Hi Folks,

I am sure you have all seen the Hitachi drives on sale at Fry's and other places.  Beware - the deal may not be as good as it appears to be.

Let me tell you of two personal experiences with Hitachi drives. 

The first one was a customer who bought a new Lenovo laptop computer.  I will make a long story short and just tell you that the problem was the Hitachi Hard drives.  Over a period of several months we went through three different computers and seven hard drives.  All the drives were Hitachi and all the problems were hard drive overheating and failure after less than 100 hours of use.  Luckily we had made an Acronis image of the computer just after we finished setting it up and installing the software that he needed.  Sadly, the image did not do us any good when he finally sent all the computers and hard drives back to Lenovo and decided to buy a Dell laptop.

The other incident involves a hard drive that I bought at Fry's.  It seemed to be a very good deal, 250 Gig for $100 or so after the rebates.  I never installed the drive in a computer; I just used it in a USB external enclosure.  I noticed it was getting very hot, so I left the top off of the enclosure and only used it for short periods of time.  The drive failed in less than 20 hours.  I applied for a replacement from Hitachi and when I got the new drive, I decided to test it in a removable drive tray in my computer.  This tray has a fan and plenty of ventilation and I didn't want to have it overheating.  The drive ran much cooler than the first drive but it failed last week with less than 100 hours of use.  It failed to the point where the computer would not recognize it in the BIOS and it would not boot, not even to a diagnostic disk, with the drive in the computer.  I emailed Hitachi with all this information and I promptly received an email asking me to run their diagnostic on the drive and to send then the log file so they could see what the problem was with my computer.  I replied that they either didn't read my email or they didn't understand the meaning of "it will not boot with the drive in the system" and that I really didn't care if they replaced the drive or not.  I will just consider the money a bad investment.

After some arguing via email they finally replaced the drive again.  I mounted the new drive in the removable tray and although it got hotter than the other drives in the system, it didn't get as hot as the first couple.  I used it for a month with no real problems but I did notice that it did overheat and set the alarm off about once or twice a day.  I will play with this drive and use it for things that are NOT IMPORTANT but you can be sure that I will not use it as a system or a data drive.  WHEN this one fails, as I am sure it will in the near future, I will throw it away and just forget about it.

You can bet your bottom dollar that I will never buy another Hitachi drive - regardless of the price.  A good deal is only good if you are getting something you can rely on to perform the way it is supposed to.

Chuckstr
----My Web Site----

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