According to a report at the japanese magazine Nikkei.Net Interactive (login required) ,which was published today, Fujitsu is going to recall about ten million internal harddisk drives which were manufactured during September 2000 and September 2001. If the recall process is limited to Japan is not known. The report states that the RMA process will be free of charge for customers. The whole conversion is said to cost about 85 million Euro, which was confirmed by Fujitsu spokesperson Bob Pomeroy. He also said that customers like IBM, Hitachi and NEC were concerned. Rancho*: I also own 2 Fujitsu drives and had intermittent problems with complete drive failures... Update: It seems there have been translation errors. The correct amount of HDD's is 300.000. Also there are numerous reports about failing Fujitsu drives outside Japan. Read more...

The defect is related to semiconductors used in the drives, Fujitsu Vice President Takashi Takaya said. Fujitsu posted a notice on its Web site alerting owners of PC models containing the drives that they may not work properly in humid climates. The flaw may affect between 2 percent to 3 percent of the 10 million hard disk drives that were produced between September 2000 and September 2001, spokeswoman Emi Watanabe said. The disk drives are found in Fujitsu's own computers, as well as those of Fujitsu customers NEC Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. Bloomberg for more information.