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3 hard drives in 3 years... acceptable? >>>

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Hello folks... I just needed a place to rant and get some ideas. Quickly... I bought an iBook G4 at the end of '03 and am in the midst of getting it's 3rd hard drive installed. I also had to replace the motherboard once. All phone discussions with Apple have yielded the company line of "Sorry, but it's out of warranty". When I asked them if 3 hard drives in 3 years was acceptable to Apple they said... "Sorry, but it's out of warranty".

At this point I am so disappointed about all of this. My iBook has only been used in the home for mere recreation. The only travelling it does is from upstairs to downstairs in my home... that's it. I'm not putting any excessive load on the hard drive and think that it should hold up longer. More importantly, I'd (naively?) like to think that a company like Apple wouldn't be satisfied with this kind of performance from their product and could AT LEAST pretend to care that it's product is performing poorly. I didn't even get that.

I still haven't finished my phone campaign with Apple, but I'm so frustrated by their lack of customer service/support. You're in my position... what would you do now?

Thanks!
Erik K
 

dtravis7


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Is Apple replacing the hard drives for you? Could you check and see what brand the drives are? You can find out in System Profiler.

That is not normal for sure.
 
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Well Erik_K, first I would say "Welcome to Mac Forums!!" :dive:

After that, I would agree with you that this is not really expected behaviour from a Mac. Into all businesses a few lemons must fall, and it sounds like you may have one. I think you are taking all the right steps.

The only thing I might wonder about is heat - heat is a killer of hard drives and might fry motherboards too. When you or the Apple techs are installing the latest hard drive, pay some attention to the fans and the fan outlets. Are they working up to snuff? Any blockage (dust, plastic covers, whatever?). When you use the iBook, is there any chance that you are habitually using in a place or an orientation where the fan outlets are obstructed?

Just a few thoughts. Hopefully you may yet resolve this to your satisfaction.
 
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Hey guys, thanks for the replys...

I've always tried to take steps to not let the iBook get too hot. I never leave it sitting in one place for a long period and try to move it around periodically while using it. I also try to turn it off when not in use.

They (Apple) are doing (and have done) the replacement work, but not paying for it. I do not know the make of the hard drives they have used. I dropped the computer off at the Apple store today so it's not here for me to check. From what I was told at my local Apple store, they don't always use the same company for their supply of drives.

I think of my iBook as a Porsche that breaks down frequently. It's awesome when it's running, but when it isn't... it isn't. I was thinking of jumping the Mac ship and going to the other guys... but I'm typing this on a borrowed Microsoft based laptop and I swear... I'll quit computers altogether before going back this this!!! :)

Again, I just want Apple to say... "Hey, we know it's out of warranty, but you've been a good, loyal customer. Here's a couple of MacDonalds gift certificates" or something like that. In all seriousness, a good company takes care of it's customers if it wants to keep them as customers. Apple isn't doing that and it stinks. It's the type of thing that makes you wish there was a third party in the computer company race.
 
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Three hard drives and a mother board?! Find the store manager, walk him through this one. T'aint right.
 

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Hello folks... I just needed a place to rant and get some ideas. Quickly... I bought an iBook G4 at the end of '03 and am in the midst of getting it's 3rd hard drive installed. I also had to replace the motherboard once. All phone discussions with Apple have yielded the company line of "Sorry, but it's out of warranty". When I asked them if 3 hard drives in 3 years was acceptable to Apple they said... "Sorry, but it's out of warranty".

At this point I am so disappointed about all of this. My iBook has only been used in the home for mere recreation. The only travelling it does is from upstairs to downstairs in my home... that's it. I'm not putting any excessive load on the hard drive and think that it should hold up longer. More importantly, I'd (naively?) like to think that a company like Apple wouldn't be satisfied with this kind of performance from their product and could AT LEAST pretend to care that it's product is performing poorly. I didn't even get that.

I still haven't finished my phone campaign with Apple, but I'm so frustrated by their lack of customer service/support. You're in my position... what would you do now?

Thanks!
Erik K

Hard drive failures are unfortunately becoming a very common reality of the industry these days. In the field of 2.5" hard drives, the most commonly failure-prone units are the IBM/Hitachi "Travelstar" drives, they're so bad, at work we refer to them as "Deathstars". But IBM/Hitachi are not the only ones, we see a lot of failed Fujitsu and Toshiba drives as well. To be quite honest, I don't think it's the fault of Apple as much as it is the drive manufacturers pushing the limits of storage density while paying little attention to making more reliable drives (one of the many reasons that the majority of manufacturers have scaled their warranties back to 1-year when just a few years ago they were 3-5 years as standard). Do you happen to know what brand of drives you had that needed to be replaced?
 
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moving the laptop wile its on and wile the hard drive is spinning may be a problem too.
 

cwa107


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moving the laptop wile its on and wile the hard drive is spinning may be a problem too.

Notebook hard drives are designed to function while being moved. What kills them is sudden high g-force maneuvers like drops and shocks. Moving your laptop around while the drive is working will not damage it under normal conditions.
 

Tak


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Apple HDs are notoriously punk, replace with a non Apple drive. A good reliable segate with a decent warranty.
 

cwa107


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Apple HDs are notoriously punk, replace with a non Apple drive. A good reliable segate with a decent warranty.

Apple doesn't make hard drives, they use 3rd parties like every other manufacturer, except maybe IBM - but since they sold off their HD division to Hitachi and computer division to Lenovo, I guess that's not true either.

An Apple OEM drive still comes from the usual suspects, Hitachi/WD/Seagate/Fujitsu/Toshiba, it's just that the unit is warranted through Apple and the OEM manufacturer has no liability.

But I agree with the thumbs up for Seagate. I've been using their drives since they reverted back to the 5-year warranty, which says a lot about the confidence they have in their product.

Fortunately, it looks like Apple feels the same way as my MacBook Pro came equipped with a Seagate drive as standard.
 
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Certainly not right. I have a laptop that i have had for well over 5 years and have never had to replace a hard drive. Find out what kind of drives they have been using and get something else.
 
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In an odd way, I would guess that there is a minor upside to all of the pain you have been going through... I would bet that you are more diligent than most in ensuring that you always have up to date backups! Hopefully these repeated hard disk failures have not cost you any significant data loss?
 
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Correct, backup lessons learned - no significant data loss.

The latest from Apple is they offered me $100 off my next Apple computer purchase. I find that very amusing and very sweet of them.

I must say that I realize that most corporations respond this way and that I'm sure Dell or Gateway or whomever else would probably be playing ball this way, that it's not a unique response by Apple. I'd just hoped for more. They like to play up the counter culture image, but in the end... they're all the same.

At this point I'm just a conflicted man with a conflicted mantra: "Computers suck... long live computers."

Thanks for the help, insight and suggestion guys. Much appreciated!
 

Tak


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Apple doesn't make hard drives, they use 3rd parties like every other manufacturer,

I misspoke, I should have said Apple BRANDED hard drives.


I just discovered I have a Fujitsu, I am less than thrilled.
 

cwa107


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I misspoke, I should have said Apple BRANDED hard drives.


I just discovered I have a Fujitsu, I am less than thrilled.

Fujitsus are generally decent drives. On my servers at work, all of the RAID arrays consist of Fujitsu drives and I've yet to have a failure. One of those servers has been running for nearly 5 years constantly. I'd say of the laptop drives I see go bad, Fujitsu (although in the top three) is more in the middle of the pack.

In order of most commonly failed 2.5" drives I see, the list looks like this:

1. IBM/Hitachi
2. Toshiba
3. Fujitsu
4. Seagate (never seen one fail in a laptop)
5. Western Digital (also never seen one fail in a laptop, but they haven't been in the 2.5" market that long either).

Interestingly enough, that order is almost completely reversed for desktop drives:

1. Maxtor
2. Western Digital
3. Seagate
4. Samsung
5. Fujitsu

(never seen a Toshiba drive in a desktop)
 

dtravis7


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On Desktop drives I have had more issues with Samsung and Maxtor. I have worked with more Maxtors so that is probably why I have seen more go bad. There were also the IBM 60 and 75GXP Desktop drives that dropped like files but that was a while back. Otherwise your findings in your work match what I have seen. Overall Seagate though has been the most reliable for me.

Apple uses very good hard drive brands overall in all the Apple stuff I have either repaired or owned. Apple DOES NOT make any hard drives. Non at all.
 

rman


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Most people have said that your hard drives should not fail that quickly. But I am wondering what are you doing to your system to have possibly three different manufacturers hard drives fails. The only thing we know here is that the hard drive maybe different and you are using the system the same way. It is possible you are doing something to put extra stress on your hard drive.
 

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