640K!enough wrote:

I'm just curious: is there anyone here brave enough to still be using a Fujitsu Picobird series hard disk? As I remember, particularly those in the MPF* and MPG* model ranges, every last one that we sold around 1999/2000 or so came back dead. Are there any known to still work?

If you happen to have one in an old machine, I have one suggestion: either get rid of it or back up often.

So far as I know, only the MPF and MPG model ranges were affected by the problem, which was caused by faulty MCU chips from Cirrus Logic. Big thread with info. It really was a huge problem, though -- something like 85% of the drives shipped were doomed within two years.

That said, I have an MPG3204AH model in my collection that somehow works 100%. It has the CL-SH8671-450E-A3 MCU and was manufactured in July of 2001. The SMART status shows as "bad" in some HDD tools due to a firmware timer in these older Fujitsu drives that trips up after a large number of power-on hours, but it works perfectly otherwise (no bad sectors, strange noises, etc). Naturally I wouldn't actually use it in a system, though.

The other model ranges predating MPF and MPG are fine. My PIII box runs an MPE3136AH with no problems, despite nearly 30K power-on hours. This MPE family and previous use MCUs developed in-house by Fujitsu itself.

I have a couple others on the shelf that are also working normally (MPD3064AT, M1636TAU). I just wish there was a way to reset the "bad" status for the power-on hours count.

We had a few MPE units that went bad, but not to the same extent as the others. The MPD line was fairly reliable, but we found them to be quieter and much slower than almost any competing unit, but they cost less, so my manager insisted on using them.

Our usual supplier claimed that the problems were related to the glue used in the production of the CL chips. Supposedly, the MPG line represented the fixed version. We replaced an MPF with an MPG for one woman, and it went bad even more quickly; she was back within two weeks of installation. I was never entirely convinced of that explanation (was Fujitsu the only company using that CL chip?), and the failure rate on the MPGs agreed with me, but fortunately, we stopped using their drives after we had to absorb the cost of in-warranty replacements on a number of them.