Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies have started to recall some of their 40 and 80GB hard disk drives, DigiTimes report. As far as is currently known, at this time it only affects the products sold in Taiwan and made in China because of 10% defect rate.

According to the report, Taiwanese resellers had to exchange quite a lot of HDDs supplied by Seagate Technology, Maxtor and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies during the last couple of months. It is estimated that 10% of all HDDs have certain defects that cause bad sectors and problems with formatting to occur. Reportedly, all of them were made in China. Unfortunately, we have no information where else besides Taiwan all those HDDs have been supplied.

It is suspected that unusually high defect rate was a reason of difficulties with transitioning to more advanced production processes. We reported in early April that both Maxtor and Western Digital had problems with transitioning to 80GB platters (see this news-story), so, the reason of current product recall may be caused by similar difficulties. Note that WD does not have HDD manufacturing partners in China.

All faulty HDDs will be replaced; I do not think that there is a reason to panic about your storage devices now since we do not know the background of the story and the quantity of actual devices affected by the defects mentioned above.