Hitachi is NOT IBM

IBM was a great innovator in the field of magnetic disk storage devices with many patents to their name. They had one of the best hard disk drives in the business when they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi in 2002.

Hitachi was a great electronics company that I remember fondly for their fantastic VCR's in the 1980's. I owned one of the world's smallest personal portable cassette players made by Hitachi circa 1982 (generally known by the Sony trademark "Walkman").

Nowadays the only Hitachi branded products that I encounter are hard disk drives. While I don't know what the install base is for this brand of drive, I do see quite a lot of failures. As a matter of fact the last 7 hard drives that I have had to replace have all been Hitachi. In this subset of failed drives were both desktop and laptop models ranging in age from around 18 to 30 months with only one desktop model nearly making it to 4 years. My experience has been to expect around 5 years for a desktop hard drive and slightly less for a laptop hard drive.

I have to go out on a limb and guess that this failure rate has to do with the plant in Thailand. I am going to connect my knowledge of the very poor manufacturing standards for touch-screen voting machines with this hard drive problem. Admitted this is pretty thin, but I would like to know why a good company like Hitachi sucks so hard when it comes to hard drives.

Do your research and buy a model or a brand that doesn't use Hitachi hard drives. These failures I have experienced came from HP, eMachine, and Toshiba. I could care less for HP and eMachine.

I am a Toshiba Certified Service Technician who is very impressed with that company's foresight in the area of serviceability. They need to spend a dollar or two more to provide you with a better hard drive.



Your Average Idiot