Fujitsu blames Cirrus for close to 6 million hard drive failues

IN THE $50 MILLION COURT BATTLE between Cirrus Logic and Fujitsu, papers lodged with the Californian court suggest Fujitsu knew of problem with a batch of its hard drives at least 18 months ago.

Fujitsu's filings suggest Cirrus Logic had supplied it with defective chips in the summer 2000, and started to receive complaints about failures from May 2001. The filings confirm what our Eva discovered here: that a change in the constitution of the resin used to attach the controller chips caused a failure in up to 5.9 million drives.

The mould compound was supplied thrugh Cirrus Logic through one of its suppliers to Fujitsu.

Fujitsu says that Cirrus Logic should have known of these "significant" changes - and that it have warned Fujitsu about them. It contends that Cirrus' failure to inform it of the potential problems with the drives has done harm to its own relationship with its customers.

Fujitsu determined that the failure rate of the chips was "in excess of all reasonable industry standards". Keith Warburton of the PC Association in the UK says this claim is likely to, "bring an outraged response from Fujitsu's trade customers and end-users, who have been trying to get an open response from the company for many months." (By the way Keith - we're theinquirer.net, not theinquirer.com).

He says Fujitsu's stance has been "either an outright denial of any problem (stand up, Fujitsu Germany, Fujitsu Canada & Fujitsu in Australia) or a grudging statement that "some customers have reported problems".

Fujitsu's own statement that up to 5.9 million of its drives could fail within their normal life expectation, damns the company by its own hand, says Warburton. "This admission could provide valuable ammunition in world-wide legal actions against the company" and "is a shameful reflection upon the company and its claimed care for its customers," he says.

For its part, Fujitsu blames Cirrus because it failed to take prompt and thorough action and didn't provide full information, on the pending disaster. µ

WE STILL remain interested in Maxim's phosphorous compound failure, which we wrote about here.

L'INQ
PC Association UK