Seagate Drives Dinged

A glitch in a series of Fibre Channel drives from Seagate Technology Inc. (NYSE: STX) was caught by at least one major OEM, avoiding the creation of defective equipment, sources say.

EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) confirms that within the last several months, 73- and 146-Gbyte Fibre Channel drives shipped from Seagate showed a problem with lubrication in spindle motors contained in the drives. As a result, the drives set off alarms in EMC's quality-control system.

Somewhere in the second or third quarter of 2003, EMC's tracking mechanisms, which are set up to test components for specific products prior to production, started showing failure rates a wee bit higher than normal.

"Variability in components is nothing new," says Chuck Hollis, VP of platforms marketing at EMC. He says it's up to the vendor to catch variability before it makes it into production -- and a hair's breadth off a normal model of testing can be a signal something's amiss.

"We got Seagate on the phone and did a root-cause analysis," Hollis says. The problem subsequently was solved satisfactorily, he notes.Apparently, the drive glitch has been common knowledge in manufacturing circles for months, but it doesn't seems to have affected actual products. Another source, who requested anonymity, says other OEMs may have been affected, but indicates the drive problems appear to have been resolved early on in production, as they were at EMC.

Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), another Seagate Fibre Channel customer, did not return calls requesting information at press time.

Seagate spokesman Forrest Monroy doesn't confirm or deny news of the glitch, and he says Seagate won't give specifics related to customer shipments. But he too says there's nothing out of the ordinary here. "With any high-tech component, things will come up. We work with customers to meet their needs."

Is the situation being minimized? Without more vendor input, it's tough to tell what was the scope of the drive problem and whether it resulted in any real difficulty for particular OEMs. The waves have closed over the incident, and its secrets, if there are any, appear to have dropped out of sight.

One thing seems certain, though: Actual consumers of the Fibre Channel products using the drives won't note any blips, since they were ironed out by specific vendors early on. One analyst, Peter Gerr of The Enterprise Storage Group Inc. says "the possibility" there were delays in qualification of Fibre Channel drives on the market recently hasn't turned up anything that could "materially affect" any vendors.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch