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Sydney, Australia – Australian hard drive manufacturer, SpinLogic, recalled thousands of hard drives because of incompatibilities with hardware in the Northern Hemisphere. Customer complaints prompted the recall.
Bobby Box, a first time computer user, reports, "Technical support told me about the problem, but I wasn't sure until someone at the store physically confirmed it."
The issue causing the recall is the Coriolis Effect. Just as a toilet will flush in a different direction in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, the same effect occurs in hard drives.
Hard drives produced for the Northern Hemisphere (for countries like the United States and Canada) are expected to spin clockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere hard drives must compensate for the effects of the spin of the Earth by spinning in counterclockwise motion. "The effects of having an improper spin can be devastating. Lost data, file corruption, and illegal operation errors," says Lloyd Davis of SpinLogic "If you have any concerns, you should quickly return your computer to the manufacturer and ask for a hard drive spin inspection. Your important files might be saved if you act now."
SpinLogic has found roughly 10,000 defective hard drives and started redistribution to countries like Peru with suboptimal spin rates.
To find out how easy it was to get a replacement for this flaw, we visited an Office Depot in Virginia Beach. After explaining the cause of the effect, the sales representative, after giggling about the question responded, "We are sorry that we do not carry Northern Hemisphere hard drives, but we have Western Digital."
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