I remember working with these drives and find some so slow and then at one time, two models had defective cirrus logic chipsets made me shy of them long ago. Even I didn't had one either even now.
What ATA models do you know are quick and does not sport cirrus logic chipsets?
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
The CL chip failure was the reason Fujitsu left the HDD production market. It was devastating financially to get a defective IC that was put into an entire generation of consumer disks, then it's defective cousin in enterprise SCSI drives. Lots of su-ball. 🙁 Sad. Till that point they were excellent drives. I still have several SCSI's before the problem in daily operation. My Fujitsu SCO UNIX system still has 2.
I had a 4gb Fujitsu that came in my MII 233 system
The system always seemed glacial until I upgraded to a Maxtor 60gb drive.
Drive was quite reliable and was sold in my college system (K6-2 450) to another student for cheap.
uridium wrote on 2020-09-22, 03:29:The CL chip failure was the reason Fujitsu left the HDD production market. [...]
Wow, had no idea about this. I was somewhat of a fan in the 90's, simply based on the fact that my first PC (that came with a working HDD) had a Fujitsu M1614TAU inside. Nice and reliable, although not a speed demon. First upgrade was to another Fujitsu, 17.3GB, and I remember the older drive that I had given away to a friend was still working ~10 years after that.
Since I started hoarding collecting 3 years ago I have amassed quite a few Fujitsu drives, and to my surprise the percentage of dead ones is quite high. I guess the explanation could be this:
Fujitsu admits 4.9 million (potentially) defective HDDs.
More shocking, in the end it seems Fujitsu was forced to pay Cirrus Logic around $25 million in damages.
Fujitsu hard drive line was picked up by Toshiba in 2009 according to wiki.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.
Sample size of 1, but my 3.5" 528 MB Fujitsu drive looks to be very well built and has no operational issues or obvious signs of deterioration. It DOES have a Cirrus Logic chipset, funny enough.
I've often read that various drive makers have periods where they've more focused on quality, eras where they've been more driven to cut costs and produced cheap-looking drives, and times where a line is notoriously unreliable to the point of public grumbling and even scandal. But aside from Kalok, JTS, and probably some obscure drive makers of the 1980s, I think most companies did sell many reasonably engineered and reliable drives and shouldn't be wholly avoided because of their Deathstar-style fiascos.
quicknick wrote on 2020-09-22, 12:33:uridium wrote on 2020-09-22, 03:29:The CL chip failure was the reason Fujitsu left the HDD production market. [...]
More shocking, in the end it seems Fujitsu was forced to pay Cirrus Logic around $25 million in damages.
That was a ploy that didn't work to delay Fujitsu hammering CL for the losses of shipping defective chips and not fully informing FJ/FAL about the extent and that it may be a patchable problem whilst they continued to sell drives. The expensive issue is outages and data loss at the enterprise level. Reparations drove them out of the game. I think it's sad. Their mechanisms were quite solid.
