we've been having. You'll possibly get bad cluster reports next, then it'll die

GM
--------

thought i would mention that there is also a firmware upgrade for this drive that may help.

Well it seems we are far from alone in having problems with Fujitsu drives. I came across this story from the UK I.T new site The Register via one of the other tech forums I subscribe to:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/27112.html

Apparently the problem's caused by faulty semiconductors, and occurs in 2-3% of their 10 million units manufactured between Sept 2000 & 2001. Personally I think that figure is a conservative estimate (although 3% of 10 million is still a lot of drives ). BTW we've now had almost half of the 2 batches of 80 PC needing replacement HDDs - yuk

GM

I hope you're charging for carrying out their Quality Control for them

Ah, I have one of these hds (MPG3204T) in my home computer that I bought about a year ago. About a week ago, XP began to crash during simple disk writing operations. On restarting my machine, the bios failed to detect the fujitsu hd - sound familiar? Eventually after many restarts managed to rescue my data, and then repartitioned and formatted the drive. However I am still having the failure to start up - after trawling forums and newsgroups tonight I now know why... I'm going to try the firmware upgrade which is a bootable floppy (it's on Fujitsu's site) - has anyone had any success with it? I guess it's only going to work if my bios detects the drive (1 time out of 20 it will). If not, I'll be looking for that 1 yr warranty...

We had major problems with two, mpg3102at and mpg3204at drives. one day they both just stopped working. We had to send them to a data recovery company http://www.Computer-Recovery.com in london because fujitsu would not recover the data but were happy to repace the drives, that made no sense to us. A bad experience, but at least we got all the data back. S.

I emailed Fujitsu about my hard disk and got a very snotty reply from their tech support saying that Fujitsu have never recalled any of their products, and generally fobbing me off with the firmware upgrade crap when I had ALREADY told them I had tried. They seem to be in denial about the problems relating to these disks (or.. they don't give a s%*t about their customers). As I said, less than helpful - I've now got a race against the clock to track down my original hardware supplier before the warranty expires. Thanks for nothing Fujitsu, I'll be warning everyone I know to stay away from your products in future. Apologies to everyone else for the rant : )

Not at all, Alex, rant away If this sort of product quality problem is out there, and seemingly being ignored by the manufacturer, people need to know about it.

Fujitsu are clearly unconcerned by the three percent of customers who have that particular model of drive, but the only way anyone will get to hear about it is when people report it on forums like this. I wonder if Fujitsu's market share really is so massive that they don't mind losing 3% of it to their competition. If they don't look after their customers, somebody else will. I mean, will YOU buy another Fujitsu drive? After reading this thread, I probably won't, and there will be others out there who feel the same. I've never had a Fujitsu drive before anyway, so, the three percent has already grown.

I was using a MPG3307AH for 17months until last week I bought it 17 months ago to add as a slave drive to my present system simply for storage so it has no operating system on it its just 1 ntfs partition. I have been using the drive succesfully with no problems last week when the bios started having problems detecting the drive, a few times this happend and I had to restart that seemed to resolve the problem and the bios detected it, but now my problem is the bios cannot detect it at all, I have tried 1 method of getting the drive to boot up which was plugging it onto another computer, it still wouldn't work,the drives getting power to it but it wont spin up at all, I have 20 gb of files on the drive that I hav'nt backed up onto cd yet. I really dont relish the thought of paying a company to retrive the data for me, the data would not validate the cost. I read on the internet that the external electronics of a drive can be easily changed. if thats where the problem is then I would like to take this option of repair and do it myself, question is how much would the external electronics for drive cost & where can I get 1 in the uk if anyone knows of anywhere I would most thankfull. Fugitsu really messed up with this batch of drives. apparently the problem is one of the chips on the external electronics PCB I have been in touch with Fugitsu & they put me in touch with micro-p.com who seem to be dealing with fujitsu's problems I asked them what the deal was with the faulty drives and what the resolution was. they said that they would refund me £43.97 on behalf of fugitsu WELL THANKS A BUNCH FUJITSU, A repacment hardrive is gonna cost me £55.00 then the I gotta get a company to recover 20gb of files I have on the dead drive thats proberbly gonna cost £500+. All I want is a new PCB to replace the 1 with the bad chip simple I thought but they cant help me with this because they dont stock parts and dont know who does. surly theres gotta be parts somewhere.

paul (UK)

We have replaced literally 100+ fujitsu drives (MPG3102AT), I contacted Fujitsu and all they said was that the drives were only covered by a resellers warrenty. We have thrown the majority of them away but yesterday we found a firmware upgrade on the HP/Compaq site. It sounded like a dream come true but as with everything else we tried with the drives (ie fdisk and reformat and reinstall) the firmware upgrade simply acted to make the drive worse, I will certainly never be buying a Fujitsu harddrive again, I would recommend IBM, they have a 3 year warrenty and I have only ever had to send one back and it was replaced within 14 days!!

Chris,

I too was considering that firmware upgrade at the HP site. (My Fujitsu MPG3102AT died today in the middle of a fresh Windows NT installation.) Could you tell me how the firmware upgrade made things worse?

Thanks.

To All:
Just to add weight to what seems to be a growing problem for Fujitsu - We are a secondary school with close on 300 computers and a local supplier of ours did supply these drives in machines and we now have 5 'mpg3s' sitting on our workbench, all dead, not being recognised via 'bios' etc. Our supplier has stopped stocking Fujitsu drives and I've also told him of the case in America where HP had a number of these drives. For some interesting reading go to http://www.classactioncounsel.com/fujitsu-litigation.htm

this guys recovered my MPG3204 fujitsu that wasn“t recognize by my BIOS.

http://www.kepler.cl/fujitsu.html

good luck

Thank you all for the info on Fujitsu. I really like reading these forums and finding faulty products. You can learn alot from these threads , buyers beware !!!!

-DNA

Struck a chord on this one didn't I? I sincerely hope Fujitsu get hammered when the lawsuite goes to trial, because their handling of this issue has been dreadful. I changed jobs at the end of last year, and my new employers have had a similar tale of woe with these drives (mainly the 10gig models, but a few 20's too) - we're now actively swapping them out where possible as we've no faith in them whatever. Thanks to everyone who replied.

*******************

I've experienced two of these. One was a new PC from a UK assembler and Windows ME kept failing with strange failure messages until one day it wouldn't boot at all. The supplier replaced the drive but I lost the data. I didn't know about the Fujitsu problem at the time and I hope they didn't just replace it with another from the same batch.

Also a friend ( a computer illiterate) had a problem with his work machine whcih had this Fujitsu drive. He had 2 years of unbacked up work on the drive. He convinced his IT people that the drive electronics card was the problem as it could be heard spinning. He persuaded them to swop the card for one from a new unused Fujitsu of the same type and the drive worked again so that he could get his data off and throw it away.

Good look to all of you who have had this problem.

Just interested in exactly how your friend got his data off his dodgy drive? You say he replaced the card? Please elaborate : ) I've got about a year's worth of data on mine that I'd given up any hope of retrieving.

Hello Alex,
I'll try to find out exactly what they did. My guess at the moment is that they had a stock of new spare Fujitsu drives of exactly the same type and replaced the PCB on the dead drive with a PCB from one of the new drives.

Give me a couple of days to contact my friend.

Sid Fewster

I'd forgotten that I found this link some time ago when I was first researching the problems with the Fujitsu hard drives. Apologies if it's already been mentioned in the many previous posts on this issue.

http://www.classactioncounsel.com/fujitsu-litigation.htm

Regards,

Sid Fewster