The engineers at Toshiba didn't. That's why the company announced on Friday that it would spend $2.1 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit against it.
It was a former IBM engineer named Phil Adams who actually pinned down the problem and decided to take legal action. According to Adams, the problem which resides in the chip's "microcode," the instructions that are actually burned into the chip itself is especially persnickety because it can manifest itself in a variety of ways, randomly deleting or corrupting information on otherwise healthy disks. Once Adams was sure he knew what he was dealing with, he took it to a Texas law firm, which filed the suit. MORE >>