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IBM DeskStar 75GXP Hard Drive Failures?
Sean Kelly asks: "Like a lot of other people, I went out and bought myself a nice 60GB IBM DeskStar 75GXP (ATA100, 7200rpm) hard drive to put in my sparkling new computer. Boy was that a mistake! A few months after I got the drive, it failed with horrific grinding and clicking noises, plus random data loss. So I RMA'd the first one and got a 'SERVICEABLE USED PART' replacement from IBM, which died of the same death after another few months. Not getting the hint, I RMA'd that one. Last week, I got the refab. drive back from IBM and it has already died, in less than a week! This time I did some site searching and found many people are having problems with this drive. Sites such as The Inquirer, Hexus, Tech Report, Hardware One,
Sysopt, and even this PCWorld have dedicated articles, forums and user reviews to these failing and defective drives. From what I can understand, IBM is not publicly acknowledging that they screwed up here. How many other people out there have had their 75GXP (or 60GXP) drives fail? What size were they? What part number? What did IBM do about it? It is my opinion that IBM should do something about this, since I've seen an unnaturally high number of complaints about this drive now that I started looking for customer feedback. Also, here is a letter I sent to IBM explaining my frustration with them. It has more information in it."
Mine's been working fine for a full year now. I've never heard a peep about them failing more than they should or anything...*shrug*
I've been running a pair as RAID-0 (yeah, I know...) for a couple of months, haven't had any major problems. The drives seem to seek to the inner track and back more often than my Seagate drive, but it's rarely a problem.
I've had problems with other drives before because of a power supply which was slightly too low voltage -- it seems a few drives are overly sensitive to minor voltage drops.
But a couple of my friends had Maxtor 80gb drives "fail" to the point where it was worth buying a new drive to avoid attempting to get assistance from Maxtor's tech support...
Do you like German cars?
Or to speak with a representative please contact IBM
Global Services at: 1-888-426-4343, and a representative
will be more than happy to assist you.
I just called them and got transferred to about 10 different people. I was simply asking for someone to talk to me about network cabling. None of them got it. Idiots.
Most of my data is, last time I checked, still on my 60gig drive. It clicks horribly, and I'm sure my data will be gone soon. The 75 gig drive that IBM sent me (took 2-3 weeks to arrive, tho this was across september 11) to RMA my first drive showed up DOA. My only thought is to buy another brand of drive, copy my data off, keep RMAing until I get one that works, and sell it to some pour sob. I'd feel bad about doing it too.
Mine has been running well for 6+ months... Never had a problem.
Small sample size, but so far My experience with them has been 100% bliss..... I wonder if there is a pattern to the failed drives, you have failed several, I know people who have several (raided usually) and they work fine... Different Powersupplys maybe?
What, me worry?
Have to have the bleeding edge, eh? Do you have an Athlon 1.4 GHz too?
May I humbly suggest that if these data are indeed of such importance, that 4 mm DAT, CD-RW, Zip disks, or even the lowly 1.44 MB floppy are suitable backup media?
Fulminating about lost data due to the failure of a mechanical storage system, and vague threats of class-action lawsuits, are in my experience goods ways to get large manufacturing organizations to put your letter in the deep freeze for about 10 years.
sPh
I had a Maxtor 10 gig drive (IBM ships Maxtors) that crapped out on me too with the same symptoms. I woke up in the middle of the night to hear odd clunking noises. I kicked my case and it didn't click for about a month. Then, when a month was up, the clunking noises came back with a vengance and my hard drive was shot. I haven't sent it back to IBM yet, but I'm hoping I'll get a free replacement.
void women (int money, time_t time);
I heard about this problems MONTHS ago. I heard that the 75GXP's were going to be discontinued because of so many rampant problems with them, and the 60GXP was the replacement line. Not sure if any of that came to be, or was true, but that's what I heard a few months ago. There are many more complaints about that drive than any other I have ever seen.
FWIW - I have a friend running RAID-0 with them (has been running his since the 75GXP's came out) and he has not had any problems.
I've had a lot of luck with Maxtor's newer model drives. I have several of their 80-gig HDs, and none has crapped out on me yet. And the price is right; Maxtor 80 giggers can be had at CompUSA for $200.
I guess they decided there were enough problems with the 75GXP line that they sent me a 60GXP. I haven't heard of any problems with the 60GXP line, and to boot it's much quieter than my old 75GXP -- I can't even hear it seek unless I listen very closely.
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Take a look at the discussion forums over at StorageReview.com. There have been several discussions about the 75GXP (and 60GXP) over there.
Case in point, some of their readers are currently running an unofficial survey.
I have 2 45Gb drives also in a raid aray, they've been running for several months now without any problems. So far it seems like there are more satisfied ppl that not. Maybe there's something killing your drives.
How's the ventilation in your computer case? Is it possible your drives are overheating?
I've had one drive crap out that was a 75G. I also had a 30G crap out in the same way.
Had a matched pair of IBM 40GB IDE drives -- /proc/ide -- set up as RAID 1. One of them rolled over and died recently. Might be related to power; I replaced the power supply fan same time I replaced the drive.
IBM-DTLA-305040, according to
Reformatted it, and discovered about 8% was gone, all up in the high-numbered sectors. So I repartitioned to make sure those cylinders stayed unused, and put it back into service in another machine where nothing much interesting is going on.
Would have been nasty if it hadn't been mirrored, though.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
The rumour going around the people who work on the disk subsystem in Linux is that certain lots/fabrication plats have lots of problems, and others are A-OK.
I recently got to experience the latter, when I got a machine with six of these disks as a RAID. To date, FIVE of the disks have had to be replaced, thanks God that did not include the system disk...
Fulminating. Good word. You don't come 'round these parts much, do you?
I have a 20 gig desktar and it clicks every once in a while. A few months ago I lost about 3 gigs of data, but it was only some folders and no system files were affected, so I don't know if it was the drive's fault or some weird software error.
I've got two 75GXP's in a striped RAID configuration that haven't given me a lick of problems. They've been humming along for the past six months.
However, we've had an equally recent IBM IDE drive (model unknown) and an IBM SCSI drive give out at work; both failures were easily attributed to the high-vibration environment that these drives were operating in (nearby construction).
Back it up if it's important to you.
I have a 20GB 10K RPM Deskstar that has been working like a champ; IBM had a great rep for reliable drives. So I recently purchased a 60GB Deskstar. Fortunately for me, I was unable to get it to work at all, so I exchanged it for a WD. Only later did I start reading about all the reported problems.
I noticed that the drive was manufactured in Romania, rather than the usual asian locations...
General concensus in messages boards seems to be that IBM hard drives manufactured in Hungary seem to fail at a greater rate than from other factories.
I myself have had a failed IBM hard drive. It was defective upon shipping, and had it replaced immediately with an advance RMA. The replacement failed on me about a month later, and I didn't qualify for an advance RMA because I already RMA'ed it once (even though the first one didn't techically fail on me, it was DOA). This was a 10GB Deskstar 14GXP (I think).
So during the excruciating one-month replacement, I bought a Maxtor drive, and now use it as my primary drive (I'm not trusting my third IBM replacement). The Maxtor's a faster drive anyway, so I'm not complaining. I'll just stay clear of IBMs for a while.
For years Microsoft has been creating operating systems that crash all the time. At first the average user might think: "Hey! This is a bug". Well, they're wrong. Microsoft does this as an added bonus to their products. Do you really think that a company with so much money and so many developers cannot create a stable OS?
IBM, seeing that this added feature obviously creates more revenue, thought: "Hey! Let's add a feature in our hard drives, that makes the drive crash all the time. That way the users OS can crash all the time along with the hardware crashing all the time."
When will the Linux community ever learn that it's not stability that makes money, it's the way you present it.
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
There was some rumbling on Storage Review that these drives may just be too fast for their electronics, and once you start filling up the outer sectors on the disk you will start getting errors. My friend has a pair of the 45GB 75XPs, and at least one of them has "issues". Every so often (now that the drive is full) the kernel will spit out:
ad4s1g: hard error reading fsbn 76293856 of 26874736-26874751 (ad4s1 bn 76293856; cn 8073 tn 63 sn 37)
followed by:
ad4: DMA problem fallback to PIO mode
So far the 60GXPs that I use have had no problems (knock on wood). I've seen at least once source that suggests that the 45GB versions of this drive are the most suseptable to having this problem. I suspect there was some poor quality control on these drives and some very marginal hardware was released onto the world (bad IBM, bad!), but that's more of a feeling since I don't have much evidence to support the claim.
I read the internet for the articles.
I've got two 60GB DeskStars in my G4. One was factory installed by Apple, the other I bought from a bargain reseller [it was the OEM model, so no manuals or anything]. Both have worked flawlessly for the last six months. [I even turned off Acoustic Management so they're runnin' at full throttle.]
*shrug*
Yea.... this has been a recurring problem. I've been getting weird clicking noises since a year ago, and it finally died on me a week ago. Came home one night, the computer froze, but the HD Access light was on. It was plain on, so I reset, W2K startup screen started, then this weird screeching noise occured, then W2K bluescreened, giving me a HD error. I just sent my drive to IBM to be replaced, but since I live in Canada, I don't expect back for a few months. Last time I checked the store I go to, they pulled the 60GXPs because of some 'unknown fault', and they refused to stock 75GXPs. Not good. I just want a drive I can use without dying.
------
Amadaeus
The last bastion of Mathie-ism
I have a 45GB 75GXP, and I have had no problems with it for six months. At work I bought 2 75GB GXP's four months ago, and those are in our server, and they seem to be fine. For a person that regularly seems to get sent hardware with terminal illness, they have been fine for me so far. (knock on wood)
I bet IBM decided to hire Steven Ball to design the DeskStar 75GXP :-)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I've got 2 45GB (75?)GXPs in a RAID 0 and a 27GB GXP. The 27 GB is at least a year old. The 45GBs were bought in January. No problems. Then again I'm using them in a G3. Perhaps you should try making "the switch" if you want to save yourself; I mean your drives.
Heh heh.
I had one 30GB 75xp for about 6 months when it started making weird noises ... then it had a "bad sector". IBM had me run their software disk utility and I ended up reformatting. I bought a 45GB (same model) at the same time I restarted everything and I haven't had problems since. /me knocks on wood
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port
I strapped mine to the back of my favorite E-Z-Chair. I run a program that alternately seeks the innermost then outermost cylinders. Now the chair hums like a power-sander; It puts me right to sleep!
I still have some unique and important data on it (the drive, not the chair), so I am concerned that this unorthodox use of the drive may lead to problems. I may even start doing backups.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I am not sure about the ones in the article, I have not used any yet but we had several, 18 out of 30, of their 36.4 gig drives fail along with attendant raid controllers in all of our servers. They would never come right out and say manufacturing defect but that is what was I felt implied. All of them were from the same batch and all failed within days of eachother. The replacement drives have been just fine for almost a year now. Who knows......?
You are much better off sueing either in Small Claims court,where the limits tend to be around 1-1.5K dollars, don't require a lawyer on your part, and tend to be settled pretty quickly.
Threats of filling a class action lawsuit are a waste of time, you are much better off going to your county courthouse, filling the paper work, doing a quick web search on where to send the papers, and hire a courier to deliver them to IBMs local legal representative. When the day is done they will pay you your 1500 because it is much easier/cheaper to do that then to send two lawyers at $200/hr to your location to fight it (and still loose quite a bit of money)
My IBM 75GXP hard drives havebeen the most reliable hard drives I've ever used. The three I own have run, quietly and reliably, for about a year, 24/7.
I bought a 20GB DPTA-372050 1.5 years ago and it failed a week ago. It sure was fast(26MB/s), but far too noisy, so I won't bother replacing it. Bought a nice Fujitsu 40GB SILENTDRIVE instead and are happy with that.
:-(
I'll think twice before I buy an IBM drive again.
Regards, Tommy
Of the 3 in my office 2 died within 2 weeks. we just rolled out a hundred+ to public labs, so far one has died, we'll see how the rest fare.
Our IBM tech has said he's seen more problems with these than any others.
Everyone I know who has gotten a drive 60GB or bigger has had to RMA their drive at least once (and one person four times!). This goes for Maxtor(/Quantum), and IBM.
It seems to me that the hard drive manufacturers should be spending more time producing quality drives instead of trying to one-up each other in the "who's bigger" war.
First to market may be well and good, if you have a quality drive. And even though OSen can take up to 1.5GB of space, few people couldn't survive with a 40GB drive. And the two month difference in time while manufacturers took the extra steps to create quality 60+GB drives wouldn't hurt people or the industry.
libertarianswag.com
I bought my 75GXP because it was recommended on Ars Technica's system guide, and because it reviewed favorably on StorageReview.com. It provided me with over a half-year of trouble-free service.
Unfortunately, I too had my 75GXP die. The first signs of trouble showed up about seven months after I bought it. At random intervals, the drive would make strange, non-normal noises (it almost sounded like a head or something skipping across the platters, which is impossible...right?).
The Real Problem happened a few weeks later when I had to install WinME (don't laugh--I had a good reason at the time). I moved all my data to a second HDD, but WinME's install failed almost before it started. A full surface scan via Scandisk produced classic bad HDD noises (CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-wrrrrr. CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-wrrrrr. Repeat infinitely).
IBM's drive diagnostic program reported that the drive was indeed bad, and gave me a cryptic error code that I no longer have written down. I RMA'd the drive via IBM's automated web RMA process and received a new (refurbished) one less than two weeks later. That was in March, and the new drive has given me no problems.
Yet.
Perhaps now is a good time to start looking at StorageReview again...
It's a good thing I sold my 60GB Deskstar to my ex-boyfriend for $200... ;)
To me it seems like the quality of hard drives in general is sort of going down. I was considering getting an IBM deskstar, but most any place I've seen online has also documented that these drives tend to fail often (not always but more than they should). At the place I work we've blown about 4 Seagate hard drives in the last couple of weeks - and we don't even have many computers. It seems like perhaps magnetic storage technology is getting pushed to it's limit. I mean when you hear about how the heads float on a cusion of air millionths of an inch from the platters, and the small tollerance needed to read and write, it's quite amazing. But simply put, magnetic technology probably just doesn't have the reliability that we need at this point and it's time for a newer medium.
Well in any event, my next hard drive will probably be a Western Digital
with a 20 GB IBM GXP HD. The thing lasted about two months. I took back to the store that I bought it from, and I argued that they should take it back, since 100,000 hours is standard. They said OK, but they stoped selling them because of the problems they were getting with them and they gave me a 7200 RPM WD. Been happy with that for about 18 months now.
How much of your data loss from the 60gb were mp3s? Maybe IBM is implementing CPRM technology without telling us!
Every single one we've had has gone bad. I think that's about six total now. We stay away from them.
The obvious thing for IBM to do is to raise price of the unit and relable the packaging
High Security Write Only Drive
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I've not received the replacement yet, but I assume it will be a 60GXP. So it's definitely worth sending IBM a polite but firm e-mail!
Note that the 30GB 60GXP only uses one side of one of the platters, since the 60GXP line is 20GB/platter, so in essence I got a crippled 40GB drive.
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I have a 25GB 45gxp and a 15GB 75GXP--both have worked fine for over a year; and I abuse them.
I've only good things to say about these drives.
makes me glad i went with SCSI ultra160 fujitsu drives on my new rig.
Until the Great Annoying Hard Drive Crash of 2001.
Ironically, I had just bought a new CD-R that day which was to be used for data backups. The clicking noise had been there for a couple of days, but I thought it was the ancient 4GB Quantum drive I used for a swap. I shut down the system, installed the new CD-R drive, and attempted to boot. Windows 2000 gave me an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. After two solid days of trying different recovery techniques, I found that I had a dead drive.
Well, mostly. This is when I discovered the wonders of OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro. I'm not doing a commercial here, other than to say it's now a mandatory part of my toolkit. I recovered all but one small website, a total of about 20GB.
Anyway, when I got in contact with IBM, they gave me an address in NorCal to which I had to ship the drive (after denying the reports I had seen on various web sites about severe problems with the 75GXP drive line), and then was told that a replacement would be in my hands in 7-10 working days of their receipt. I live in SoCal, UPS said it was a two-day trip up there, so I figured it would only be a couple of weeks until I could get back to normal.
Wrong. After ten working days, I called, and they were backordered, but expected to be able to ship in three days. Then I called back five days later, and was told that the shipment was coming from overseas. A few days later, the shipment was "stuck in Customs". I finally got my drive (a refurbished unit, dammit) a little more than a month after originally sending it, and it has since worked more or less normally. I am, however, antsy about it, and I am looking forward to getting a couple of good-sized, high-speed Maxtors later this year and setting them up in RAID-1 configuration.
I used to heartily recommend IBM drives, and now my faith has been shaken to the core. Maxtor has regained my respect for top brand, with Seagate second (primarily for price), and then IBM. Of course, I still won't touch a Western Digital if I can avoid it. I've had EIGHT of those go bad in my systems and in those of friends and family.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I've had two 30 GB Deskstars die on me within one year. Luckily I got new ones; the last one got replaced with a 40 GB one because the 30 GB were out of production. Let's hope this one is better...
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Does anyone else find it slightly odd that this almost 'anti-ibm' propoganda is popping up shortly after they publicised their stance on the DMCA? Nothing against the slashdot crew, but lots of companies make bad hardware, Ive used alot of it.
.. maybe it is just a coincidence...
or
I've always believed IBM to be the tried and true hardware manufacturer. At least when I toured IBMs Rochester MN plant a few years ago, I got that impression seeing the racks of drives being stress tested, and the extensive thermal and shock tests being done...
;>
If these reports continue, I might have to go out and buy a Western Digital!
We purchased a half-terabyte IDE RAID system utilizing 8 75GXP Drives. 5 of the 8 drives failed in less than a month. In fact, the drives prompted our RAID vendor to remove them and replace them with Maxtor diamondMAX drives, which have operated flawlessly. If you have a look at storagereview.com, you'll notice that the current king of IDE drives are the western digital "BB" Series drives. I'd stay FAR away from the DeskStar's.
I love the IBM hard drives. IBM may make expensive hardware but they are always fine quality. I can't even tell that its on because its so quiet and its been working for over a year without a problem. I guess the newer ones are the ones that are defective. Also be aware that Maxtor uses %100 IBM desktar drives. They just slap a Maxtor label on them.
http://saveie6.com/
Could it be there's a certain lot of them that were faulty? Or maybe there was a certain lot that was great until something got knocked in the line....
I'd be willing to bet that IBM is checking the serials to see where the process went wrong/right.
That is, if they ever decide to acknowledge there's a problem.
At the place I work, we had a few 18GB IBM drives fail on us. They were standard inclusions with the Sun gear we use here (Sun ships a lot of machines with IBM and Seagate drives.) We found out from IBM that there was a recall on 9, 18 and 36 GB, 10,000 RPM drives manufactured between certain dates. These drives are pretty much guaranteed to fail, period. One of our other departments had over 90% of their suspect drives fail already. Our Sun reps came out to count how many we had, so that they could replace them. My department has well over 100 of the recalled drives. Fortunately, most of them are in gear that hasn't been put into production yet.
This is not a Fugazi
I bought one of those drives for my computer last september. Up untill a month ago, it worked great, but then it died, showing the same symptoms as other people here have mentioned. I haven't followed up with IBM about it yet.
Yep, I'm now dealing with a bad IBM drive as well. It's a 30GB GXP75, which I bought in Feb. of this year. Manufacture date is Dec. 2000. I've got my RMA number (but only after they insisted that I run "Erase Drive" utility) and will ship the thing out on Friday.
;)
What sucks is the fact that I have two more GXP75s running in a server...a 20GB and a 45GB. I've already replaced one of them with a Western Digital 800BB to prevent that one from losing critical data...it's in my main machine which is much easier to backup. I'm just waiting for it to die so I can send it back
While IBM was nice about dealing with this failed 30GB drive, I wasn't too happy that they refused to cross ship me a new drive (probably since they are getting so many of these back)...some people have indeed been able to cross-ship with a credit card number. I begged for them to send me a GXP60 replacement, but I'm not sure if they will. If I get another GXP75 back, I'm going to thrash the hell out of it until it dies too, in hopes of getting a RELIABLE drive back.
There was an article posted somewhere (sorry, no linkage) a few days ago about the GXP60 drives being bad as well...this is very bad news for IBM if it's true. Until I know for sure that the GXP60 drives are *good* drives, I won't be purchasing any new IBM drives in the future.
I own a 40 gig 60GXP and I haven't encountered any of these problems.
My roomate, on the other hand has gone through 3 IBM 30 gig 75GXP's in the last 7 months.
The 75GXP uses 15 GB platters whereas the 60GXP uses 20 GB platters.
I'm no power engineer, but I've read a number of reviews that say its related to power issues in the drive.
(BTW my roomate got his 30 gig 75GXP back on monday and we've since set it up as a public dedicated mp3 gimp on the university network to see how soon it fails.)
Yes, I've had failures with my two 60GB 75GXP drives as well. Under Windows 2000, I would get read/write errors on them. I would reformat them and the problem went away for a short period of time only to return. I also got timeout problems consistently under Windows 2000 -- this was a wierd problem. When the "timeout" occured, the operating system was no longer able to WRITE to the hard drive, thus causing Windows to basically lock up.
Thinking that the drives might be incompatible with my motherboard, I bought an ATA-100 Promise IDE controller. The same problems continued to occur under Windows 2000.
I finally figured I had buggy drives since I bought them when they first came out. I returned one hard drive to see what would happen and IBM replaced it with a brand new one. The same problems occured. So, thinking the problem might be related to Windows, I moved the hard drives to my Linux box and moved my Linux hard drives (IBM 34GB 34GXP drives) to my Windows box. Windows no longer had a problem. I also installed the ATA-100 Promise controller on my Linux box and hooked the 75GXP drives to it. To my surprise, it's been about 6 months and I've not had a single problem on Linux with the 75GXP drives!! All the problems disappeared when switching to Linux and I've been happy with the drives on my Linux box.
My conclusion is that the drives don't work properly under Windows 2000 for some reason. My Linux box is running with the same hard drives and same IDE controller without a single problem. Go figure.
Yeah, I bought a 75gxp for ~$140 when they were shiny and new...that one died in four months, they sent me a refurbished replacement...which died in TWO WEEKS. During which time my WesternDigital drive in the same box experienced no problems.
Eventually I just shelled out another $200 and bought a WD800BB, which has been going good for about a week now.
It would be really cool if I could get some of my money back, as it seems I and a great deal of people on StorageReview.com's (just check the tech support board) forums have gotten totally shafted on this.
Our company ordered 8 of these for our department. 7 seem to be good so far, but one was bad. It had the clicking sound and such. Although we keep most of our work on these machines in a CVS server that is backed up daily. Most of us are developers, and do most of our work on our own machines, and when we get something working, we check it in. So if we lose a HD, then we will probably lose a day or two. Not that bad but still bad enough. We may need to invest in some tape machines for these machines, but it will be hard to get procurement to agree. We each have about a gig of work so we would need a tape to do the backups.
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
When WD released their 3.1 GB IDE HDD (Caviar 33100)in mid 1998, it was among the first 3 platter, 3 GB + capacity HDD's that were available. Soon after, these drives starting clunking. The procedure was to RMA the drive to WD, and they would replace it with equal or better. It took more than a year for WD to finally admit that the design of the drive was flawed. The company I used to work for, and other OEM's, were left having to explain to their customer's why their data had disappeared, and why their new drives were failing. Very bad policy.
IBM should learn from this, and quickly admit if there is a quality problem. Most people will forgive errors if told the truth and their problem is resolved quickly.
i've got 2 76.8 gig 75gxp's (the DTLA-307075). they're both great. they're fast as hell, and it takes 5-10 seconds to transfer a gig from one drive to the other. i don't have them raided because i didn't get them at the same time, but i've had no problems with them. and on top of that, every time i've ever had a problem with an IBM product, their tech support has been perfect. it's hard for me to imagine someone having a problem with either IBM or one of these great drives.
Was just wondering under what conditions this drive was running under. Was it in a tiny case with some high end heat generating graphics card and an over clocked CPU and other hard drives with little or no ventilation and only the fan on the power supply to cool it?? I'm not sure how susceptible drives are to heat but was just curious.
Or you can install a microsoft operating system and have m$ thrash your hard drive every time you boot. it's coincidence, or better yet, because of stupidity that you broke your hard drive. linux rules.
I have an 8 node cluster with IBM DeskStar 75GXP drives in each node. The cluster has been operating for about 5 months. In that time, I have had drive failures in four of the eight nodes.
Others in my organization have experienced problems with these drives
Your mileage my vary, but they look like lemons to me!
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Ive lost two Westen Digitals Caviar HDD and soon after that they recognised their drivers were deffective (I remember something about 100k drives being collected). Will IBM be wise ?
Someone please mod the parent to this comment up. Very valid point.
Many people have their shiny new 50+Gig hard drives in an old AT case with inadequate cooling. I had to move my Maxtor 30 gig to a different area in the case of my old box that had better flow and cooling to get it to work reliably. who knows how much life I took off of it running it hot...
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Well, just throwing my 2 cents in. I've had a 75gig 75gxp since they were introduced and I've never had a problem. I wonder if these complaints are a little overhyped. I did have a Western Digital 30gig drive that failed, and the RMA failed, and the 2nd RMA failed, and I sold the 3rd RMA on Ebay. Ever since then, I've never had full confidence in harddrives, even though that was the only one that gave be continuous problems.
I take the same approach to harddisks that I take with other high-use/important items that you don't think about too much when they work right, but when the fail you have huge problems (motorcycle tires, condoms, etc.). I settled on Maxtor for harddisks a few years back, and have not had a single one fail. EVERY other drive I've owned that was made by ANY other manufacturer has died, regardless of wether I bought it separate or if it came with a system (Western Digital, Seagate). Really, you might save a few bucks by buying one you don't have experience with, but is it worth the risk?
Has the same problem. I'm currently waiting on replacement drive number 3 (?!). That makes 4 drives in less than 6 months.
I have had problems two drives; with a 30gb (only shows up as 25...) IBM hard drive (i have no clue as to the model number)
:-)
When i first got it, bad sectors poped up left and right, and the drive was junked in about a month. I sent it back to the oem and they sent me a new one. No problems since
The second junked ibm hdd i have had problems with was in a pc i built for a friend. After about a month, he got horrible clicking and scratching noises whenever he did a disk intensive task in a 32-bit enviornment.
Whenever the clicking took place, the drive failed to read or write for about 10 minutes, then it stopped and everything was normal (for about 30 seconds
Sighs..... i always associate quality with ibm...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I have a 30 GB 75GXP and it has worked flawlessly for over a year. Fast, quiet and cool.
My 45GB 75GXP drive has been fine since I got it in.... Feburary? March? something like that... the cases I've heard are all "here and there" sorta thing, sounds like the drives either had a couple bad manufacturing runs, or the drives just randomly have a defect, and the rate is higher than for other components.
IBM is a good company now, and they're also a company that doesn't want to lose customers, I'm sure they're looking into this.
When the drived first came out, I purchased a 15G GXP and it did fail a few months later (my first drive failure ever). IBM quickly responded and shipped me a new drive which has had no problems since (more than 1 year).
I use 5 75G drives (purchased in July) in a RAID5 array, and they are all running beautifully.
I use 2 60G drives in a RAID1 array (purchased in August), and both of those are fine as well.
My Windows Box (shutup!) box uses a 45G GXP (purchased in January) and it's running beautifully.
My Linux Box (ok, cheer now) uses a 45G GXP (purchased in March) also, and has no problems ('cept it gets hot, and the 1.33G Athlon fries my bacon).
So in short, when the drives first came out, it appears there were problems (and in fact PCWorld mentioned a plant in Hungary that produced faulty parts). In recent months, however, there do not appear (in my limited experience) to be of poor quality.
In fact, I would say they are exceptionally fast and quiet. I recommend them to friends (I recommend Quantum to my enemies!). And I don't have anything to do with BigBlue.
But more importantly, DRIVES FAIL! If you don't have a backup then you're none too bright. If you do have a backup, don't worry about it. IBM has a 3 year warranty on these suckers!
Is that you?
It's irritating that IBM produced a lemon, but it's even more disappointing that they've been unresponsive to their customers. Customer service makes a world of difference, especially with commodity items like hard drives. They say that a happy customer tells five people about their experience while an unhappy customer tells twenty-five. Well, thanks to Slashdot, an unhappy customer has told thousands of potential customers to stay away from this drive. A little more responsiveness to this customer's problem would have prevented that.
In contrast, a good experience can make a loyal customer. I recently purchased a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV because of its' speed and silence. When I finally installed the drive, it started making a really irritating squealing sound. I contacted Seagate, and they quickly wrote back a helpful e-mail along with some software to fix the problem. Not only did they make me a happy customer, but they prevented me from becoming an unhappy customer and bitching to all of my friends about it. IBM would do well to take note.
This
and have had them for over a year. I have nothing but praise for them, acting as a popular movie server on a technical campus, thrashing 24x7 to saturate 10 megs upstream for weeks on end without a single complaint from them. I'm not even interested in other brands of hard drives.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
I purchased a Maxtor 30GB ATA100 7200RPM hard drive about 6 months ago. It died after five months with the aforementioned clicking and grinding.
Is this perhaps indicative across the spectrum of high rotational speed drives? I don't have any hard info to back this up but it seems plausible. I'd be interested to hear from any other /. members who have had 7200RPM drives go bad.
I'm crossing my fingers that my new "refurb" drive holds out, especially since I finally have Win2K and Redhat 7.1 setup, configured and playing nicely.
How about it, is anyone else having their 7200RPM drives fail?
Actually, it's the reverse. WD sells relabled IBM drives. IBM invented the GMR technology that both brands of drives use.
Well you're not going to get anything unless you send it back. Putting it under your pillow and hoping the HD fairy comes to visit you probably won't work.
--Egg Troll
From my past experiences if you are having a lot of HD failures replace the Powersupply with a better quality higher rated unit ASAP. It has gotten to the point where if I have a dead HD I replace the powersupply along with it. Better to be safe than sorry. I also think it is quite unfair to reem IBM for drives failing. Everyone in the industry had a HD manufacturer that they will not touch with a 10 foot pole due to bad experiences. For me this is Maxtor. For others it is Seagate or Western Digital etc etc. Personally I have been running IBM drives in my systems at work and home since the GXP series drives first came out and have never had an issue with a single drive new or old, and assuming standard failure rates I would have expected at least 1 or 2 failures by now.
But for gods sake get a new powersupply in your system. If your chewing HD's then likely that is your problem. Also consider getting a decent UPS on your system as well...
The DTLA series was pretty screwed up. Last week I sent another two drives that died after about half a year of ordinary desktop usage. As far as I can see it's the technology used in the 70GXP series. See this article on anandtech for more details. I've already seen 5 drives from this series going down the drain. A low level format usually helps to solve the problem, but only temporarily! The error most likely occurs after some weeks again, in one case it reappeared even after some hours! Some friend of mine called IBM Germany and taled to them. They say it's MS Windows' fault, because it doesn't write correctly to the disk. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! And two of the disks I sent in were running Linux nevertheless...
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
Same problems here - click of death on my 60GB 75GXP drive.... I returned the drive and they accidentally sent me the 75gig version (307075), so we'll see if this one holds up any better...
-Berj
I had purchased one from a wholesaler that sells to small-time vendors, and it was an OEM model. It died within a week. I took it back, got another, and this one's been happily running for about ten months.
:)
I've got to wonder if the problem isn't the drives necessarily, but bad handling... Mine were both OEM, only a static bag, no padding otherwise when I received them, so I'm wondering if shipping is doing something nasty to the drives, or if some other problem NOT related to the manufacturing is the cause. Granted, I could be dead wrong, but the second drive, (45GB models) has been absolutely perfect.
I just hope now that my drive-karma holds
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I thought I just had bad luck, but if this is commonplace...well, they do have a 3 year warranty :)
As the two 75GXP's I have running on a 3Ware card have worked great for about a year. These drives are the best I have ever purchased, and I have been recommending them to others.
Guess I better stop recommending.
Should've gone for the Ultrastar series SCSI drives. I've been using those exclusively for the past four years. I've got 30 of them and haven't had a single failure yet.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
I was tossing up between a new IBM DeathStar and a Western Digital 60Gb HDD - phew, decision made!
:-)
To add to the fray...
I have a 60GB 7200rpm ATA100 Deskstar drive which failed last week. I have RMAed the device and am currently waiting for IBM to return it. It was less than 6 months old.
Ugh.
I recall a very similar problem with Western Digital drives. Their 3-platter 1.6GB IDE drives would fail (this was circa 1995) at a very high rate. I RMA'd the first failed drive. Within weeks, the replacement died. That drive too was replaced, but the next drive was dead on arrival. Western Digital refused to admit there was a problem and replace the drive with another model (2-platter 1.6GB drive or 2-platter 2.0GB drives were available with similar performance at similar prices). The DOA drive made infuriated me, so I demanded a working replacement of a different model or a full price refund under state Lemon Laws. Because so much time had elapsed by this point, I had plenty of time to find others with similar problems with this exact drive model. The replaced the drive with a 2.0GB 2-platter drive which continues to work in a secondary machine I own. About 8 months later, Western Digital finally recalled the drives, admitting there were faulty parts in their 3-platter drives. I have not purchased a Western Digital drive since.
If I was working at IBM, I wouldn't be too concerned about your letter. You talk, but not very well. As long as you have your Swingline stapler, you're not dangerous.
You make slight, inoffensive, and -- most importantly -- ineffective threats. The world doesn't work like that. Your state has lemon laws? Exercise them! Contact your State Attorney General's office and get information or even get them working for you. Attach a copy of your correspondence with the AG.
"It seems to me that this is a scenario where a class action lawsuit..." -- I'm hearing an Andrew Dice Clay bit starting here. Put up or shut up. You think you have a legitimate case? Get your Lawyer to write to IBM. Can't afford a lawyer? You're a student. Your college has a legal aid department. Your school may even have a law department, and new lawyer grads are always looking for a way to make a name and would jump all over the chance to have this as their first big case.
No. You're an apologist, non-confrontational, don't-want-to-make-anyone-mad-here, whining loser who'll get walked all over. Don't sit there threatening to run off to Maxtor, SEND A FUCKING COPY OF YOUR MAXTOR DRIVE RECEIPT!
"Somehow right the wrongs?" Your mother still lays out your clothes each night, huh?
Some people are going to be mad at my tone. Fuck 'em. Either do things right or don't bother.
There's enough info on how to deal with big companies out there and here you are whining with an Ask Slashdot, when the story shoulda simply been "BadAss writes: The entire line of IBM 75GXP drives are defective. Avoid at all costs. I had a couple and here's how I dealt with IBM. If you have one, back up your data now and get your drive replaced."
woof.
If a mirrored drive dies in a Compaq DL360, the good drive continues the mirroring and dies as well. I know this now.
When working on a major (2000 PC) rollout for a customer, we had a large number of Maxtor drives fail within the first week (on the order of every other drive). We ultimately found that all of the drives shared a similar make/model and serial range.
Eventually tracking it back through the vendor (Compaq) we found other customers reporting the same thing. Compaq was of the opinion that someone in the warehouse probably dropped the pallet and didn't tell anyone. The drives were run through the assembly process and ended up being sprinkled around many different orders. It was only when we ran the 2000-unit rollout at enough attention was given to notice the common factors.
What you are talking about sounds very similar. Pallet drops happen a lot when warehouses cheap out on forelift operators, or worse try to train some minor tech how to operate one. It could be that IBM isn't really paying attention to the "big picture" in this situation. They are probably replacing the drives on a case-by-case basis. Unless a major customer orders a huge quantity that then turns out to have a high percentage of failure, I doubt IBM would notice.
For my experience, I've only owned on IBM drive (not at the computer that has it now, but it is an old 3.2GB model). For three years now it has been reporting "immenent failure" to my SMARTII BIOS and I have yet to have it actually go bad. I just tend not to use them because they generally cost more and I don't have any problem doing a shop-n-swap when cheap "on sale" drive blows chunks.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I have 3 of these drives in a RAID5 array... this has been up for less than four months, and already, one of the drives has crashed. I'm currently awaiting my replacement from IBM.
We have about 50 of the drives (mixture of 75GXP 60GXP) running in RAID systems here with no problems. We've been buying them for all our video systems for around a year due to the speed and capacity...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I recently powered up my win2k advanced server (with a DeskStar 75GXP) to find the drive making a horrid clicking noise. I really thought it was a head crash.
So I called IBM. They had my problem pegged in a matter of seconds. Apparently with some versions of windows (MS KB article) the OS doesn't give the drive enough time to flush it's cache before shutdown. Thus it's powered down before it can write. This slowly corrupts data until everything goes boom.
The IBM tech dude said there was a patch (which you have to ask MS for). Or you can wait for the next win2k service pack.
I switched to WinXP and the drive seems fine... for now...
Man, I don't know what you do to your drives, but my IBM's have never failed. I own four Deskstars that are all put to use in my server. I've never really had a problem with them, except for maybe losing some partition information once.
When I bought my first Deskstar, they were the best performers out there. And even though they come at a slight premium with respect to other drives, I won't buy anything but a Deskstar any more because they have never failed on me, whereas I've had a Maxtor that totally crapped out on me once.
Anyway, I just think you ran into some bad luck with these drives. They are really top quality in my opinion.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Yeah, I bought a 15 gig 5400 rpm Maxtor for my machine for $80 at staples which seemed like a sweet deal for a poor student. Disk started chewing and all my data was gone- this is for everyone:
Back up your data now! Don't wait until later!
Anyway, I RMA'd it and they replaced it with a 7200 RPM drive which was a pleasant surprise and
*knocks on wood
it's still running just fine, albeit after only about 60 days. But that's longer than the last one worked...
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
My 75GXP 45GB first had problems about 3 months ago (I purchased it OEM for my new AMD 1.2Ghz system I built in february). During a reboot my partition table became corrupted. (uggg).
Bought a 2nd HD (40GB 60GXP)for backups, but still use the 75GXP for my main drive. I had gotten the 'clicking' problem before, but it only happened once, and my drive kicked back in about a minute later, albeit with some nasty errors in my log files. About 3 weeks ago, my drive crashed HARD. I was getting these clicking things every 30 seconds for minutes at a time. I managed to throw everything important on my 2nd drive before grabbing IBM HardDrive utility. It gave me bad sectors, blah blah blah and told me to format using it's Erase utility - writing 0's to the entire disk. I did this, and 2 hours later, I re-ran the diagnostics, and it passed.
So far, no more clicks, no problems. *knock on wood*
If I get anything else, it's RMA for this baby.
I had an 8.5GB Maxtor for over 2 years and it never once gave me any troubles. Twas a sad day when I got my new HDD and it was a Fujitsu.
About 4 months ago, my company bought one for a new system. It was DOA.
Granted you are very upset over not getting a reliable hard drive, but that is a textbook example of how NOT to write a letter to a business looking for satisfaction.
I don't think that IBM is going to be driven to action by your threats to lawsuits (they will crush you should you ever attempt), your threats to disparage them (since you have just done it in front of a much more massive audience than you could ever speak to in person) and your unprofessional approach to the letter ('The 75GXP Series is garbage').
Publicizing the problem is definitely a good thing, but don't look for a speedy response to your complaint. If I had a pile of letters asking for compensation due to the drive, yours would definitely be moved to the bottom.
Obviously, with a name like "75GXP", it stands to reason that these drives are only compatible with "XP" systems...it's that secret built in copy
:)
protection...all us music sharing pir8s are getting our data "purified" by these new drives..
ie=> purified == erased
Anybody know more details about this firmware upgrade? It looks like it's a SMART upgrade covering the 75GXP line -- maybe they want a little more pre-failure diagnostic data, or maybe [conspiracy theory] they know/think somethings wrong and they want to save users' data before it completely dies. [/conspiracy theory]
Damn. And my systen has a 75Gig 75GXP and two IBM 10k 18 Gig drives in RAID0 - the 75GXP was supposed to be my safe haven from any RAID failure. Luckily, I've got a 14Gig IBM laptop drive (in my laptop- it's loud!) that also has my important data, and i've got some off-site ftp storage, too, so *HOPEFULLY* I'll be ok.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
one of them started clicking yesterday. I friend had his 30gb fail a month ago.
I've purchased a bunch of these for home and work; (>20) I have a pair of 307020's in my home pc connected to an Abit motherboard with built-in RAID. It rocks.
I have sent a few back to IBM, but only because they failed the Drive Fitness test that IBM supplies. I have gotten in the habit of running this util. as soon as I get the drive, because most of the damage I've seen is due to excessive shock in shipping.
I've never lost data due to a failure, and I love the speed. The 60GXP is even better.
Basically Demi is a cost-cutting slut in a suit.
Let's hope [this time] someone got some good sex out of all these bad hard drives...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I had two drives arrive DOA, a 45GB and a 60GB drive. Despite RMAs, they have still not been replaced. IBM has gone one my blacklist along with Seagate and Western Digital. Only Maxtor drives for me now.
I had two 75's show up DOA. Got another two, and after a few weeks one of them had hard errors and I had to low-level format them. At that point I went out and bought two 60's after hearing about problems with the 75's. Now, yesterday my raid stripes were broke (had 2x60s and the 2x75s for "Backups"). Lost all my data. Ran the IBM DFT program on the 75s and while testing one of the 75s (which passed the test!) the drive was making terrible noises and spinning up and down on each test...
We got two IBM 75GXPs almost a year ago and they've consistantly given us trouble. At least once a week now we get something like:
hdg: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdg: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=38535423, sector=38535360
end_request: I/O error, dev 22:01 (hdg), sector 38535360
Over and over again.
It used to be more frequent and would cause the system to completely die after a while, requiring some console-based fscking. But many months back we changed some kernel option -- forgive me as I can't recall which, though I think it was the "burst bit" or something related -- and it hasn't been completely crashing, though we still get those errors about once a week.
I've heard stories of drive completely dying, but thankfully -- knock on wood -- that hasn't happened here. Here's what our setup looks like (from dmesg):
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 21
VP_IDE: chipset revision 16
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd800-0xd807, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xd808-0xd80f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
PDC20265: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 88
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:11.0
PDC20265: chipset revision 2
PDC20265: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20265: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.
ide2: BM-DMA at 0x8400-0x8407, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
ide3: BM-DMA at 0x8408-0x840f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
hde: IBM-DTLA-307030, ATA DISK drive
hdg: IBM-DTLA-307030, ATA DISK drive
ide2 at 0x9800-0x9807,0x9402 on irq 10
ide3 at 0x9000-0x9007,0x8802 on irq 10
hde: 60036480 sectors (30739 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=59560/16/63, UDMA(100)
hdg: 60036480 sectors (30739 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=59560/16/63, UDMA(100)
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=71 This from Anandtech faqs from earlier in the month pretty much covers it all - and covered it a long time ago.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I got my first IBM Deskstar 75GXP 45GB about a year ago. It worked flawlessly, and i bought another one. Now about an week ago, the first disk i bought, started to keep that not-so-funny noise in filesystem check. I tried to run ibm test software, and it said that the disk was broken. After that, i leaved the disk in my table, waiting to be sent back to store. One day i decided to try it once more. I booted to linux, and made new partition table to it. It keep that horrible noise, but it was able to do the partition table. After that, i tried to make the filesystem, and somehow it worked. I rebooted the machine, and tried to copy some stuff in it. I didn't make any noise, and seemed to work.
My friend bought one of these drives, and it broke in couple of weeks. He got replacement from store, and it broke too. When he got his third replacement, he sold it to someone, didn't want to lose more data...
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
Just this week I sent a 15GB Deskstar for RMA. My 30GB at home still works though. And, as far as I know, all the PCs that I've made for my friends are still running with their Deskstars.
I had no idea there were so many problems with these drives. Time to get active.
Yeah my 15gb deskstar crapped out on me about 1 year ago, both ide pin 1 and power pin got pushed in and i had to solder them back into place. I called Ibm before I started soldering and they told me they would not replace it because I used faulty IDE cables and power cables. Ibm drives have no back plate to stop the pins from getting pushed in! I have sold 30 computers with the deskstars and this is the only one that gave me problems, but i was able to fix it and its working with out problems. I would go though another harddrive manufacturer but they seem to lack compaired to the deskstars.
God Bless America..
I have read that weak solder points on the power connectors for these drives is the culprit. Makes sense if you look at them. For my Maxtor drives, there is a huge glob of solder holding each connector. For my 60GXP, there is no glob of solder visible. The power connector is pretty much a surface mount. To prevent any possible problems with this, I stuck in a power cable extension so if I need to remove the drive, i won't put any stress on the solder points.
I too had serious problems with my IBM Deskstar harddrive during the last couple of years. Grinding and clicking noises, sudden boot sector loss, corrupted, unrecoverable and impossible to isolate bad clusters, total data loss on one occasion.. I'm not buying an IBM hd anytime soon. I'm now using Maxtor and WesternDigital drives and they work fine.
I just bought two of the 60GB drives about a week ago. I've got them striped on a Hot Rod 100 Pro RAID controller on my Abit KG-7 RAID board.....I've been happy with them, but I'm really, really nervous now....
Argh......the only reason I bought them is because I had an electrical problem in my machine that fried everything - I don't want to go through rebuilding all my data again.....
IBM manufactures maxtor drives. Plus Maxtor has quality problems as well. At my university we purchased 100 new computers for our labs and 90 of them had a hard drive failure within 1 week. They were ALL maxtor drives. I had a problem with a WD drive about 6 years ago but have used both seagate and wd drives since and now i use wd drives exclusively b/c they are cheap and good performers. I've installed on my and others about 30 WD HDDs and have yet to have one fail.
..but I've heard that if you put your hard drive in the freezer for awhile it will be revived long enough to back stuff up until it thaws. Your mileage will vary though, of course.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I bought two for use in a Linux web server. After about 3 months of uptime I brought the machine down and ran fsck and one of the drives dies with "horrible clicking failure" at the same point about 50% through the fsck of a ~40GB filesystem.
System is very clean, good cooling, good power, no mechanical shock.
The other one continues to work fine, but I fear for it. I didn't return the drive, I use it as a desk toy to remind me to do backups...
Bad drive: DTLA-307075 76.8GB ATA/IDE
S/N: YSF5N252
jeff
I bought a Western Digital 80gig 7200rpm drive, and it started having problems the week I brought it home.
This was a major hassle for me, since I was building a new computer, and couldn't pinpoint the random problems on one part for some time. Add in to that some bad RAM(how much bad RAM does everyone end up with?), a video card getting fried in a storm, and an Asus Geforce2 Deluxe that SAYS it works under Windows2000, but the primary feature of the card(the digital VCR) doesn't, and the store refused to give me a refund.
Nothing funner than building a new computer, eh boys?
A nice family-run place nearby figured out the RAM and video card were bad for me. I returned the video card for a replacement and bought new RAM. Then the hard drive got RMA'd back to Western Digital with a replacement coming in a timely manner, with their nifty ability to get the new hard drive BEFORE sending back the old one(so I could copy my data over).
To get my comp working I also had to upgrade drivers, flash bioses, install AGP patches for the motherboard, and install several hundred megs of patches to Windows 2000, all of which caused various problems while I was trying to trouble-shoot which and whether my hardware was broken.
It should be easy to see if hardware is broken--everything else works, so the thing that doesn't is broken. right? Nowadays nothing works right, even when its working at its best. It's near impossible to tell if your hardware is bum, or if you just have some unlucky combination of hardware and software and need to wait patiently for a patch to come out and make things work correctly.
Computer parts are becoming incredibly unreliable. Putting together this latest 1ghz machine was more hell than every other machine i've built put together. What can we as consumers do to stop this? Why is there no pressure on companies to put out reliable products that work out of the box?
I just had one of the 15.3GB go out. Luckily I managed to copy all I had off before it died. No data loss that I could tell.
A odd click/whine every 30 or so seconds. SMART utility said it was fine. Warm boot and it was
"working". Hard reset and that was it. The Promise RAID card refused to go past the detection phase. Later just off the motherboard controller the drive locked the machine up on detection...
Sadly it was a member of a stripe of 4 of these so I had to rebuild. Moved to a 2 drive WD40GB RAID 1 having learned the lession of RAID 0.
Now hearing about these problems I am happy I went with new drives. I'll just use the 75GXPs in non critical areas now...
Seagate was the worst in the pre-1gb days; it was rare to have a drive last more than 18 months. Since then, they've steadily become better. I'd trust my life with a Seagate before anything else.
Quantum was absolutely great up until their LC10/LC15 line, which was the last before that division was folded into Maxtor. Something went terribly wrong with the LC series, and I'd expect any of these you have in use to die if they're not power cycled very often.
Maxtor is an odd bird. Half their drive models seem to be made of wet cardboard, half seem to be steel. Any time they jump to a new size, the drives are great. Then subsequent revisions at the same size start to fail; perhaps they're cutting too many corners as they try to reduce cost.
IBMs have been solid all along for me. I don't think I've ever had an IBM drive go bad, though several have been DOA. I use several 75GXPs (60 and 75g) in portable caddies. These have been dropped from 3-4 feet a number of times without incident.
Western Digital, I won't touch. I've yet to see a Western Digital last two years:
The Western Digital Caviar series was the worst, especially around the 540mb mark, where half my drives would die in the first 4 months. WD is also the only manufacturer who's never admitted to me, in relative confidence or otherwise, that there's been a bad run of drives. Even after my 9th return of a bad Caviar drive, they maintained that my situation was absolutely unique, only to issue a recall several months later, as I remember it. Every hardware manufacturer makes periodic mistakes; the ones who won't admit even the possibility of a problem don't deserve my returned trust.
I've got a travelstar drive that came new in my Dell laptop. Its a 20 gig and it has been making wierd noises that I've always associated with failing laptop drives. But it works ok. I ran IBM drive diagnostics http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m#DFT on it and it said it was ok. I've gotten the same results with Dell diagnostics. So now I leave EZ-Smart http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m#EZSMART running. Which makes the drive noisier because it is constantly querying the drive.
I bought a 15GB 5400RPM Deskstar and parititioned it into 6 drives. Things went well for about 8 months. Then the drive crashed, with some severe problems on my application partition. I ran IBM's diag utility, and it came back with some error (0x70, I think). I called tech support, and they sent me another drive right away.
The replacement was a refurb from Malaysia. When I opened the static bag, the drive was covered in fingerprints, which sort of bugged me. Anyway, I got that drive all set up with the same configuration, and it died 2 weeks later. Diags gave the same error. Scandisk from DOS showed a diagonal pattern of bad blocks all across the drive.
IBM replaced that drive with a 7200RPM 20gb Deskstar from their Hungary plant which I've had no problems with. I reconfigured my paritions a little, and eventually changed the power supply (after about 6 months of use with this drive) I don't know what caused the failures, but I'm leaning towards heat. The current setup had the HD bolted to the bottom of the case, with the case fan blowing right over the top of it. The old configuration had it sanswiched under the floppy, which seemed to prevent heat dissipation.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
I've had my IBM 75GXP (40gb) drive for over a year now, still works beautifully, its the fastests, quietest drive i have used.
;)
running Slack8 with my nice ReiserFS partition on it too
My first DeskStar Drive (a 40 gig) failed. It just started making this high pitched beep and a loud cracking sound over and over again. It would also run very hot some of the time.
My replacement one still beeps occasionally, and I think that it is running out of time. I'd stay away and go with a different brand. Hopefully I can replace my drive before it dies.
I'm in the same boat with my 75GXP. It has exhibited multiple failures and some lost data after about 9 months of use.
One thing to note is that Maxtor will cross-ship a replacement drive to you, allowing you to ghost the old drive to the new one (assuming the old one isn't completely dead), but IBM does not offer the option of cross-shipping. I have to backup whatever data remains on my 75GXP and restore once I received the replacement.
Despite the nifty performance of my 75GXP, I think I'll be sticking with Maxtor going forward...
I had an 80 GXP fail also. I was mirroring it, and while I was waiting on the replacement to show up, the other one failed!
Like an idiot, I replaced 'em with the same drives. We'll see how long that lasts.
The only thing that was good about it was the RMA process. I just went to the IBM storage web site, confirmed they were still under warranty and they sent me knew ones just like that.
A bunch of lawyers won money from Toshiba and a few other companies for "faulty" floppy drives that never resulted in data loss. Of course the fault has been long known, but who cares.
In this case it sounds like you paid money and aren't getting something that you paid for in quality terms. Find a good lawyer and file a class action lawsuit, the great American past time.
over the years with IBM drives. I've had
many die after 1-2 years of use, and in at least
one case the drive came defective, with the
famous clicking. That was a different model,
a notebook drive.
I generally try to avoid IBM drives these
days. The GXP I picked up a few months ago
didn't work under Linux so I exchanged it for
a Western Digital. Maybe that IBM drive was
defective as well.
Someone can feeleth mah pain!!! I've been reading slashdot for quite some time but never post. I created an account just to post to this. And all i have to say sit aht buying the IBM 75gxp has been one of my worst experiences ever!! At this point I'm still using on board sound (yeah, yeah, i know, gotta buy a sound card) and so I thought there might've been some IRQ issues with the hard drive (seeing that it's been f*cking everythign else up). But, in some ways, it's nice to hear that my horrors are not mine alone. Anyway I had to chkdsk my drive after every couple of reboots. Sectors seem to go corrupt (and it seems to be with teh data that I access the most (Count0rstrike)). It pisses me the f*ck off but what can you do? Myabe i'll try to RMA it. sigh life sucks. FF
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am current awaiting the return of a drive from IBM. A Deskstar 75GXP model DTLA-307045 (46GB,
7200rpm) originally bought from Makami Systems
(since gone defunct) in an external box with an IDSC21E IDE-to-SCSI adapter for use on my Macintosh. After less than a year, the disk drive died and was replaced by Makami. After about another yearish, the new drive has died and I RMAed it to IBM (I really like IBM's Web site for doing this and keying off the S/N, makes it very easy to return items). I have replaced the
drive with a Maxtor 60GB drive and an ACARD IDE-to-SCSI card (since the original would not handle disk sizes over 32GB properly). When the IBM drive comes back, I plan to get another ACARD and install the drive in another external box I have already.
So I'll shortly be on my 3rd repetition of the IBM Deskstar 75GXP.
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
I had a 45gig 75GXP that was purring like a kitten. There was a thread about the 75GXP drives in the Arstechnica forums failing a while ago. I posted there about how great mine was. Not 20 minutes later I rebooted for something and mine was bad. I did the DFT, all the stuff, and it was bad. Knowing that IBM was basically sending out "refurbished" drives for replacement I called to RMA (didn't do the web based thing) and told them I wanted a 60GXP as replacement. The woman I spoke with talked to her supervisor, and viola! IBM sent me a 60gb 60GXP as replacement for my 45gb 75GXP.
Now, it was a paint to reinstall everything, but thankfully I back up and I ended up with a faster, bigger, and (hopefully) more reliable drive, so I can't say that I am going to complain too much.
I try to reboot as little as possible now.
According to the PCworld article, "the drives are available in 15GB, 30GB, and 75GB capacities" - but according to IBM at http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/dtla/dtlamo d.htm there is 20GB, 45GB, and 60GB as well. Not to mention the product number for *ALL* 75GB 75GXP drives is "DTLA-307075". This number has NOTHING to do with being "made in Hungary". All the 75GXP drives appear to have part numbers DTLA-3070xx where xx is the size in GB.
Anyways, my 45GB 75GXP has been working fine for over a year, as well as the two 40GB 60GXP drives in two other computers, and the raid array of 2x 20GB's in another computer, which has been going strong for well over two years.
Then there is my two Seagate 9.1G's, which have each been RMA'd once, and the 14 drives I RMA'd in the past 3 months at work - all 10G Maxtor and W.D.!
Morphing Software
I've been using DeskStar 20GBs, a 75GXP and a 40GV, and THEY SUCK!!!! In less than a year, one of them crashed - I had to RMA it - and now both of them are giving me click of death. IBM has a tool on their web site that you can install on a boot floppy:
IBM hard drive support downloads (check the drive fitness test)
To get an RMA from IBM, they prefer that you use this program (I suppose you can't if your crashed drive was the sole HD you had and you can't create the floppy). The program said my drives are the picture of health when I know by my ears that a grinding noise and spinning down randomly is NOT a healthy sign. Of course, SMART worked really well on the crashed drive - it came up with an immenent failure warning AFTER the drive had crashed. Despite their claims of reliability and good support, I've sworn off IBM drives now. No drive that fails this quickly should belong in any system.
t.
"Corrupting our youth one mind at a time"
Like others here, I also had a 60GB 75GXP go bad (scratchy grinding sounds and bad sectors) within about 8 months. My OEM replaced it with a 60GXP as well.
Hmmm.
DCMonkey
I've had and used quite a few IBM hard drives, only one of which has ever failed on me - an old 4GB thing. I don't even remember the model number at this point, but it lasted a good three years. I currently use both a 45GB and a 60GB in my primary machine with no problems. They've been in the machine for over a year now. With the repetitive failures you're experiencing, maybe the probem's with the controller?
I have a 30GB on one machine, and a 45GB on my wife's. Both have been working excellently for almost a year.
Perhaps the problem is only on the higher capacity drives.
I had drive failure, replaced it, now some 6m
down the road its all good and dandy.
Just got 60GXP 60 Gig drive. If it fails, here I come IBM!
Everyone has these time periods. Maxtor got its name as Mightstor for a reason.
My PC is equipped with 2 IBM DTLA 307030 drives.
It works for me without problem. Even with a VIA chipset they work without a problem for over a year now.
I have to admit that I had one problem recently: My MBR got lost, but I would aim at Windows about that one.
Following the discussion, yes, there seem to be problems with these drives. IBM does no longer make the DTLA ones. But I would not say that IBM is to blame here. Chipset and OS do matter.
My own 30 Gig drive (ata 100) from IBM in my Gateway system died after barely 6 months. It had horrible clicking sounds and I had to transfer what data I could to a replacement 60 Gig drive from Western Digital.
I've had the same issue with a 20GB 7200RPM DeskStar. Same exact symptoms, and IBM's diagnostic prog says it's due to excessive force, even though it has never been dropped.....
Um, excuse me but most people would think that the western digital drivers were the schiznit. In fact Gateway and Dell used those exclusively in a large percentage of their model lines for years. I owned at least 7-8 myself, and did work/assistance for users and saw at least 22 more. While personal experience != statistics, at least my sample is bigger than yours ! =)
I have three IBM drives (18G 22GXP, 20G 34GXP and 45G 75GXP). I have never had any problems with any of them, but I have read about the problems with the 75GXP series, and a friend of mine did have his 45G 75GXP die recently.
When this happened I did some google research, and found a rather interesting usenet posting (unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, you'll have to take my word for it).
Apparently someone had found that his Deskstar refused to work (only making clicking noises) when secured to the case, but worked fine if isolated. He found that there was a significant current flowing though the case, drive and IDE cable, because the case was not at the same potential as the motherboard ground. I found this especially interesting as my friend had switched motherboard and PSU just a few days before his drive died.
Perhaps the real problem is bad grounding, and the IBM 75GXP series is just more sensitive than most drives to this. That would also explain why some people kill drive after drive, while others have no problems at all.
my friend's drive died after about 6 months, he rmaed his too
I had one show up DOA, and the other went bad within 2 days. Very nasty clicking noises. Both of them were RMA'd. New ones were formatted, but haven't been used since! Not quite trustworthy.
I've had three disks fail on me so far this year. Two 45GB and one 30GB.
Both 45GB's developed bad sectors, which the RAID subsystem noticed and kicked them out of the mirror. The first one was in March right after I got the pair, the second in August.
The 30GB was different however. Something mechanical has failed in it and the BIOS doesn't see it anymore. It makes rather horrible sounding noises. It was, unfortunately, unmirrored and not backed up due to an earlier failure of my SCSI card, so no DAT or CD-R backups recently. I had just acquired a new card and was going to backup the system that afternoon, when blammo, it died. Total suckfest. The drive was 8 months old.
That's my experience. The 60GXP's I have (40GB and 60GB) seem fine so far.
I had a 75GXP 45GB, it failed with the exact same error after ca 6 months. Still have'nt got a disk back after I sent it in.
Hard drives on there other hand might work fine testing, but something not lubed as well might fail down the road. That is not so easy to test.
So what should we do? Everything solid sate! Remember the days of $1000 1Gb hard drives, now a days you can get 1Gb of Ram for a few hundred bucks and tomorrow who knows.
Your right I have no point.
In our facility, we have approximately 120 of the 30 and 40GB drives. We've had 4 failures so far, and we have been installing these for the last year or so.
This seems to be within what we normally expect when we build a run of computers. When we used Seagate Baracuda's, we had about the same number of "infant" failures (first 3 months).
Of the deaths we've had, 2 were right out of the box - they did not spin up, and did not detect to the BIOS - we think they were treated roughly before we got them. The other 2 worked for a few days, but were always noisy - lots of the reported clicks.
We currently have one in the fleet that is whining a lot - the sound you usually get from older drives when their bearings are wearing out.
But, within our sampling, I would say the failure rate is no higher or lower than other groups of drives we have purchased in the past.
Goes without saying, but if you start hearing any noises, backup these drives up ASAP. Running on refurb now, fingers crossed.
BTW, retail drives get returned to IBM for refurb. OEM drives go back to dealer. My OEM drive was returned to dealer and refurbed by "Alpha Parts, Inc".
I don't want to hear this, I have used a lot of darkstars in the past..... but yes, I have seen them fail, one from singipore had problems from its first minute, we could write to it, but it would have problems reading.
Shoot - I just got finished putting this exact drive (75GXP) into my brother's TiVo for him. He called me last night saying that he noticed a lot of clicking sounds once in a while (almost like the normal headseek sounds, but a lot more frequent and louder).
I've had an added drive in my TiVo for a while now, and I can't remember hearing any kind of drive noise other than the normal whirring.
This would especially suk if I had to replace this drive. The Tivo's A drive (IIRC) must be restored from backup in order to work once a second drive is added and then removed (or replaced?)
Anyone else have any experience with this?
my 45GB has the described failures as well ,including the noise :/
I noticed an occasional click from a 60GXP that I had, but the weird thing is the click went away. Haven't had a problem with the drive yet, but I won't be surprised if it dies on me. A guy I know with a 60G 75GXP was complaining that it was starting to click on him, so I decided to stay away from the 75GXP when I went looking for a 60G drive last month.
I have built approximately 30 machines with IBM 75GXPs and lately 60GXP's, probly about 40 drives in total, haven't had a single problem. I consider IBM to have the most reliable drives on the market, head and shoulders above maxtor and the like.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
The only problem I ever had wasn't with the drives, but I would get random 1 bit errors because the hd controller drivers were screwed up some how. I formatted and reinstalled Windoze (no comments on windows please). That didn't help. I tossed the Asus A7V board and bought an Abit KT7A-RAID. Note I use the EZ-SMART application and have NO entries in the firmware records on ANY errors on any of these drives. Note: you don't need ez-smart to be running to log these errors, the firmware on the drive does this itself.
/home on linux box.
I got lucky, I just now see that my vender substituted a 60GXP for a 75GXP. Note all my IBM hd's run really hot. Much hotter than older 3600/5400 RPM WD Caviars. Note again, newer WD drives now use many IBM OEM parts for their drives, I wonder if they are having any probs?
Note I have the following drives:
1) 60GXP 60 GB 7200 RPM, puchased May, 2001
Model#: IC35L060AVER07-0
Firmware: ER6O
My main drive.
2) 75GXP 45 GB 7200 RPM, purchased Jan, 2001
Model#: IBM-DTLA-307045
Firmware: TX6D
My other drive. Nothing on it right now.
3) 20 GB 7200 RPM, purchased 2000.
Works great,
4) 9ES 9.1 GB 7200 RPM U2W SCSI, purchased 1998.
Still humming along, 0 errors. / on my linux box.
- SkewlD00d
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I too bought an IBM 75GXP HD almost exactly a year ago. It began giving the horrendous clicking/scraping metallic sound after about 7 months of otherwise normal operation. Each time it would get the read error it would perform a surface scan on the next boot (windows 98 does this). I just kept doing surface scans and marking the sectors it would click on as Bad. I lost small files, whole folders, and programs to bad sectors.
Finally this VERY morning my hard drive did the clicking/scraping during boot up and now my system won't start. Imagine my surprise when I see this story come out on the same day my HD died.
I bought a 30 gig 75GXP in early April; haven't had a bit of trouble with it yet. And believe me, it has done a shitload of reading and writing. The performance from it is great; damn near rivals SCSI. That's why I bought it in the first place. I was very surprised to hear about all the troubles people are having. Don't tell me a WD is more reliable than IBM now. Still have to say Quantum is it in reliability. Have three 8 gig fireballs in RAID 5 in another box that holds all my data and mp3s (only about 1000). Had them for almost 3 years and not one hiccup. So, I could care less if this IBM crashes and burns. Might be kind of humerous from what's been said...
Your article describes my experience with the 60GXP exactly.
I had the same horrible sound, got the same data loss. RMA'd the drive, and got one back with a Servicable Used Part sticker on it. It is now making the same noises (less than a week after returning), and I'm loosing data on it, just like last time.
I haven't RMA'd it again because it took over a month for the drive to come back, and I don't want to go through that again.
Now I don't know what to do.
I have a 60GB 60GXP that is going south. I has a spot of defective media about 1GB large. It's a shame as the tech in this drive is very advanced.
I've been trying to get it replaced and haver all data off it. My problem is I can't find where at IBM or on there site you get warrenty repair for a drive. I can find warrenty repairs for aptivas and other such junk but not for hard drives.
Anyone who has been through this point me in the right place to get started?
I am running 2 IBM Deskstar drives (the 20 and 60 gig models) for the longest time now and have nothing but praise for them. Not only are they very fast, dependable IDE drive, but the CPU usage is very low as well.
*shrug*
...I guess that is all that needs to be said.
Their other products seem to be top notch however.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
My 45GB Deskstar GXP died a couple months ago, a little over a year after I bought it. It kept freezing my system and making weird grinding noises. I RMAed it and got a brand spankin' new 60GB Desktar 60GXP in return. They treated me well, replace my bad hard drive with a new one that is bigger AND faster! It works great too! This has been a known problem for about 5 months to my knowledge.
I have mod points. I'd rather post...
/.-ed. I can't seem to access it with my crappy modem connection, but few weeks ago, someone typed "75gxp" and "fail" in the search page and got 1500 results. There have also been polls conducted about the GXP's behavior, and there is some evidence suggesting that the more recent 60GXP is just as bad, both in the tech support and General forums. This is a direct contradiction to several posts here stating that the 60GXP has no problem. Other interesting topics, for those willing to visit SR's forums and poke around, include the possibility of class-action litigation (including posts by a soon-to-be-lawyer), statisical analysis of similarities in failed drives - location of manufacture, size, that sort of thing, and many, many tales of RMA woe similar to those of the topic originator.
I'm a fixture over on storagereview.com (you can type it in, I'm not a goatse.cx person). User complaints about the GXP-series have been a literally unceasing topic of discussion since very early this year. The 75gxp is now an assumed unreliable drive - to the point that a single thread about ongoing good experiences with them only garnered a half-dozen replies (one of them mine. I have two 75GB 75gxps that continue to function in a RAID0 array).
I believe SR is now being
The 75GXP has been discontinued. If you send in your failed 75GXP today, in all likelihood, you'll get a 60GXP back. 75GB 75GXPs don't have an equivalent size in the newer 60GXP product line. I have no idea what IBM does for those - they were significantly more expensive.
Finally, IBM's DFT utility for Windows and Linux, if you'd like to test out your own 60- or 75GXP. From time to time it is able to correct misbehaving drives' problems, but just as often, if you're to the point of needing to use it, you might as well call in your RMA.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Corrupted sectors..
Called them up to see if I could get the replacement drive first before shipping broken one out, they declined.. even after I proposed giving them my cc#. Turn around time stated to me was "about 14 days after we get it."
I went ahead and ordered a Seagate drv..
I have undergone a similar ordeal, only with KDS monitors. The original monitor I purchased failed within a few months, and each of the three replacement monitors I was provided with died within a day of receipt. After repeated verbal requests for a refund followed by several demand letters, I have now initiated a lawsuit against KDS and its business associates for failure to provide warranty service.
I am doing this through my jurisdiction's small claims court; the procedure, while lengthy, is not so complicated that I require a lawyer. If you decide to opt for the same route, I would be pleased to provide you with a copy of my claim. You might want to examine it and adapt it for your own purposes and jurisdictional requirements.
Mine lasted 3 months. -bam-
was a 75GXP 60GB
Is it the same with 60GXP? they have replaced some of the 75GXP as far as i know.
I actually returned the Harddisk today, maybe i should try to get another harddisk back =).
still reading?
In case information is still being harvested, I built a machine for a friend a couple months ago with an 60gb IBM Deskstar, DOA. Made clicks and beeps. They happily advance RMA'd the drive (a little too happily, I think, I've been doing hardware solutions for years, and it usually is a little more inquirious of a conversation), and the replacement works fine, for now.
However, if you're having repeated drive problems, I'd suggest qualifying everything else you use too, the odds of a huge manufacturer actually selling a product built with a defective process are very slim, especially for IBM.
I wouldn't abandon the best IDE drive manufacturers over this, IMHO.
-Matt
(excuse my poor moderation score, hopefully this gets through!)
I have a 30g IBM Desktar ATA/100 7200 RPM drive as well. Not sure about the model number, but the other day I booted up my computer and heard a strange crackling noise. I popped open the case to find out that the controller board on the drive had literally *started on fire*. I immediately shut down the system and blew out the fire, but the drive was totally shot. Thankfully no other damage was done to any of my other system peripherals.
I sent the drive back to IBM and just recently got a replacement (same drive). I'm hoping that this doesn't become a recurring problem. Chances are it wasn't the PS, it's a 300w sparkle that comes standard in the Enlight 7237/3 case.
Best of luck to those with Deskstar drives as well... I might be going Seagate SCSI soon if this keeps coming back to haunt me!
"Stop saying 'Don't quote me' because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying" -KMFDM
Im not sure if mine is one in the GXP family but I have sent 2 30GB drives back to IBM now and I still get shit loads of bad sectors when I load FreeBSD onto it. =\ I have even used IBM's low level format software and it didnt do shit but make more bad sectors.
Privacy? Not in this lifetime.
My first one died just a couple days after I got it, I guess I should of taken the hint and swapped it for a barracuda. We'll see though... no trouble yet after a couple months usage....
After going through the comments, there are only two people who said their 75GXP is still working fine and dandy after a good amount of time. The rest said their's failed. On top of that, a lot of people said they RMAed multiple times and those failed as well. That's like a 95% failure rating for the Slashdot crowd.
IBM should do the right thing and issue a recall.
I had 4 45GB 75GXP's on an Adaptec ATA 2400S (nice controller btw) at RAID 5... went on a 2 week business trip to come back to a BSOD caused by 2 of them failing while I was gone... haven't gotten around to RMA'ing them yet tho...
sounds like the beginnings of a class action suit...
I've got one of these in my iMac at home... it's a little bit clicky, but not too bad. Any other Mac owners with Deskstars? Any problems?
(I gotta admit, the fact that all the tools and such on their web site seem to be unavailable for MacOS certainly doesn't inspire confidence.)
--saint
I've had 3 46.1 Gig IBM hard drives break in the last 2 weeks! I got them form a rather dodgy ;) supplier in Cambridge UK (I'm sure someone knows who I'm talking about) in January, they've all died in the same manner. After dismantling one I think it might be the bearings that are causing the problems.
.. I hope IBM offer money back or compensation or something.
The model number is: DTLA-307045, built in August 2000.
I've got 4 more of these damn drives
My Friend always told me not to buy IBM drives, he had a new SCSI fail, 4 IDEs fail. I went out and bought my IBM 41.1GB 5400rpm drive (made in Thailand DEC2000) and yesterday it failed on me.
I need to RMA it but my friend waited 9 months for one of his drives, and is still waiting for the 3 others.
Sorry IBM, I love you Thinkpads, but your drives are poor.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Why in the hell would you even buy a KDS monitor?
We have a dual Athlon machine with 3 3ware 7800 raid controllers and we have had huge problems with our IBM drives. We bought 26 75gig 75GXPs 5 of which I had to return the next day. I currently have another 10 sitting on my desk ready to go back. I called IBM and they claimed that they had "Never heard of such problems" and after putting me on hold for 30 mins they told me that the only thing they could think of was "Acoustic Vibrations". My question is what do I do with all of these drives? I can't trust them and I can't send them back?? Bye bye $6,500???
I have a 20.5 Gig model. Hope it isn't affected. However, I've had it for over a year now and it's working fine. >
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Powering them up and down is bad for them period. An always on systems has better success as the drives never need to spin down and back up. I work as hardware support in a large data center and the WORST time is the annual building powerdown :( More stuff shuts down and never comes back in that one weekend than fails the rest of the year. If it was not Federally mandated there is now way we would shut down at all but the 21K vault and the high voltage UPS systems have to be inspected along with our giant diesel tank.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
My own personal machine, a Dell laptop, has a Dell MagStar mini hard drive that is always making weird noises. I actually RMA'd the first drive I had because I thought it was broken, but the new drive acted in the same way.
Diagnostically it runs fine, and I've never had any file transfer problems (outside the fact that it, like most laptop drives, are just slow). But it has always been a little noisy.
I had 2 40GV running striping, but they did some clicking from time to time so I figured that striping them without no redundancy was not a good idea. So I got a 75gb 75GXP instead. I did some quick performance tests on it and the single 75GXP was faster than the two 40GV's(on a on-board Highpoint controller on my abit VP-6 board).
So now I hope that it won't die on me. I haven't had a drive quitting on me the last few years, except for one Fireball that lasted for 2 hours. I normally buy a new HD for my desktop PC every year, and the old ones normally goes to a Linux or FreeBSD box setup where they run 24/7. The same thing happens for my old desktops, aah ye olde Pentuim 166 running FreeBSD on a 4gb drive. Still humming along.
Go here for warranty support on IBM drives:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/warranty/
I just installed a new 40GB 60GXP one week ago, today. Fingers crossed.
/etc on the desktop system, but maybe that's not such a good idea, any more.
My 3.2GB Deskstar has been flawless. For just over two years it's been spinning away nearly 24x7 on my 'old box'. I back up
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Well how about a little Hard Drives 101? They will ALL DIE. EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM.
Maybe these drives tire quickly of 24/7 mp3 playing & sharing.
I have had on going trouble with my 20 gig IBM TravelStar laptop drive. Same thing- started out ok, then got weird humming/ buzzing. Then later developed occational "thwack" noises- I RMA'd it, they sent a refurb- same thing, but the problems aren't as pronounced as they were on the other drive. The buzzing is quieter, and the (more scary) thwacks are less often.
eddie@(nospam)actaeon.net
My external RAID-5 unit has 3 75GB 75GXP drives (and we bought a fourth as backup) where one failed 3 months after receiving it. Another drive seemed to have failed a couple weeks ago and after taking it out and reinstalling it, the RAID unit stopped complaining about that particular drive but it did have to rebuild it. The company I bought the RAID from replaced it but never said anything. I even emailed IBM about it, and their reply was this:
"I would suspect this is not a drive issue and is caused by interference
on the bus. Faster ATA RAID configs are very susceptible to noise and
require good shielding and 80 conductor cables."
This is seemingly a very well built RAID unit and seems to have very high quality cabling. I had my suspicions about this and now I am even more so...
I have two 40G 60GXP drives, and i'm using software raid0 for some partitions. Everything went fine for first few months. But now just week ago, other drive has started to lost it's DMA:
.. upgraded bios and kernel to latest ones.. did not help.. gotta check wheter this could be temperature problem too. If nothing helps, I'll propably RMA'd it. Of course this could be motherboard (VIA chipset) problem too, who knows... :u
kernel: ide_dmaproc: chipset supported ide_dma_timeout func only: 14
kernel: hda: status error: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
kernel: hda: drive not ready for command
kernel: hda: timeout waiting for DMA
- b
I'm in the process right now of attempting to restore my IBM 40GB 5400RPM drive using a 75GXp 40GB drive to mirror. The nice thing about these IBM drives is that, apparently, once the drive shuts down the heads are lifted from the surface of the drive, rendering it "impossible" (according to the info page) to damage the surface of the disk while in transit.
Well, I have been using the drive for 4 months and taking it back/forth every day in a caddy (yeah yeah) and it finally died with many grinding noises and the occasional screetchy one. Well it finally barfed and toasted about 0.2% of the surface of the disk (in random places), but just enough to prevent 2K/XP from mounting the disk. I made a recording of the noises that the drive made, I'd be interested to hear yours to see if they're the same.
In any case, this problem isn't limited to IBM. I've had about 4 HD failures in the past 3 years personally of IBM/WD/Maxtor and since I also run a small computer shop I've seen about a dozen more in the same time period. I remember 5 years ago when HDs lasted forever.
OTOH, My server at home is running 2x40GB WD + 2x30GB Maxtor and has been up and running without a reboot for 183 days now (running Windows 2000 I might add). So I guess "yah payz yah money, yah takz ya chancez."
If God gave us curiosity
I own the same drive, it works perfectly, always has. And I load it pretty heavily. blah.
The company I work for has been building boxes with these drives. All of a sudden we've had five of the 75 GB Deskstars come up with bad sectors in past week, rendering filesystems un-fsckable and generally wreaking havoc. We had an emergency meeting just this morning to discuss the issue. I also have replaced probably half a dozen of these suckers in my poor little IDE RAID box over about four months. Frankly, I blamed the RAID controller for being fussy, but I guess I was wrong.
sclatter
veal@galaxie:~$ cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/model
IBM-DTLA-307030
doh!! *prays*
I bought my 75GXP in Dovember 2000 from uBid. I found it unusual at the time that no retailers were offering it, but uBid was selling it and I wanted > 60Gb so I purchased it. The unusual thing about this is that IBM publicly claims to have only stared production of the units at the end of December, while on my drive it states November; the webmaster of storagereview.com didn't even get his model until Feb and also commented on the earliness of my model. This leads me to beleive that IBM sold modified pre-final production models on uBid to make a little extra cash. Whats the problem with this? My drive sounds louder than a 10k RPM drive produced 10 years ago. Since there were so few units sold then, I haven't been able to identify anyone else who purchased the drive to see if they were all like that, but IBM has had a history of giving handing out defective drives. So far my tally is two 18GB (note IBM return policy is to reduce warranty on a returned product to 90 days!!) and one 60GB drive. In theory, great drives. In theory...
We also need to ask how many people have had *good* experiences. Now, it is clear from reading some of these posts that many users have had good experiences with them. But posting this sort of question here, where a large selection bias probably exists and where people who have had good luck are much *less* likely to post their success stories, is going to result in a very skewed picture of IBM - or other - problems. So even if a dozen Slashdot users wrote in with their own horror stories, I wouldn't know what to make of the results, especially since horror stories of other manufacturers are not solicited at the same time. No basis is therefore provided here for us to evaluate any results.
Don't ask a question if the results you get back won't mean much !
I have the 45 GB ATA/100 75GXP series drive and it just recently developed bad sectors and started doing some weird stuff in Linux when I tried running apps. I had to change my filesystem from ReiserFS to ext3fs since ext3fs can actually mark bad blocks unlike ReiserFS. Right now, I don't have the time to send my drive back to IBM because I'm in school but when December arrives, it's back to IBM for this hd.
There's no question that the 75GXP has serious problems. The only question left is whether the newer 60GXP shares those problems. Initially, I think it was sort of assumed that the new drives would fix the problems; but now I'm not so sure. I've heard rumors that the 60's are starting to fail as well, but by the time anyone can sort out the statistics it'll be too late for most people.
All I know is that I wouldn't buy an IBM drive right now. As long as they're keeping people in the dark, why should I take the risk? I'm used to company marketoids denying stuff like this; but if they won't acknowledge the problem, how can we ever be sure that it's fixed?
I've used pretty much every form of hard drive out there, and in my experience the Fujitsu (whom makes IBM's drives for them) and Western Digital drives are the worst to be had.
:) I've never, ever had a bad experience with Seagate, and will recommend them to anyone who listens. The few extra bucks you'll pay over a Maxtor or similar mass market drive are worth it a hundred times over when you've got critical data floating around in a non-raid situation. That's the situation for most college kids whom are cash-starved, yet need to have their thesis survive to the end of the term. :)
For IDE applications, I recommend the Seagate 7200rpm Baracuda line.
For SCSI, the Cheetah line. I have one of the age-old original 4.5GB Cheetahs. I've low level formatted it a few dozen times, high level formatted it a few hundred times, run a dozen operating systems on it, dropped it numerous times, whacked it, smacked it, and just generally abused the hell out of it in my torture (Q&A) server for many years. Once, when all the little brushless fans in my drive coolers decided to die within a hour of each other, it got so hot I couldn't even touch it for a few hours.
And.. it's still working.
Hippies smell.
Today I'm sending back the "servicable used part" that they sent me to replace my FIRST drive, a 45GB 75GXP which failed. I guess in a sense I'm grateful because this one failed after a couple of hours - before I had too much work stored on the drive.
The previous generation of IBM 7200 RPM IDE drive, the 34GXP, always worked great for me. I've got a couple of the 27GB drives and they still run fine.
Lesson learned: you can't shop for drives based on brand alone. Although no Maxtor drives have given me problems yet...
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Bought a 75GXP 15Gig drive last september. It died after 2 months. IBM sent me another drive (not new, had replacement on it) from Hungary. This one seems to be working fine now.
My gripe is with the hardware review sites. I remember most sites (including storage review) recommending the IBM drive as the fastest IDE drive you could buy at that time. Question is, which sources of information are trustworthy and where should first time hardware buyers like me go so that we are not suckered.
What would be a good 7200RPM ATA100 drive (say 40gigs) that I can buy right now?
I had two of these puppies in a RAID 1 setup, and couldn't believe that they both were crapping out at the same time - but they did. IBM has replaced the first one to go in for RMA (after 4 weeks).
I've bought about 15 maxtor's personally for my systems. I had only 1 fail (1.6GB), after about a year, which they replaced withint 3 days with a 3GB one. I'm pretty harsh on my gear - that's why I bought Maxtor in the first place - it was cheap. It turns out Maxtor isn't cheap, it's just INexpensive. AKA Cheap but Good.
My personal systems are almost always rebooted daily, since I don't feel a need to leave them on when I'm not using them.
... if they ever pass this "Proposed Federal Criminal Statute Addressing the Solicitation of Commercial Terrorism Through the Internet" or a comparable piece of legislation.
Published in the Winter 2000 Harvard Journal on Legislation this draft would make it possible to prosecute those who run disparaging web sites aimed at corporations and their products or otherwise by their activities on the net cause damage to corporation's public image or revenues:
(excerpt) The development of the Internet as a means of communication marks a dramatic change in the manner in which information is exchanged and disseminated in our culture. Quickly fading are the days in which a person's main venue for expressing her revolutionary views included standing on a soapbox or distributing leaflets. Instead, the Internet provides any person with any opinion the ability to reach a virtually unlimited audience without the formidable barriers previously posed by costly and inaccessible mainstream visual or print media. n1 In the current "Information Age," the marketplace of ideas is booming on the Internet.
However, along with the benefits of increased access to information, ease of communication, and new avenues for commerce have come the problems associated with a largely unregulated {page 160} environment. In its present infant stage, the Internet resembles the lawless "Wild West." The Internet is open to governance by human instincts, including those of greed, deception, and hate. In recent months there has been an alarming increase in the use of the Internet to sponsor, solicit and encourage the use of "commercial terrorism." n2 For the purposes of this Model Statute , "commercial terrorism" is defined as the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce commercial interests. (/excerpt)
Now to be sure, this is just a draft. It may not even have entered the "legislative process" yet. But all the same it certainly is an indication that people are thinking along these lines... and given the laws that have been passed the last five years I wouldn't be the least surprised if something like this would come up in the near future.
When I was working at a my last job (a .com) we had a co-location at at a company the mirrored the internet (quite famous one too) - they stored the internet literally on hundreds of those 76 gig IBM deskstar drives (running over 250 machines) - we had two fail, they've had a couple fail too - but for the most part most of them have survived years of really intense use.
So I bought one (76g gig just like our co-location and the mentioned article) for home use - used from an ad in a local computer magazine - worked fine for the first few months - then it started going clack clack clack and making a scratch noise while doing so - freaked me out - so I used ghost to back it up to a Seagate 40 gig disk drive. I ran DFT over the "bad drive" and it said I had a bad sector on it (error 0x70) - it tried to fix it - the first time I did this it worked just fine for another few months - but then it happened again - to the point where dft could only fix it for like a week. So finally I sent it back - I got a brand new part back. I should mention I never actually lost any data (or any crucial data) during this whole period.
One thing I noticed about the replacement is that it runs like twice as cool as the last one. The first drive was very hot to the touch - this one is just warm. So far its been running for the last two months without a single hitch.
get a clue, dude.
What are we supposed to do sit around and stay plugged into CNN so we can hear about each little tidbit of information so we can try to plug it into "The Big Picture" - your little corkboard of news clippings and how it's all a conspiracy. You disgust me!
We are moving on with our lives and we're not sitting in our little cave with TV remote in hand waiting for the scraps of news that the public media feeds us.
Frankly, I have faith in our government. They are doing their job, they are on the case. This whole deal's gonna take time, and you gotta learn to let go and move on. This is America's war. The people we have elected to positions to oversee such operations are doing it. Put away your little Survivalist Monthly magazine. It's not your war. You can unload your BB Gun there chief, our war fighters will do the job. And they'll do it well. We're not gonna sit around crying over spilled milk. We as a nation are taking action - as a team, not as individuals dialing up on mommy & daddy's AOL account to flame mesg boards... Not that i haven't gotten on mine, but get off your soapbox - Stop being so self-righteous and pious... (and lose AOL)
12 gb Western Digital. Suddenly, everything would randomly freeze for a few seconds at random times - it's now at the point, however, where a cp command takes fifteen minutes - for one file!
..Oh shit. It's doing it again. The freezing. Only, it's not - it's making *noise* this time, and the freeze only happens if I haven't accessed the drive in about three or so hours. Other than that.. Still running.
6.4 gb Western Digital.
20 GB Seagate something or other - DOA.
60 GB IBM. Holy fscking shit! d00d w00t dr1ve iz qu13t! Seriously, this is the most quiet drive I've ever had. It's fast. It rocks. Had it for a few months now.
Frankly, if the IBM dies, I'm handing in my degree and going to work in McDonald's. I'm getting sick of shitty hardware. It's worse than shitty software.
I bought my Dell Dimension 4100 about this time last year. Thinking I was going to use it for video editing, and massive MP3 storage, I got the biggest available drive at that time, a 75 GB IBM drive. Witin a few months of receiving the computer I began to hear horrible grinding noises every time I used it. I ran some tests under both Linux and Windows and both told me that about half the drive was corrupted. After a few weeks of convincing tech support, I finally got them to send me a new drive. I installed this and it worked fine...for about 3 months. Then I had the exact same problems and, again, half the drive was corrupted. They finally sent me a third drive at the beginning of the summer and, so far, I've had no problems. Unfortunately, Dell refused to send me a different drive, even if it was smaller.
Admittedly, I could just be in a very statistically insignficant group...but two drives? And then all these other complaints I'm hearing?
Looking on the bright side, I now know way more about both Linux and Windows installation!
Checkout taccom my worl war II simulator
I recently had a Quantum Bigfoot fail on me with _exactly_ the same symptoms as described in the links --- the occasional click, the linux kernel DrivReadySeekComplete (or something like that) errors, and then the constant-clicking-and-not-booting thing.
This article really scared me! I have one of those IBM 60GB harddrives.I have a lot of critical data on it (which I depend on for my studies)
Although I haven't had any problems with mine yet.
Actually, my impression about using this harddrive for about six months is that it's extremely fast (and hot!).
Are there any warning-sign to look out for? Should I loose my sleep over this harddive?
Some drives fail. It's a pain, but they /all/ do it! IBM are trying.
/deserves/ my continued loyalty.
As far as I'm concerned, going to the effort of making a repair utility I can use on my Linux servers
Class action lawsuit.
I bought a 45 gig one start giving errors on parts of the drive after a few months. I didn't bother sending it back because I read about all the other people with problems with it and I didn't want to loose any data again.
I don't have the 60, i have the 45er. It hasn't died yet but it does suffer from the clicking everyonce and while and i got some data loss along with it. But it hasn't died YET. From what i have heard the problem stems from one of the features that they tout. They cram a crap load of data on one platter, there fore lowering the amount of platters needed, therefore lowering their manufacturing cost. So when the drive heats up data becomes very hard to read and thats where the clicking comes from, the heads are trying to read data over and over *click whirrrr* *click whirrrrr* etc. Just an FYI
Hope you don't live in an older neighborhood or in a multi-unit building. They'll blame power problems and you'll probably get nothing.
Here's my story. The first drive I ordered, back in March, came DOA. I figured that wasn't a big deal, and RMA'ed the drive. I got another one that appeared to work fine.
.BLZ file from the DFT disk, which I also provided.
Fast forward to about a month or so ago. My drive gave me no clicking noise indications of failure or anything, but I became unable to access anything on the disk one time I booted the machine.
I ran DFT, and found the good old 0x70 error code, and that bad sectors were found about half way through scanning the disk. Other than DFT, no tool that I have would read anything or scan the disk.
I've contacted IBM, specifically stating that I will not accept another of these disks, since they obviously have reliability problems. Monday, I talked with their support, who requested all the system information I could provide them (thanks to SiSoft Sandra that was easy). Also they requested the
The rep I talked to acknowledged that if I needed the disk replaced I wouldn't want the same model, but I haven't heard anything since Monday. IBM seemed anxious to prove that my problem was due to the shutdown bug, but realized that the evidence wasn't there. I run Windows 2000 (longer shutdown cycle), my processor is slow by today's standards (550MHz PIII Katmai) and I was only running ATA66 rather than 100.
I only hope that all these responses will compel IBM to actually admit to and do something about this problem.
When I hooked it up and powered up the system, the drive fried. We got a replacement, and that worked for a while, but when it got moved to another system, it got fried.
We eventually figured out that what was happening was that in the systems these drives were going in, you could not easily see the power connector when the drive was in its bay. That's not normally a problem, because power connectors are keyed. However, the plastic on these connectors was not very rigid. If you tried to put a power connector in wrong, the plastic would simply bend and allow the connection. There was no noticable difference in the force required to put the connector in right and that required to put it in wrong. So, anyone using the "the right way is the one that actually goes in" method of hooking up power had a 50/50 chance of getting it backwards.
Now here's the funny part. We found out from a contact in IBM that IBM was having something like a 20% failure rate on these drives during testing at their plant, because of their own QA people plugging the power in backwards!
"I've got to wonder if the problem isn't the drives necessarily, but bad handling..."
Bad handling is DEFINITELY an issue. Many people buy OEM bare drives that come from the manufacturer in bulk packaging. The people who package them and send them to you obviously have no computer knowledge, or thay wouldn't be working in a shipping department. (Computer knowledge means never having to say "Paper or plastic?")
Studies have been done of the acceleration (deceleration) caused by hitting a drive on a hard counter. A small bump of a metal drive on a hard counter can be 70 Gs. When you think about it, it makes sense. The drive is traveling at perhaps 1 foot per second, and then it comes to a complete stop in less than a thousandth of an inch.
The solution is to buy retail-boxed drives. Wait for a sale if the price is a problem.
The damage done by a bump is usually not evident for months until the drive fails. Apparently a drive will get a small mechanical irregularity, and then slowly chew on itself until failure.
By far the most common cause of drive failure is vibration or movement of the case while the drive is running. If you put a tower case on the floor, and the floor moves a little every time someone walks near, expect problems. If you put a case on a concrete floor, but it is often knocked during the day, expect failure. If a computer is on a table that moves a little while you are working, it may not last long. This failure mode is dependent on how much movement about the axis actually happens, of course.
Drives are built to handle a lot of Gs when they are not powered, but when they are running they are very vulnerable.
Inadequate power is also a reason for drive failure. Put a drive on its own power supply connector.
I've had good luck with considerable quantities of Western Digital drives. Good support, also. I've had bad luck with Quantum, Seagate, and Maxtor.
Whew! I didn't realize I knew much about this until I started typing.
Secrecy destroys democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
You are very right about a couple of things: Don't threaten. Don't plead. Don't whine. Set them a dead line, go through whatever the legal process is in your jurisdiction and then sue them without another word. Oh and one more thing: I always, ALWAYS let my lawyer do both the paperwork and talking and I don't appear in court if I don't have to.
So you recommend a drive known to have high failure rates to your friends? Some friend you are! I too have a 75GXP (45gb) without problems but come to some sense! No reason to tempt fate.
I recommend Quantum to my enemies!
Well I'd rather be your friend than your enemy. Quantum drives are pretty damn good these days (least the IDE ones are, no experience with the SCSI). Do you have some proof otherwise besides the failing tiny drives of yore?
I was really amused sitting at my desk going over a machine with 2 60GB IBM drives where one just goes CLICK CLICK CLICK and won't even post, and I look up at slashdot and there's the story.
2 drives, both dlta-307060, both made in Hungary AUG-2000. Unfortunately I think we have over a 100 of these drives in production. It's a good thing the company is dead, maybe I should feel bad for the people that are going to buy them at auction next week.
Chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
My 75GXP 75gb died after 2 months with NO chance of data recovery (I know, I know... backups...) Sorry to hear I'm not the only one... They're sending me a replacement drive as we speak. I'll be cautious of the new one.
It's only a game...
hi all,
I've been running 2 x IBM 40gb drive for over a year now. Initially, I noticed that it was running very hot, so I added a dual fan hdd cooler and its running fine for this this time. But I still make regular backups , cos' its more likely NTFS will go and trash itself then the HD fails.
eddie
I have had 2 of the 60gxp's for about a month without problems. I heard of this problem before I got the drive and through all the reading I can to the conclusion that it was most likely a poor quality or less than adequate power supply that most people had problems on. These drives seem to be particularly sensitive to the correct amount of power all the time so if you're going to get one make sure you have a good power supply. I have a dual p3 1ghz/all the other little accessories/512mb of ram/raid card so I got a 450 watt power supply for it.
I've had a Maxtor 60 GB that died in the same way (grinding noises, wouldn't boot). The only way to make it start again was to hit it with a HAMMER (honest). The noise stopped and the drive started spinning, but I lost about 30% of the data on it.
It's funny how you trust a certain brand, read nothing but fantastic benchmarks about it, buy the products and exactly 6 days after your warranty from you local reseller expires it crashes and burns. I called the IBM helldesk, which is also suffering from a shortage of capable personnel (for *^%%^ they don't even speak the language) and gave 'm my email. They called me back twice because they had misspelled it, and after the third attempt hadn't succeeded, they diverted their attention to another (suffering) customer.
:) ).
In short, my 75 GXP drive is "experiencing some minor data loss" (helldesk: nothing to be concerned about), the Drive Fitness Test reports that my drive is in "fine health", the Dutch helpdesk does not speak Dutch (nor English, my Turkish is a bit rusty
It is always a relief to hear that "it is a known problem sir, and we are working on it".
Bottom's up!
I lost a 75GB IBM drive a few monts ago. It happened after a reboot.
The drive just started clicking and making noises.
I sent it to Ibas, a data recovery company to try to recover some of the lost data. No luck.
I lost almost 70GB of GIS data. (no backup).
I've heard this horrible clicking sound a couple times, but I havent found any data loss and was fine after rebooting [which was my reaction as soon as I heard the sound...
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I have had it for almost a month and had no problems. I ran intensive disk tests (e.g. SpinRite v5.0) just to be sure. No odd symptoms so far.
How about you guys?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have 2 75GXPs in my home box (20G and 30G) and they have both been great. I've also installed another 5 or 6 75GXPs in other peoples computers and they've been totally reliable. I've also had a few older IBM drives that have been passed on to other family members. I've had such great experiences with IBM drives that I haven't bought any other brand (for myself or anyone else) in over a year.
Kind of a glowing endorsement, I know, but we tend to find what we're looking for. If you're looking for problems with a particular manufacturer you will most likely find what seems to be an inordinate number of them. How do the complaints you're finding for IBM stack up in comparison to other manufacturers?
Also, could it be a heat problem? I always make sure that any hard drive I install has at least one adjacent empty bay for air circulation, preferably one on each side.
With that many drives in a row going bad, I would suggest that the drives aren't the problem. I had a friend who rebuilt/upgraded his computer several times last year because he was having weird stability problems. He went through 3 mobos with 2 Athlons, 2 mobo's with 2 P3s, 2 video cards, 2 sound cards, 3 hard drives, 3 IDE controller cards, and God only knows how many cables/connectors before he finally figured out it was the power supply that was the problem.
Of course, at every step he would sell the "bad" hardware to somebody at about 1/3 what he paid for it and they would have no problems with it (which is how I got my Athlon, mobo, the 20G 75GXP, and a RAIDed Promise Ultra66 without being murdered by my wife ;)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
When I buy new hardware I usually check various review sites first, but since I've never had any problems with my IBM drives, I've just bought them without checking... Big mistake.
I am also the victim of a failing IBM drive just like the author of this article...
So I checked my usual review site, c'net - and wow, take a look at the 60GB drive reviews! They are horrible! 50/50 for good/bad!
Even though, c'net themselves rates the 75GB drive as 8/10 - wow...
My two maxtor drives are very good though, but they do make a bit more noise than the IBMs - but rather that...
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
My 45Gig 75GXP just died last weekend after having no problems for around 10 months, I'm waiting on IBM to RMA it now but after what happened to my drive and after reading all this I'm not sure I feel safe storing my data on the drive they're going to send me. Too bad, the 75GXP were nice drives, theoretically.
__
Somewhere out of a memory, of lighted streets on quiet nights...
I had the same problem as you last February. The first RMA'd drive died shortly after I received it, but the second one has so far lasted 9-10 months... (knock on wood).
I bought an IBM drive, since they are supposed to be more reliable than Western Digital or Maxtor, so these failures really came a surprise to me.
I don't know much about the new IBMs but if you want suggestions for HDs, I have 3 Maxtor 80GBs and 2 WD 100GBs to name a few. The Maxtors I've had for more than a year and all is cool, they're workhorses. The Western Digitals obviously I haven't had that long but no problems thus far. Good Luck.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Have you tried other drives in the same bay, on the same power, etc? Even a bad drive line wouldn't be expected to fail 3/3 times. That's an incrediably high failure rate, even if the next 7 didn't fail. Maybe you have internal problems (vibrations, heat, power surges, etc...) that are causing you problems?
My company was recently forced to refurb machines we sold to a customer because of a high drive failure rate, and it less than 5%. Something makes me think it's not just bad drives causing your grief...
If you would like to be a leader with a large following...drive slowly down a windy two-lane road
My 60GXP works just FINE. It DOES, however, have a hole that says DO NOT COVER. DON'T COVER IT! In fact, dont stack another drive on top of it. Maybe that will solve some problems.
I remember something a while back on one of the Hardware sites about not running some older IBM drives on a system with the PCI or FSB overclocked as this tended to kill the drives rather quickly. Could this be an issue with these drives as well? As most people I know overclock everything...
Mine just failed today, just after I bought a box of CDRs to backup my data...no strange clicking sounds, just a rather destructive system hang and reboot with a scandisk 2 days ago, which destroyed the part of windows2000 holding my profile info as well as some other bits i'm sure. It was recovered to found.000 in the root of C...useful.
;)
I managed to get a couple of disks worth off the sinking ship but now it wont boot (hung again burning disk3...also ruined) and trying to do a windows repair install wont work because it doesnt believe that windows is installed...
The circle of life goes on...format install boot reboot reformat install boot reboot *dies*
just bought two of those, damn
I went hrough a VERY similar experience with IBM recently... I've RMA'd 7 times with 4 different drives.. maybe that doesn't sound too bad but we only bought 10 total for our workstations.. ALMOST each time i've gotten a "serviceable part" i've had to RMA those too.
I thought for sure it was cables or HD controlers... maybe even power.. but with our workstations... it seems pretty independent (e.g. I went through the trouble of putting the new drives in a machine that had a good drive in it... double checking the fitness of the drive against the machine)
Ugh I feel yer' pain!
Hmm. IBM's storage site actually had a rather in-depth aritcle on heat related failures. Seems that for each degree increase in heat, the rate of failure doubled.
Most typical PC cases are prone to heat buildup. I bought a few of those drive-bay fans, beefed up the case fan, and haven't had a drive failure ever since (computer is quite loud however...) BTW, those 7200 or 10K RPM drives run very hot.
Just to add to the fodder. I have 3 IBM GXP75's running in my LAN case. It gets moved, tossed, kicked... The only problem I've had so far with them is that one of the molar power connectors has a slight problem, its not well attached to the PCB any more. Other than that they are working flawlessly. Two are in a Striped RAID config one is solo. In the same period of time that I have had those drives, two of the Maxtors I've had in the same machine have died, and the third maxtor I think is on its way out. Oh how I used to love my Maxtor drives.
/bin/laden
Cheers all.
digitac
rm -rf
Some time ago, I bought an "IBM-DTTA-371440" (sorry, don't know the trivial name). It was advertised as desktop hard disk (by the DeskStar label), but according to the manual, it requires a constant air flow on the top, and I have practical experience that this is true.
I think you can't run most 7200 RPM drives inside a desktop chassis, at least not if you've got several other heat sources in it.
Burning cd after cd after c.....
Got myself the 30g 75GXP about 10 months ago, no problems yet, so I guess it looks like I'm a couple of months overdue for a massive failure. Just my luck. I hadn't heard ANYTHING bad about these drives. Now I'll spend the rest of its bit sucking life just WAITING for it to fail.
Maybe i should contact IBM now and have them send a replacement drive in advance...
this suxors...
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
All the ones we got went bad. We begged Dell Premier access not to ship us another IBM replacement.
Instead of Deskstars we call them Deathstars
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Definitely. The best solution may be to use those removeable drive drawers that have 2 fans. Heat is an issue with any electronics.
Bush's education improvements were
My friend had a 60GXP 40GB fail within a week of new! the drive was running about as cold as you can get inside a case. I dunno if it was mobo or what (Abit KG7-R) but a HDD shouldn't do that. My Maxtor Diamondmax 40GB (the fast one, can't remember if its plus 60 or plus 40) is running perfectly 24/7 for months now. The Maxtor does run about twice as hot as the IBM though.
NeuTurbo
IBM helped the Nazis! You should have thought before purchasing such an anti-semitism endorsing product.
YOU ARE ALL WORSE THAN THE K K K!
Stupid me bought a Gateway with this drivein it and it wasn't until my 5th install of Windows 2000 I decided to download the IBM utilities for this drive. It analyzed the drive and told me there was some serious problems that could only be fixed by running their low level format. I did so, repartitioned and formatted, laid down Windows 2000 and haven't had one click sound since. You can get said utility from IBM's website.
I've heard stories here and there from friends of friends(yep yep, one of those stories) who work at IBM that the quality of their drives have been reduced somewhat in order to turn a higher profit because their PR folks have told them that the deskstar line has a good reputation etc... So the execs decided to use this to their advantage and deliver us an inferior product to improve their profit margin. Love them business majors!
Supposedly this has been going on for about a year and a half and has now culminated to this... junk products. I guess this is what happens when a big manufacturer creates a succesful product line. A lot like Iomega.
I'm glad this is a slashdot article, maybe the publicity will hurt the line's public image enough to where IBM will start manufacturing quality drives like the 10gb and 20gb desktar drives they made a couple years back.
We had 4 IBM 75GXPs operating in this household and they all worked perfectly. Then, 9 months later (thankfully in warranty), within the space of a week two of them died.
They can be temporarily resurrected by doing a low-level format, but on one disk this problem recurred. Annoyingly enough (don't buy at computermarket.com.au ), the company refused to replace one hard drive since there was no evidence of failure.
I have 2 drives from them:
Sep 30 11:55:29 dave kernel: hde: IBM-DTLA-307045, ATA DISK drive
Sep 30 11:55:29 dave kernel: hdf: IBM-DTLA-307030, ATA DISK drive
The 45 gig drive I had purchaced first, and has never even hiccuped at me. I had purchaced the second drive a few months later when an of 4.3gig western digital finally passed on after many years of faithful service. The 30 gig drive started making horrible grinding noises during my initial partitioning (DiskDrake under Linux 8.0 Beta3 I believe). I ran some diagnostic program from IBM's website, it gave me some cryptic error message in hex, I called up the place I purchaced the drive from (www.mwave.com) and they cross shipped me a new drive (same model), which seems to be working fine for a bit less than a year now.
I have also heard from a friend that had similar problems. The first thing IBM tech support asked him (drive was purchaced during winter months) was if he let the drive reach room temperature after delivery before power up. Apparently there are some condensation issues. This was not my problem as I lived in an appartment at the time and it was happily sitting in the lobby all day before I got home, my friend on the other hand, I suspect his drive was sitting on his front porch untill he got home from work.
And lets face it, no one I know can stare at a shiny new HDD for that long before chucking it in and firing it up.
But you're conceptually correct: generally, if something stops quickly, it does so in a short distance.
OK, enough nitpicking. :)
--
chahast at pangaea FOO dhs FOO org
s/foo/dot
After reading quite a few hardware reviews of an IBM drive, I decided to go with what I thought was going to be the fastest drive. IBM seemed to be a reliable company, so I bought a 20 gig 7200rpm ATA/66 drive off eBay. Everything went well, very very fast drive... quiet also. About three months down the road, it started making spinning noises and clicking while trying to read data. Called IBM, amazingly they said the drive was still under warranty and proceeded to give me a RMA. Shipped the drive back, gave me a brand new drive of the same model, it dies about 6 months later. By this time they've implemented the online rma form and this drive is still under warranty. Ship that one back, they send me back a new 30gig 7200rpm ATA/100 drive, bigger and faster then the other two that died! It's been three months since then and the drive is running exceptionally strong. Hopefully when this one dies, it will still be warranted and I can repeat the process, constantly getting new hard drives! wish me luck!
I have an oem DTLA-307045 45GB GB drive that has been running since April non-Windows without problems. Maybe that gigantic Master File Table (MFT) that gets laid down with 45+ GB partitions in the Windows 2000 NTFS file system stresses the drives too much.
I bought a system with a 60 GB 75GXP last August and it failed this August, with the same horrible cicks and grinding noise that was described by Cliff. It was about 45 GB full and had been making unusually loud grinding noises for about a week and then during a routine defrag it started making really loud noises and the computer froze. I waited about a minute and the restarted, and when it tried to boot Windows it gave me a "non-system disk" error. I had to buy a 20 GB drive and copy over to it all my files in DOS. I returned it to GamePC (who I bought the system from) and asked em if they had been experiencing high return rate on 75GXPs, and they said no. But they sent me the 60GXP model at no extra cost! I asked my friend about the 75GXP failures and he said he read that the drives made in Hungary were failing. My advice, stay away from 75GXP drives altogether, go for the 60GXP or the Western Digital Caviar drives, they seem to be getting kudos from good sources (Tomshardware, StorageReview).
I still have 3 SCSI 2GB Conner 3.5" drives running on our SQL Server. They are atleast 15 years old. They are still running strong. Never RMAed or Crashed. (Crosses fingers hoping for 15 more years of good work out of these drive). Anyways, I wish Conner Peripherals came back and made some drives again... Maybe we would have better quality again.
Conner was the highest quality/most advanced drive makers at the time. I seriously doubt most of you would even remember who Conner were.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
Mine failed and I sent it back, they sent me back a refurbished one, it hasn't failed yet, but I am going to buy as new drive anyways, i don't trust my data on it.
That manuf. in the GB race are falling behind in quality? I've had more large xxGB drives fail than ones that are smaller than 20GB. And most of the 20GB or smaller ones have been running 24/7 ever since they were purchased (long before the larger drives.) One brand I don't like is Maxtor, I lost a lot of stuff of a 40GB drive after rebooting once, and the drive rattles now (did the head break off?). WD no problems, Fujitsu no problems, Quantum no problems.
--- Delta0.. makes no difference.
I've got a 40GB Deskstar 60GXP. Here's what I've dug up on these uberdrives.
The platters in the 60GXPs are 20GBs each. Apparently, this is incredibly dense for consumer-grade hard drives (the 75's were 15GB each). The problem is this: heat. Everyone knows what happens if you stick a magnet on a grittle and let it cook for a bit. If you don't, here's the skinny: there are two ways to quickly and permanently demagnetize something. One is extreme shock. The other is heat. Harddrives heat up. If this heat is not dissipated, the platters heat up. When a platter is too hot, and the read/write head attempts to magnetize/demagnetize a sector, the magnetism may occur on the adjacent track.
My tip: A HDD cooler, even a passive one (giant heatsink) is better than nothing. I have one, and it's loud and obnoxious. But my HDD is fast, and that was my point in buying the Deskstar.
Hope this helps.
I had a Maxtor DiamondMax 20.4 gig that started failing before the OS would completely load. I was able to freeze the harddrive and get it to work for 5-10 minutes before it would fail again. I had to freeze it 3 times to transfer all my data. The bad news is I decided on buying a 45gb 75XP drive from IBM because I was hoping it would be more reliable! It hasn't failed yet, but I am going to backup my files tonight :)
couple of years ago I got first of those 7200rpm ibm hard drives, 15gb. and it started to produce bad blocks in one month. then i activated SMART on it, problem was gone. I've used it for a while then, w/o SMART, and month ago it again started to make funny sounds and produce badblocks, I again run SMART on it and drive is healthy once more. just run SMART always on these drives. I have 3 of them - 15gb, 30gb and 60gb. 15gb is serving me >2yrs.
for debianized people, apt-get install ucsc-smartsuite
It does get hot so I bought a disk fan which keeps it cool. I'm sure if you slapped it in without a fan it would die.
What's strange is I have had the drives for a while with no problem, but I do recall seeing this exact same type of story on another site about a few months back. Again I didn't have a problem at all and I haven't seen any complaints since then.
I have a bunch of old AT power supplies I got from a warehouse clearance thing that have a "Glitchmaster" label on them. When I was first playing with one of these outside the case, I noticed that after I unplugged it it kept running its fan for like 45 seconds. Under a heavy power load (3 or 4 ancient hard drives - one of which was a seagate 1GB full-height 5.25") it lasts for about 1 seconds without power. The only problem I've seen with these Glitchmaster supplies is that the output voltage increases the longer it's been unplugged (weird), and that some of them seem to keep trying to come on for a while after I disconnect the power (or turn off the power switch), causing the drives to click every 30 seconds for the next few minutes. Probably would kill any new hard drive by the power "clicks," but if a better version of this power supply were released in an ATX style it would be very nice for use in rural areas, or with older UPS's that have a slight delay in the switch to battery mode.
A solution to the problem with music today
Besides shocks, one thing I've found that can make a disk's main bearing fail before its time is if the disk isn't perfectly horizontal or vertical while running.
I know that the Navy has a problem with disks aboard ships, because the rolling motion puts a nearly continuous precession stress on the spindle.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
and I find it hilarious that IBM says on their product page that cnet praises their new 75gig drive, and then when you go to cnet, 50% of the readers have given it a thumbs down! nice work IBM..
a. after 2 defective replacements (ie 3 bad total) the customer receives a brand new item. Cost for item comes out of management pay. By law.
b. Defective software can be returned for a full refund even if opened.
c. Corporate CEOs, management and other decision makers can be sued for the actions of their company.
d. Corporations have the rights of an individual, but none of the responsiblities. Criminal cases filed against corps are to be simaltaniously filed against CEOs, management, and other decision makers.
e. Punish fraudulant marketing as fraud.
There, that about sums it up.
I had the same thing occuring with a WD drive of mine (Caviar, of course). I was performing the painstaking action of "defragging" in Win32, when it thrice made this awful clunking noise.
I could no longer write to a portion of the drive, so I RMAd it, and recieved a drive that did the same thing (clunk clunk, my original didn't do that until a few months after I got it).
It's expensive to ship things into the USA from Canada, unless you want to wait a month.
I sold that drive to a guy on usenet, before anything bad happened, and bought a Seagate drive.
The moral of the story? Cut your losses!
(Yes, the drive was full of MP3s)
I'm with you, I tend to believe that heat is the problem on these drives.
My 75GB GXP has been working great since January, and the computer's only been off 3 times since then for servicing. Current uptime is 89 days, and the drive gets a read/write request from a seti@home client every few seconds so it doesn't spin down very often.
The drive is installed in a removable rack with two fans, intake and exhaust. (Intake is from outside the case, naturally). It stays very cool. I've accidentally bumped it around quite a bit (running and not running) and have had no problems. From my experience I would think minor shock damage isn't an issue.
I have a 20G 75GXP drive, and it has
(almost) been fine for 2 years. I had a bad
patch for about 2 days where the drive was
corrupting files and making horrible grinding
noises: these were also the only two days in
which I had installed a beta Bios for my Asus A7v
motherboard.
I had the corrupted files to contend with,
but I had no trouble with the drive after I
returned to the good BIOS.
I understood there were two kind of chips on this hard drive. On from China or so and one from america. The china one was broke, it is going much too hot. Good luck I had one of these china ones. After my hard drive crashed, I buyed a hard drive cooler. I never had any problems again. It shows that this drive sux!
Funny, but I encountered the exact same thing
with a RAID array and Two 60GXPs.
Lots of 0xffffff corruption, hard drive failure
imminent errors, etc..
I bought an IBM 60GXP-series drive back in July and it's been running with no problems whatsoever. I actually specifically avoided buying the 75GXP line because I had heard similar horror stories from friends.
One of the 60GXP drives that I own failed after 2 weeks, and is currently being RMAed. I hope I don't need to do it again!
I know I shouldn't be baiting a troll, but I don't use Linux. I, the one you are trolling, use FreeBSD.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I hear you, brother! I work in tech support now, and I've been called a jerk, asshole, and "fat and lazy" by people who are pissed because I can't waive my minimum-wage wand and make their cable modems work.
ANYONE who is a jerk to me gets their support call priority set to the lowest possible level. It may be petty, but it's the only power my sorry ass has.
(Posted anonymously because my boss often reads Slashdot. Heh.)
just before failing to boot again was:
/home. I have't formatted the upper 20G of the disk. I'm worried. I think I'm just going to go out and buy something different unless IBM wants to give me something other than more of the same.
screech, screech, screech, clickidy, chickidy, clickidy
pause
screech, screech, screech, clickidy, chickidy, clickidy
pause
...
is that what you're talking about? Wondered what that was. Mine's a 75GXP 30G purchased about 9 mo ago but this happended after 3 mo. I did a low level format with IBMs utility and reinstalled but recently I discovered I cannot make an isofs of my
75GXP harddrives have failed in so big masses that it is economically unwise to buy such a harddisk. As a harddisk vendor, we were warned by the distributor (to be unnamed here) each time we bought PC's with 75GXP harddisk in. Those harddisks were the only product they didn't ask about when we returned them for a replace.
I was really pissed off when I first noticed this story as for years I have found IBM drives to be really reliable and never considered any other drives at all.
At first, when reading the posts, I thought it was a bad batch of one model of drive, then I noticed the messages about how some people's drives had been packed! I always get my drives from dabs.com (I live in the UK). Even if you buy an OEM drive it comes in an anti-static bag inside one of those small cardboard boxes with the pre-cut foam inserts so the drive can't move and impacts are mostly absorbed by the foam. When in a PC the case/chassis absorbs a lot of the impact in day to day use, but I would not even install a drive which had been packed in some of the ways people describe- it will almost certainly fail eventually.
I think heat is less of a factor than people think, though. My drives are always in the shoddy old 3 1/2 inch bay section with something above and below them and I don't have a case fan.
You could think- so what- just one computer doesn't mean it's ok- but actually I run about 10 computers (a while since I counted) and they are all set up like this.
Power though- hmmm. I haven't trusted crappy brand power supplies since I discoved my Enlight 300W supply wouldn't run my PC133 ram with CAS2 despite it running fine with another (superior) power supply. The moral- the quality of the voltage supply is more important than the number of watts. If you haven't got enough power you'll soon know. (Step up electrical engineer X to correct me...)
graspee
I have a 45GB 75GXP at home that has been there since the drives came out. No problems, ever.
We have about ten 40GB 60GXPs here at work that were purcahses four months ago -- no problems here either.
I have been sysadmining for about seven years now. Very few times have I had a disk drive go bad on me. I had an old full height 5.25" Wren SCSI drive die on me, causing data loss about four years ago, but it was on a non critical old server. I have had a few Western Digital sub 1GB IDE drives die, but they had been slapped around pretty badly.
Here at work, we had two SCSI disk drives from HP g o bad on us. They were actually Seagates, I think?
I had the same exact issue with the drive I purchased. It worked beautifully for about 3 weeks, then died a horrible death with a loud clicking noise. UPS just delivered the replacement drive yesterday, but I haven't had a chance to test it out yet. I figured that I had jinxed myself because about a week before it crashed I was bragging to a friend how I'd never had a hard drive crash on me. It's nice to know that I'm not alone :)
I have a 60GB IBM 75GXP (aka. DLTA-307060) and experienced some of the grinding noise problems during seeks on one of my Linux partitions. However two months after a reformat I have had no problems whatsoever.
A guy in my office runs Linux and has an IBM GXP drive (75 GB iirc). He has already had it replaced once, and the current one is in the process of failing again. He's too scared to reformat or to let me do it for him.
My advice: always but always keep backups of anything you care about. The drive is a bargain, but certainly not bulletproof. I would buy another one, but then again I mostly use it for storing MP3s... I produce only about 2 CDs worth of critical data per year.
We use these in our turnkey servers -- the numbers as follows:
Drives in the field: ~ 120
Drives failed: ~ 20
The drives in the field are worked VERY hard -- full 30/45/75gb copy over every few days, plus normal traffic.
Not horrible, but not very good. Most failures
are because of the power cable prongs are very flaky. They're ide drives, and MUCH more reliable than any of maxtor's offerings (which ive had horrible 50% death rate experiences with).
60GXP's are better. Ask for a replacement 60GXP. We've dropped the 75gxp's for the 60gxp's and so far havent seen one dead drive.
Mine cratered on me once, making the oddest noises I've ever heard a harddrive make. I didn't lose much data, but now I don't trust the drive. I still have my 24GB Quantum in that machine that I keep anything important on. The Quantum was supposed to go to a file server on my home network. After the Deskstar cratered, I ran IBMs drive testing tool which found the errors, did what I assume was a low-level format, and it has been functionning fine ever since. Still too worried to keep anything important on it though.
I both two brand new 75 gig models to setup a Promise RAID set. The two drives failed within a week of each other. So, RAID really didn't help me much. Good thing I had a backup.
It must be the handling.
I've got 3 of them, 2 in one box that have been doing RAID-0 for almost a year, and a single in an older box that has ben going at it for almost 2 years. Most of my friends also use IBM 75GXP drives.
Don't buy computer parts from sketchy places just because they've got the best price on pricewatch.
fwiw, my drives were all oem, but in full padded box packaging.
Don't think that somethign is crap jut because people have complained about it in a forum online. It may well be, but moe people bitch than praise.
Someone mod the parent up.
But now, they ship CMS drives.
Don't believe me? Find a photo of a (reasonably new) CMS drive. You'll be floored.
--Life may have no meaning, or, even worse, it may have a meaning of which you disapprove.
Through out my consumer hard drive purchasing life so far, I've found IBMs to be the best. My brother has an older IBM from an old Dell system he purchased years ago. That has been rock solid even 5 or 7 years after purchase date, fast, and quiet. I purchased a 30 Gig 75GXP 7200 rpm about a year or so ago, and it has run fine with me, even with just stock cooling. Granted it resides within my basement which is admittingly cooler than the rest of the house. But to date, I've had no issues with it, I take the system out to Lans frequently enough in the past, I purchased an OEM version from Onvia so the packaging was okey, even traveling accross the border. I've never run into these IBM harddrive issues people keep mentioning online.
I think this is just a symptom of the large size of today's hard disks. Disks are getting so large, that people can store enormous amounts of data on a single drive, data that has taken them alot of time and effort to accumulate. In previous times, this data might be spread amongst many drives in a system, now it's all on one whopper of a drive. Single point of failure is what you call that. That makes people more furious when they have a failure! They've simply lost more STUFF. That's why I've been thinking of saving up until I can buy 3 large capacity drives (maybe 3 60 GB IBMs), and putting them into a software RAID 5 setup. That way if one dies, I can RMA it, and when I get the new drive back, I can recover. Does anyone know how robust this is going to be using the software RAID in the Linux Kernel? Can you bring up the RAID 5 set with only 2 of the drive active, or does it require a spare?
Actually, I like WD's. I've only had one start losing sectors, but I assume it was just a fluke - I have an very old Caviar 82 MB drive that still works perfectly!! Also, I have my IDE bus loaded to the max, PSPL stressed huge, and daily the floor vibrates, machine gets tossed around/shaken/etc while running, cables plugged in and unplugged, and still these suckers work perfectly. It can get up to 80-90 degrees in here, and they work fine, with the machine uncased, so they're susceptible to dust. They are extremely silent, I've had many sudden power-downs (I.E. windows crashes and I use the Big Red Button), and they still work perfectly. They initialize fast too - takes about 5 seconds to come back to active from a powerdown, and can be reset as quickly as need be without getting screwed up. (My CD-RW can't do that!) My only complaint is that the mounting is a bit weird - I have to use little "Fun+Games" tickets to keep it in place so it's not banging around in the case. (Actually, a Seagate AT drive just fried on me, but it lived pretty long too... /me touches the bottom and fries his finger)
--Joshua
P.S. If you reply to this, email me - wiseguy586 AT yahoo DOT com.
It's also important to keep in mind that the way the drive is mounted can affect the way it works. Specifically, how tightly is it screwed in? IBM drives (believe me...I used to install and troubleshoot these things for a living) cannot be screwed down too tightly, or the voice-coil inside will become bent. When the voice-coil becomes bent, the heads stop doing what they're supposed to, leading to the "clicking" or "high pitched scratching" that many users compalin about.
It sounds ridiculous, I know, but time, and time again, I've fixed that very problem for people by slightly loosening the screws that keep the drive bolted down in the case.
--Life may have no meaning, or, even worse, it may have a meaning of which you disapprove.
My company uses these drives (75GB 7200rpm) in the G-Force (Arena) IDE RAID (6 and 8 bay units) and we have seen plenty of these drives go bad. We have purchases upwards of 100-200 of these drives. It seems every week we are sending back at least 2-3 drives.
I saw a few of you post that heat could cause the issue. We use the drives in very well air conditioned data centers (Liebert power and a/c) and still have this issue. The drives are just really unstable.
We have since found these drives unacceptable for our business since once a drive goes, our our RAID doesn't detect this properly and end up striping garbage data over the RAID.
The only good part about using these drives in the RMA proccess is really simple. No phone calls, no tech support, just fill out a RMA online and they'll send you a new drive!
I've had four drives die. Two DTLA-307060s and two DTLA-307015s. two of those were from IBM direct. They're hard down in the case and the case is sitting on a concrete vibrationless floor. All drives in any condition when I insert certain CDs into my Yamaha CRW2100E squeak, groan, and reset a zillion times. I've tried different power cables, different IDE controllers, different computers, everything. I have two drives that are in need of RMA. These things are FAST, but not very reliable. I'm just hoping my new UltraStar is better.... but I would like to return or exchange these drives.
No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'
I don't think so. I remember reading a thing about where IBM was being criticized because they are known to have supplied machinery to Nazis. They supplied the machinery even knowing that its purpose was for keeping track of the elimination of the jewish slime that plagued most of Europe during that time (something to do with the purification processes that were underway at that time).
I have 4 IBM drives, 3 EIDE and 1 SCSI.. not sure off the top of my head what series but they're all 7200rpm, 13.5/20.5/60.5 EIDE and 17.5 SCSI, and my computer sees quite a bit of abuse.. I've had them various times from close to 3 years to just 5 or 6 months, and my case has been dropped as much as half, maybe a whole inch before, when off, and once or twice half an inch or so while on.. and when off it's been bounced alout during transportation.. I'm impressed how much abuse they took.
At one point the SCSI died but it turned out the ribbon cable from the drive electronics to the drive itself had it's connector pop loose and the cable kept sliding out.. pushing it in and pushing the connector in again to tighten fixed that and never had any more problems.
There's no other way to put it. I went through the same experience a couple years ago with their 10 GB hard drives, RMAd it several times, etc. Not a single one of the hard drives they sent me worked. NOT A SINGLE ONE. And even worse is their customer service - I damn near had to take them to small claims court to get my money back.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Good point. You could probably drop a computer case out a window, and not subject the hard drives to a lot of acceleration (Gs). The reason is that the case flexes, and takes all the stress.
Bush's education improvements were
I've got direct access to 15 Deskstar 60GXP 60GB drives, 2 of them since May, 12 more since August and 1 more since last month, and none of them have failed, made odd noises, etc. The only time I had a bad surprise was when I only had the oldest 2 disks, and the machine on which they were installed starting making horrible noises. I thought it was something wrong with the disks, but it turned out that the second flat cable I had installed myself was touching the processor fan. Oops :-)
I had three 46.1GB 75GXP drives fail on me with the same symptons. All three failed within a 3 month period.
I saw this discussion on StorageReview (or one just like it) several months ago. After reading it, I came to the conclusion that the only people posting were those that have had problems with these drives. Any time someone came back with "Mine works fine", they were shot down with "IBM sympathiser" or "lucky [%^&%*]" name-calling.
I found this disheartening. Are we all just angst-ridden 14-16 year olds?
FWIW, I have 2 75GXPs in my machine right now: A 30 and a 45 gig. Both from Hungary. Neither one has given me even a passing whine. I have had them in 24*7 use for 12+ months now.
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
Being an IBM employee (in software development, not hardware, so please direct your flames elsewhere), I can vouch for the bad disk hardware that IBM has been putting out lately.
Not only are there batches of DeskStar 60GXP and 75GXPs EIDE drives that are DOA or failing before 10,000 hours, but the low-end SCSI drives used in NetFinity and RS/6000 (oops, xSeries and pSeries) machines are prone to similar fates.
Over the past 5 months, one of my development machines with over 100 of these SCSI drives (RAID-0, now RAID-5 just to minimize my hassles) consistently throws one or two bad disks a week!
I would strongly recommend staying away from IBM for standard EIDE and SCSI disks (laptop and SSA disks seem to be fine) until they can get their manufacturing problems ironed out.
Do these drives give a warning before failing? About a year ago, my (then) 2 year old thinkpad started giving warnings about an expected drive failure. The warning was some function that IBM had put into the drive controller. I considered replacing the drive with a different, cheaper drive. However, since the warning might have saved a lot of stuff that I hadn't backed up, I got another IBM drive and put the old one in the ultra bay. Easiest switch imaginable! Now I can still use the old drive.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
I had a Dell 4100. Started with a IBM 45GB, they replaced it with a 75GB, then it died and they finally replaced it with a Maxtor 60GB. Now, my new G4 867 came with an IBM 60GB...it started making a prop airplane noise so Apple immediately replaced it with a Maxtor 60GB. Maxtor Rules. By the way, getting Dell to replace those drives took hours of phone support. Wanted to kill myself. Apple's support was painless. No more IBM DRIVES!
Check out this link on IBM's website.
Looks like there are firmware updates to -prevent- the problem, but if you've ran the drive too hard for too long, it may be too late.
http://www.pc.ibm.com/qtechinfo/MIGR-39082.html
all my ibm and western digital hard drives work great :)
:{
maxtor, on the other hand, *sigh* - one 60gig, two 30gigs, and three 20gigs have failed within the last 6 months
maxtor = cut
- Co-worker #1: four 40GB 75GXP drives - one failed (cycles up and down on power up) within 4 months. Another failed the next month.
- Co-worder #2: two 45GB 75GXP drives - one failed (constant reseeking requiring reboot) within 4 months.
- Co-worker #3: two 60GB 75GXP drives - one DOA (no spin-up), first replacement DOA (no spin-up), second replacement OK.
- Myself: two 60 GB 75GXP drives - one failed (constant reseeking until bus lockup) within 3 months.
- Myself: two 60 GB 60GXP drives - one failed (constant reseeking until bus lockup) within 2 months.
So, of 14 drives (twelve 75GXP, two 60GXP), 7 were DOA or failed within the first 4 months. And, no, I'm not being selective about which drives/co-workers I'm listing. I am listing all of the IBM drives that I know of that were purchased by my co-workers in the last few months.At this point, this is approaching (has reached?) a statistically significant sample and the numbers don't look good. --Doug
The damage done by a bump is usually not evident for months until the drive fails. Apparently a drive will get a small mechanical irregularity, and then slowly chew on itself until failure.
An impact strong enough to cause the hovering heads to actually touch the moving platters can cause the paint like magnetic surface to fleck, causing bad blocks. In time, as the heads pass over that area, they can cause further chipping off of the surface and thus the bad blocks grow in numbers. This may result in data loss and possibly destruction of heads alltogether.
With modern drives, that automatically re-map defective blocks to spares set aside to guarantee maximum usable blocks, this problem can be masked until those spare blocks are exhausted.
You need a high enough impact or vibration to cause a head to come down onto a spinning platter.
If you put a tower case on the floor, and the floor moves a little every time someone walks near, expect problems.
Vibration levels of a person walking near a PC on the floor is nowhere near high enough to cause any problem. The vibration induced by the drives own head movement will cause far quicker acceleration and total drive movement than that (which is mostly a safer horizontal movement). Unless the PC is on creaky floorboards, but even then this is *slow* movement.
If you put a case on a concrete floor, but it is often knocked during the day, expect failure.
Yeah, if the PC itself is knocked, it could cause drive problems, depending on what knocked it (how hard, heavy and fast the object was moving). But I imagine people who care for thier PC's actually take care of them.
If a computer is on a table that moves a little while you are working, it may not last long.
The table is bound to take a lot of the usual day to day shock, which should be quite minimal. Sure if you're dropping heavy objects onto your desk with your PC on it then you might be at risk. But not typing, mousing, paper folders, general office duties type stuff or even dropping a book onto your table. The table stops the book, not the hdd, and any vibration that gets to the hdd would be very damped by the desk.
This failure mode is dependent on how much movement about the axis actually happens, of course.
Which axis? Drives don't like to be yawed while they are spinning as the gyroscopic effect puts strains on the bearings in ways they were'nt designed for. Sideways shock should cause minimal problems, it is the vertical shock that causes heads to crash.
Drives are built to handle a lot of Gs when they are not powered, but when they are running they are very vulnerable.
Very true. Usually 4 or 5 times. Drives are also more susceptible to vibration than shock. My drives takes 300Gs shock non-operating, 63 operating, but only 0.5Gs vibration while operating!
Put a drive on its own power supply connector.
Every PSU I have ever had cause to open, had all it's GND, +5V and +12V wired to common power rails within the PSU. Seperate connectors barely make a difference. Anyway, drives tend to not use much power once they have reached their stated spindle speeds after power up. My drive draws 27 Watts during power-on, then 11.6 during seeks, 8.5 reading/writing and only 7 Watts during idle (platter spinning, no head movement or RW). This is a 7200 rpm drive and I have two of them.
I guess one possible saving grace at boot time is that the CPU is not doing a real lot while the hdds are spinning up. As an interesting comparison, my Intel Pentium II 300MHz, draws 43 Watts at peak!
I've had good luck with considerable quantities of Western Digital drives. Good support, also. I've had bad luck with Quantum, Seagate, and Maxtor.
Problem is, that ALL manufacturers have particularly bad batches and good batches. I've personally had good experience with WD, IBM and Seagate, so-so Quantum and absolutely dismal experience with Maxtor (I will never buy one again). WD is known to have past models that do NOT adhere to standards that the drive reports to support.
Drive manufacturers in the past (not sure if they still do), sold "special" models that passed as a grade A drive, built to higher tolerances (almost as if mil-spec) and sold for higher prices for server usage. A DEC rep told me this years ago and looking at the lifetimes and warrantee periods of the high end SCSI drives we were using, I would tend to beleive him.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
It's interesting to me that you have good luck with Western Digital drives, and bad luck with Maxtor drives, when Maxtor is the one who makes the drives Western Digital distributes (read: slap a new label on them, and you're done with WD's involvement). Atleast that's what I read sometime back (and naturally I can't find the place I read that, so take this information with a BIG helping of salt).
Also, about Maxtor, I've had nothing but good luck with their drives (as well as WD's, as you noted too), and bad luck with Seagate drives (never tried Quantum, so I can't say one way or the other). The one thing I like about Maxtor is their RMA/return/replacement policy-- you give them a valid credit card number, they put a hold on your account for the price of the drive you're supposedly returning, and they immediatly ship out a replacement drive the next day (before you've even shipped back your defective unit). You have 30 days (I believe) to return the drive before they ding your credit card for the price of the drive.
About the concerns regarding proper handling, you're right about OEM drives, but this guy returned his drive 2 or 3 times, and you'd think the guys running tech support/RMA would have some training on how to handle the drive (if indeed that's the reason the drives are failing). Of course, it could have been any of the other (correct) causes of failure you listed (PC on floor, lots of walking; PC on concrete, tips over or is jarred alot; etc).
If someone can shed some light on the manufacturing processes of Maxtor and WD HDD's, I'd be thankful for the enlightenment though-- I'd hate to be seen as talking out of my ass.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
I know of 3 friends that have had the 40GB drives die and one of mine. Mine died through heat. Even though it was in a well ventilated case, the drive itself was too hot to touch when the noises started. With the replacement
I'm guessing that perhaps the 60/70GXP's suffer from the same problem.. heat expansion mangling the bearings and causing the thing to vibrate and wear prematurly.
I wasn't aware that linux was able to boot without accessing the hard drive. please explain to me how this is possible.
The symptoms were the same in both cases. Bad spots first appeared in a few sectors. The problem didn't seem to spread very quickly, but I've learned the hard way to take immediate action when this sort of thing happens.
After pulling the faulty 60GB drive, I ran IBM's disk diagnostic utility. It confirmed the error, so I allowed it to clear the disk. Then it checked clean. That worked OK for a while, then some errors recurred. At that point, I got an RMA and shipped it back to IBM.
I'm now at the same point with the 76GB drive, although instead of shipping it back to IBM I simply set it aside and replaced it with a pair of Western Digital 100GBs in a software RAID-1 configuration. Hopefully now I can sleep a little better.
The real irony? I originally bought IBM (and paid a premium) specifically because they seemed to have a reputation for reliability. Sigh.
Phil
I have a 30 and 45 gig GXP drive. Both are full of bad sectors and are clicking like crazy. I'm RMAing them one at a time so I don't lose my data. WTF is up with these drives? Am I going to get refurbs? WTF!!!
I thought it was just me. I bought 4 of the 30GB IBM DTLA drives right after Christmas. Within one to three months 3 of 4 were gone with bad sectors. The last one I barely managed to tar up my files before it went out. All the drives were installed in production server systems with ABIT BP-6 motherboards. All the IBM drives were also made in Hungary.
I have since replaced the IBM drives with SCSI3 and SCA drives.
This experience told me to stick with SCSI. I've got an old SCSI 2 tower with a pair of 9GB Seagates that are close to 8 years old. They work flawlessly. I've lost track of the number of bad IDE drives I've had. I can count the bad SCSIs on the fingers of one hand (p.s. the thumb is not a finger).
been consulting for 16 years. standardized on IBM hard drives long ago. never had one fail.
purchased two 40GB DTLA-305040 drives in feb 2001.
one failed within 1 month.
the other developed bad spots within 1 month.
moved my clients to Seagate until IBM proves it can act responsibly.
ok, i fibbed a bit. i once replaced an old IBM laptop hard drive. that was the only dead IBM drive i'd ever seen, until this year.
Yes, WD drives are very good. I keep a small stack of small WD hard drives around for use in any firewall box I want to slap together, and I've had a small Caviar 120 running flawlessly in a machine across town for a couple of years now. I doub't they'll fail anytime soon.
-- I'll cut you up so bad, you'll wish I'd never cut you up so bad!
I have four IDE IBM 75GXP's; two 30GB drives (in my Win2K box) and two 45GB drives (in my Linux box).
The Linux setup is running RAID 1. I've already lost one drive -- it experienced the same horrible clicking and grinding noises previously described. Partition by partition it went offline, until finally it was completely unusable. I've replaced it and rebuilt the RAID 1 array, but just the other day I heard more click-grinds from it for a few seconds. They haven't recurred since, but I won't be surprised if they start up again.
The drives on my Windows box were originally set up in a RAID 0 configuration -- blindingly fast! However, one developed a single bad sector that must have been in a critical location of the FAT32 filesystem, because next time I booted my entire directory structure was scrambled. Even hooking a drive up to my Linux box -- a tactic that's worked wonders in the past -- didn't allow me to save any data. Now I have the same two drives set up in RAID 1. No more bad sectors so far...
I don't blame the loss of data from the Windows box on anything but my own foolish lack of backups, but these drives, in my experience, are not reliable.
I know there's not much I can say to contribute to the discussion, so I'll merely mention my experiences. I own an IBM Deskstar 60GXP, 7200rpm, ATA100, and it's running just fine as my primary FreeBSD boot drive. I've been using it for roughly a month.
I've got a 250W power supply, and I'm sure all my components have more than enough power. Temperature stays cool in my case, probably due to no overclocking and my excessive use of fans.
Hearing this will sure make me back up my data more often, however.
I bought a 2x1x6x HP SureStore burner when they first came out and used it happily for about a year, at which point it died the common degraded laser death. I was greeted frendily at my first request for an RMA, and was advanced shipped a drive within a week. That drive worked well for about 2 months until it died as well. I again contacted tech support and got another RMA drive, but this one took 2 weeks to get to me, and the replacement was DOA. Well, I should say that it couldn't burn at all, but it could read fine (all of the drives were "refurb" BTW), the error codes were "critical hardware failure". So I phone them back, and this time I tell them exactly what the problem was and expressed my concern. Their reply? "Well sir, normally when you get those serious error codes we'd ask you to ship it back in, but since you just got it from us it must be a configuration problem on your end."
Argh. I know what I'm doing here buddy....
After spending a week with tech support trying to convince them to let me return the drive, I wrote a letter to the head of the customer service department, and CC'd it to the VP of (?) and a few other people, basically telling them that I'm tired of using their defective r(efur)ubbished products and that I wanted a brand new burner along with 20 disks for the ones that I wasted. (it was much more diplomatically worded than that). I basically got a phone call the next day saying "OK, where would you like us to ship the new drive?" They didn't replace the disks, but I got a 4x2x20x drive back in return, which needless to say was much better than the one that I was using, and it hasn't failed yet. So they redeemed a bit of respect in my eye, but I still don't trust their products very much =(.
If God gave us curiosity
Why buy there? Well wile your on the phone dicking around with them and going down to UPS to send your drive back only to wait a few days/weeks...I already went to COMPUSA and got my money back or got a new drive and put it in.
After shipping arnt you glad you saved that $5 now?
Argh! Seagate is your second favorite drive?
I was going along with you until you said that!
I've given Segate chance after chance over a span of 12 years or more, and each time I buy one, I get burned on it. Ever since the days of the ST238R RLL drive (I think it was a 30 meg.), I had several of them die off or develop loads of bad sectors.
When I started working for a local PC builder/repair shop in 1993 and 94, we sold a lot of IDE drives in the 120 to 540 meg. range, and I saw the Seagates come back as bad almost every time. (I personally know a few people *still* running Maxtor 245 meg. IDE drives we sold them back in '93 - and they haven't worn out yet!)
Then I got a job doing I.T. support and systems administration, and they bought all Dell systems. Dell used a mix of drives, ranging from Western Digital to Maxtor to Quantum to Seagate - and guess which ones always ended up failing on us? Yep, Seagate again. Oh, granted, they did have a bad batch of 1.6 gig. Western Digitals at one point in time. I think Dell ended up replacing each and every one of those we had in their Optiplex GS systems. But that was an exception to the rule.
Meanwhile, I bought a high-end SCSI LVD drive for a PC at home and went with Seagate because of the price and performance specs. I figured "Ok, maybe they finally got things right on these high end SCSI drives." Guess what? It had a bearing failure and self-destructed! My Quantum Viking and Atlas replacements are still ticking along with no problems at all....
Sorry Seagate, you're just junk in my book.
what do you use for your raid 5?
And, may I ask, how do you have 5 IDE drives on a single raid? You gotta be using software raid, no?
I want to do a 3+1 raid 5 with 40GB drives that I have, but I'd be forced to do it in software since the money for the card is equal to just buying an extra 2 40GB drives to raid 0+1 it.
But yeah, I backup frequently. And would'nt'cha know it... I was lazy and didn't do backups in about a month, and the drive toasted itself. I'm still trying to peice it back together now.
OTOH, I've had 2x40 + 2x20 in a tower case running nonstop for 180+ days now without so much as a hiccup. Let's hope they stay that way until I can get there to raid 5'em
If God gave us curiosity
i ordered my drive from some retailer on pricewatch. After about 3 months or so it started making noises that i can only liken to a clutch slipping out on a manual transmission car. Concurrent with these noises would be long seek times, even though i had disabled powersaving spin-down. I think the individual platters spin down or something. Anyways, i d/l'd the ibm diagnostics, it said i had a bad drive. So i called ibm tech support, they said too fucking bad, bec apparently my vendor had bought the drive from dell, thus making it 2nd hand and without warranty. I, being the trusting fool that i am, had thrown out all documentation, and felt screwed. Then i put the drive back in and decided to keep using it until it completely died. Only, and here's the catch, i didn't screw it back in, just left it on the slides in my case. The plm was solved! I was overjoyed and figured i could screw it in, since it would be there for a while. Immed after putting the screws in, the plm is back. I've left the screws out and haven't had a plm since. Yeah!!!
--why?
I got a 75GB drive of the same model from IBM sometime in May. A couple of weeks ago I started seeing the same things. The drive started making weird noises and needed a long time to access data. IBM currently has the drive but from the sound of it getting it back will only help me in the short term.
I don't have a backup because I can't *afford* a backup. What do you want me to do, burn everything to CDs? I'd spend more time on that than anything else! (only have a 2x CD burner) Similarly, buying extra drives for backup/RAID isn't really feasable. Us poor folk just have to live with risk, it has nothing to do with intelligence.
Fortunately I've got a WD400BB (RTL no less), not one of these crummy ones...
Bad handling is DEFINITELY an issue
Well, not so neccessarily... those IBM drives have their heads parked off the surface of the disk when powered off so you can shake'em around all that you like and won't damage the surface of the disk. I like that and that was one of the reasons why I sprung the extra for the drive.
By far the most common cause of drive failure is vibration or movement of the case while the drive is running
I don't think so. I was told firsthand by a tech that by far the most common reason was due to overclocking. Don't forget that running that wonderful 1.4GHz processor at 1.624GHz also overclocks your PCI bus by 4.5MHz. Doesn't sound like much? Well that's 14% above spec. After a while, and with the heat that these drives generate anyways, it's pretty easy to toast your electronics by doing that.
Mind you, that was for hard drive failures in general, I don't know about IBM drive failure reasons.
I've also had good support with both western digital and maxtor, but I've had about 3 drives of each company fail on me in the past 3 years. Argh.
If God gave us curiosity
I got a Dell 4100 about a year ago, and I my 45Gb drive died in about 2 weeks. The same horrible clicking noise. I got a replacement from dell and its been going fine for a year.
I've also hard three drives fail on me. They were the 75 gig drives though. IBM said that the drive failure was below 2%, but I don't quite see that happening. One thing I can tell you though, is that IBM lost their enterprise contracts with Dell and Gateway and Seagate has picked it up. Also, IBM has entered into a deal with Seagate wherein they will begin putting Seagate drives into their own servers. This is some bad news for IBM, because they took a huge hit from most PC companies.
If it is those are dropping like flies at work along with it's little sister the same drive with a few less platters the AC12100 a 2.1 gig. Western Digital's quality control hit the crapper years ago. I don't know what the newer drives are like but I have heard they suck as well.
I despise Western Digital.
auto262814@hushmail.com
3ware has an 8 channel hardware raid5 IDE controller.
drives will heat up due to the friction of the platters moving through the air
Would it be viable to place the platters in a vacuum then? Can't be very hard to do, and if this would help to cut down on the resistance that would not only cut down on heat but also power used.
If God gave us curiosity
Maxtor makes WD drives? That's odd. I've heard that IBM licenses tech to WD. *Shrug* They're all in on it, in the end, I guess.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Oh boy!
/home partition was all clingy. Some mail files went through lotsa clings and clangs. Unable to be recovered whatsoever.
Mine was working great... but it died. It is on a home computer. Linux only. Good ventilation, usual stuff. No silly overcloking nor anything wierd. Plain desktop system. I even have a fan blowing air under the HDD!
After about 6 months of home use, I had trouble with my e-mail (using Kmail). Configuration got screwed up? I checked configuration, created new user, copyed config files in new user... and it didn't work.
Bug in old KDE 2.0? I tried upgrading to KDE 2.2.1. No success. I tried uninstalling and installing back the whole KDE 2.2.1 thing. No success. Still problems. Bad ones.
Software problem? The software was OK. I tried with other users. So next I checked the partition.
Oh Boy! CLinks! Clanks! It was an ReiserFS (I like to play safe). And some nasty errors showed up on the mail files.
I managed to save most of my email, copying the files to another partition. The
So I got myself an old drive and, while trying to install a linux on that 2nd drive, inorder to burn a CD from a reliable system, I made a mistake. With all the panic and pressure, I obliterated my partition table on the IBM 60 GB Desktar IDE-100 HDD instead of backing up the partition table.
OH boy!
It has been more than a month. I am still trying to recover that partition table. parted / gparted are no good: they have issues with ReiserFS and extended aprtitions (my data is on a ReiserFS extended partition).
I am very sad. I actualy bought that disk because it was an expensive IBM disk, because I wanted my data safe.
Of course the place where I bought it have ofered to replace it. But recovering the data costs many $$$ that I do not have, specially after getting layed off by a big blue company.
Oh boy! I'm pissed!
Score:5, Informative? (No offence Michael) People who moderate Informative are by default ignorant, or else it would'nt be informative to them. So of course, they are not qualified to say this is "Informative" without your post having supporting evidence, links, etc.
The thought that it's "not the drives but bad handling" is silly. There are bad and good batches. It seems from this story that there might be a bad batch of IBM's. Do you think that mostly these IBM hdd owners for some unknown reason are handling or treating their drives baddly whereas the other owners are more enlightened on drive care? Not a chance.
Poor PSU quality, heat removal, shock, vibration and simply bad manufacturing batches or even poor design (rare to get past Q-Ctrl before mass mfg) can be the causes of drive failure. The problem CAN be the drives and in this case seems to be.
http://www.driveservice.com/bestwrst.htm
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I like the old Caviars too. I had a WD Caviar 340Mb for about 7 years. Worked very nicely and was much faster than the crap Maxtor it replaced.
/, /usr, /home and /tmp. Urgh urgh urgh...). The *day* I plugged in one of the Seagates with the little Caviar as the slave.... boom, no more Caviar. Shit itself baddly, oddly somehow due to the Seagate? I don't know, I'm pretty happy with the Barra's though, going from about 1.2MB/s with the Caviar to ~28MB/s raw off the Barra's and 45MB/s Linux (2.2.x) RAID-0 was pretty sweet.
However, I upgraded (big time:) to two Seagate UDMA Barracuda 20Gb drives (Linux RAID-0+Reiser
Of course now, with Linux 2.4.x, RAID-0 performance is SLOWER than the raw drive speed for some weird reason that I am still trying to track down. FreeBSD on the other hand, is consistently faster transfering data off these drives. I'll soon test FreeBSD's RAID-0 to see if I can get back my 40+ MB/s...
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I know this is a little bitt of the topic, but any1 using IBM ServerRAID with linux here? I strongly recomend doing a badblock check on the partitions sine there is a error inn IBM ServerRAID that causes it to get bad blocks on the raid (not phsyical). I've just sent logs back and forth to IBM and I've just hit the end with they saying that they're working on a solution.
I have seen some info to the effect that it's pretty much impossible for reasonable abuse (even dropping on the floor from a few feet up) of the system case to damage the drive once it's installed. However, banging the bare drive around could cause greater shock and potentially more damage.
Also, IBM uses a system that actually moves the heads off the platters when the drive is spun down - most other manufacturers just park them in a landing zone on the disks. Apparently a lot of shock damage is from the heads bouncing up and down on the platters because of the impact, IBM's system wouldn't allow that to happen.
I had the same thing happen to my 40GB 60GXP hard drive, I just RMA'd it a few days ago and they sent me back a 60GB 60GXP, and 2nd Day Air too. The part # for the new drive is 07N6655. Is that the same as the ones that have been failing? Maybe they think I'll forget how the first drive failed if they send me a bigger one. Whatever, as long as it lasts a little longer...
Well, not so neccessarily... those IBM drives have their heads parked off the surface of the disk when powered off so you can shake'em around all that you like and won't damage the surface of the disk.
Can you provide a link to support this? I've been working in PC hardware repair since '94 (For NEC and DEC) and electronics since '89 before that. I've never seen any modern VC drive (non stepper) move the heads *off* the platters, they *always* move the heads to the inner most location of the platters, near the spindle, where head touch down is at the lowest surface speed (inner vs outer) and also required motor torque is the least when spinning up, since the heads are clamping down on the platters!
To move *off* the platters, would require some mechanism to transition the heads from off/on to the platters. I have'nt been watching hdd tech lately, so a link to this would be very interesting.
I like that and that was one of the reasons why I sprung the extra for the drive.
I hope you're right, for your sake. Not that I don't think IBM drives are not great.
I was told firsthand by a tech that by far the most common reason was due to overclocking.
You were told wrong. Loads of techs don't know shit. They come out, run a test from floppy, deem a drive OK or not, and if not replace it. They do the same kind of crap with printers, MODEM's, screens, etc. Most of them are good for what they do (replace hardware) and not much more.
Don't forget that running that wonderful 1.4GHz processor at 1.624GHz also overclocks your PCI bus by 4.5MHz.
It depends on how the overclocking is done. If you're just choosing standard CPU multiplier and FSB speeds from BIOS settings, or even jumpers, it should not change the PCI speed (but can). The small 1MHz tweaks that some BIOS support, can change the PCI speed also. You can also explicitely change the PCI speed too if you have the right mobo and read the manual. Just choosing different default CPU speeds should not though.
Doesn't sound like much? Well that's 14% above spec. After a while, and with the heat that these drives generate anyways, it's pretty easy to toast your electronics by doing that.
Possible, but definetely NOT the most common reason. I've been over clocking since it required soldering ; ), and I've found that hardware either does'nt work or becomes unreliable due to the overclocking. *Some* CPU's will die, though I've never killed an Intel. Having said that, some Intel PII's above 300MHz (and including some 300's), had faulty thermal diodes, which would allow destruction of those CPU's under overclocked settings. I've never killed a hdd due to overclocking.
Hell, I used to hot swap an old IDE WD Caviar (for years) to move big chunks of data before I got some 100base-T NICs. ; )
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I purchased a 20 gig IBM hard drive 1.5 years ago. It crashed in 2 weeks. I got it replaced, then the new drive crashed in 2 weeks. I got it replaced once more, then a drive came broken (IBM diagnostic tool said "severe shock received") out of the box. Then I got a Quantum, and it has worked, at least until now. Maybe the third IBM hard drive was broken because of bad handling, but others seemed to be OK at first. I think its IBMs fault, not the retailers. And the hard drives were made in Hungary too.
My suggestion- don't buy 7200 IBM hard drives, at least not 75GXP series and not made in Hungary. If you already have such drive, backup now.
I had a 60 gig 75gxp do the exact same thing to me... Start clicking a little bit and gradually start doing it more often and for longer periods of time.
Can someone set up a web based vote tracking system which asks the question of those who have drives of the GXP series: "Ever had a problem?" I want to see what the actual failure rate is since /. story posters, in their world of utter cluelessness, post stupid stories just because they might draw lots of attention. I think you could substitute ANY make/model into this Ask Slashdot story and get a lot of enraged posters.
Why bother.
I've had two IBM-drives, both ~40Gb -- one 75GXP and one 60GXP -- for about a year now. The 75GXP was at first emitting very annoying klonk-klonk sounds which sounded very bad (like the arm slamming out, hard), but I soon discovered that changing the speed of my FSB made the problem go away.
Well, either that or it fixed itself, because I haven't had a problem since. It's weird though because I weren't exactly overclocking the bus, only running it at 113MHz (it should do 133MHz no problem, but I have a locked Duron 800. Maybe I'll try and pencil it some day, but I digress.)
I think there might well have been a problem with the 75-series, but I'm gonna pick me up another 60GXP soon. Also, were can we find many of these complaints? At places where the writers overclock like crazy and do all kinds of insane things to their systems (using rounded ATA-cabling for instance). These things may 'catalyze' the problem with the 75-series (which might be a good thing, depending on how you see it).
Belief is the currency of delusion.
My story involves a pair of DTLA307030 30G drives.
I'd been using them for a few months and then I noted an occasional unusually loud sound that I'll call a "bad block sound". Initially having experience rooted in old SCSI drives I didn't understand the cause, and shrugged it off (somewhate moronically I'm gathering) as a thermal recalibration. :-)
A month or so later that freak sound returned with read errors. So I called up IBM (got the wrong support number of course, but the person was still quite helpful). Suggested I go get the drive analysis/repair tool from their site http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m (thanks for the broken URL slashdot...). I do that and scan the disk, well duh, "Fail code x70 - Defective Device". But what the phrack does that mean?? The drive is still working beyond the nasty bad block(s).
The software then offered to try to repair it by erasing the disk. After a long story of backing up the drive data/OS, yadda I do it. And the drive is magically new and stuff, no errors.
After more research it seems theres a problem that due to the near 2 megabytes of cache on the drive when the crazy fast auto-powerdowning systems of today shutdown they don't necessarily give the drive enough time to flush its cached writes to disk before the power dies or the reset signal hits it. Henced a fudged write.
Another poster mentioned a place where firmware updates can be found, http://www.pc.ibm.com/qtechinfo/MIGR-39082.html.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Oh dear. The sanctimonious troll struck again.
No, the problem was not with your hard drive electronics.. it was with your Whirring Grinding Unit. You know, that little box inside your computer that makes all the Whirring and Grinding noises. Obviously, yours is faulty.
Had exactly the same problems with my 76gb drive. Some sectors just makes an annoying "Gssshh gsssshhh gsssshhh" noise when trying to read from them. I've never bought anything from IBM after this experience, I simply dont want to deal with companies making products like this, I dont make unlimited money, I need to know that what I buy will last more than 3 months (which was the lifetime of my drive before it started bugging).
I have 4 IBM drives, 3 EIDE and 1 SCSI...see quite a bit of abuse
.5GB drives came in.
We are, of course talking about a fairly large technolgy gap here. These new megaGB drivers are more dense, faster, and more delicate by several orders of magnitude - how do u think they get 75GB in a box the size your old 4GB or even older
This makes the shock, vibration or whatever aheluva lot more destructive to these new drives.
It happened to me as well after about the first month.
I sent the 75 Gig in, and they replaced it, but this one has been running fine for about 9 months now.
I've setteled for raiding 2 40 Gig Seagate drives, instead of another 75 Gig.
After buying the harddrive, I sent a notice to the people I did buy from, telling them I bought it because they voted no.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I have an old 2.1gb Maxtor from 1997 that is
:)
still working. It did start making a faint squeal
2 years ago, and ever since, I kept the drive vericaly mounted. The HD started acting up
again 4 months ago, so I remounted it diaganaly
and it's still working. No bad clusters have
showed up so far, so I am gyessing it could be
a cabling problem., If not, I guess I am lucky?
(note I don't recommend doing this. If you
do decide to do this, you do it at your own risk
Yah, that's what I heard anyways, and you're right about IBM's involvement-- to me, IBM has always been the technology leader, but I don't buy their drives because I've had friends who had "bad luck" with them.. Usually the technology gets licensed or copied so fast that the other manufacturers seem to have no problem keeping up (atleast as far as retail offerings go), and usually surpassing IBM at drive size fights (noting that Maxtor and WD both beat IBM to >75GB drives.. I don't think IBM even offers anything better than 75GB yet, I could be wrong though).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
I have used approximately 200 hard disk types (ranging from old 5 MB drives to the modern large scsi drives) and the IBM DeskStar 60 GB 75GXP seems to be the worst.
-- Imperial units must die --
Taking into account the majority of comments on the board about heat/knocking/transportation whatever, I'd like to offer another possible cause of drive failure.
About 2 years or so ago I purchased a seagate 8.1g (dont laugh) hard drive. It ran fine for ages, but then one day the IDE cable became dislodged from the drive whilst the machine was running. Well I wasnt sure if it was the drive because the dislodging the ide cable had the unexpected side effect of scrambling my BIOS. God knows why, but every machine I tried the hard drive in had its bios settings screwed.
Be warned: if you mess around inside your machine doing ANYTHING, check your cables are correctly inserted into their appropriate slots, or you could be in for a lot of trouble.
Btw, any reported problems with the 40gb deskstars that anyone knows about? Its just I bought one to replace the 8gb drive that was scrambled.
Saying all this, I have a really OLD 2gb drive from my first machine with linux on it which has outlasted my cd rom, motherboard and 3 processors!!
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
My 75gxp was one of the few parts to survive a computer accident. My power supply got unplugged while the system was running and i plugged it back in when half of the hardware just died. 1x psu, 1x hd, 1x cdr drive, 1x g400 died. The one hardware item that made it thru all this was my ibm 75gxp drive. (The one that broke was a Seagate Barracuda)
/C0
IBM normally makes very very good drives with high reliability. We use many hundreds of them a month. However, two weeks ago we got a shipment of four cases of 75gig drives, with 20 drives per case. They were brand new, from a first-tier disty in factory packaging, sealed, with no visible shipping damage. We handled them with full ESD and shock/vibe protection, as always. Most of the drives in three of the cases failed with clicking and grinding as soon as power was applied. I did the engineering evaluation myself and triple-checked the test rigs, which were perfect. It's weird I'll grant you that. We shipped the working drives after a couple of days of testing, and thus far there are no reported field failures. IBM has been great and instantly swapped out the bad drives, no questions asked. The failures and their frequency was not subtle -- they clearly had some kind of manufacturing screw-up.
What's the role of SMART in this whole discussion? I thought SMART was supposed to prevent this kind of stuff?
Hey, be kind to dumb computer stores. I admit Compusa and the people that work there don't instill great volumes of faith in me, but they do have the Maxtor drives, and they almost always have one of them on sale too. When one of my vid drives goes down I can just run over and get a new one, no waiting for shipping, etc...
Now, on to my real question here:
Has anyone compared the IBM DeskStar performance for high res vid capture, editing and transfer to DVD/SVHS? Up until recently I have used Maxtors, but the company I bought my editing machine from has changed over to the DeskStars. I was ready to try it until I read about all the problems with the larger drives.
"Kill me? I'll kill you first!"
- Hitokiri Batthousai
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
seems ibm has some duff 18 and 36 gig scsi drives....maybe its the same contamination fault?
Thing
I had the same problem with the 37.5 Gig 5400 rpm version. The replacement they sent was DOA. They finally sent me a 41 Gig replacement. The replacement they sent me was new. I put it in yesterday well see. At least this one spun up!
i have two of the 75gxp series hard drives from ibm, other one is 45gb which is a under a year old and a 75gb one that i've had for 4 months.
the 45G version is still humming along nicely, but the newer 75G drive just suddenly died on me last week with the "horrific grinding noise" mentioned in this article. with no warnings whatsoever, just died and lost everything i had on that drive. i mailed it back to the retailer yesterday, and i just hope i get back a drive that'll survive a little longer...
IBM licenses hard drive technology because they have the patents on the technology used to coat the surface of the disks and the read/write head technology. If you want to make competetive hard drives, you need to pay your IBM tax. That's what I read when I was doing some research on hard drive technology.
It is basically a commodity market. Everyone makes pretty much the same drives, but of course quality varies from company to company. Most of the big names are OK because they would not remain in business long if everyone knew that the failure rate on their hard drives was 3x of their competitors.
This whole mess simply sounds like a bad batch. It happens in all companies. How the company handles the returns is the main factor for my buying decisions. Maxtor is good because you do not need a receipt or any proof of purchase. You could buy a failed Maxtor drive at a garage sale for $1 and if it was made in the last 3 years, then you could return it for a replacement.
All of my drives (5) are Maxtors and the oldest one is more than 5 years old now(540MB). I've had no failures in that time.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I got my drive in march, everything was working well until july/august when we stated to get these incredible heat waves. My CPU was running approx.: 80 to 100, I started getting weird behaviour nothing really specific it just didn't feel right. So I started to run some diags, Motherboard,CPU, Memory,Disk crunch crunch crunch Whoa! what the.
On a complete surface scan it started to give me bad sectors (I checked it when I got it and everything was fine then) Two days later the temp. dropped to 68, I did another scan and this time everything was fine.
I still RMA'd the drive, Added an internal fan that shoots at the drive, so far so good.
You have run IBM's DFT on the drive, I assume? Uncorrectable error means that the drive is saying "I can't read that", as far as I know.
;-), we've sent nearly 20 of these gits back there....
Personally, I know the address of IBM's RMA centre in the Netherlands off by heart now
I have two Deskstar drives, one a 45GB (DTLA-307045) and another 20GB which is a Deskstar but I forget which line it's in (purchased later). Both are working fine, although the 45GB has made some strange noises once or twice. Just to be sure, I ran it through the IBM testing software and Spinrite, no problems found.
Personally, I think IBM has just had a run of seriously bad luck, and I intend to carry on buying IBM drives in the future, mainly because I don't really trust any other brand. Anyway, you can bet that after this they're going to make doubly sure their quality control is up to scratch.
Im gonna back up my Data to a Pioneer DVR-A03 DVD recorder because I dont trust my GXP75 30GB anyway more.
See:
http://www.dvdwriters.co.uk
I've had my 75GXP 45GB drive for over a year with no problems so far, thankfully. However a friend that bought the same drive model had his fail about a month ago, as did another friend who bought a 75GXP 30GB at around the same time. Only difference is they both have mid-tower cases and I have a full tower - maybe power or heat issues? Though my IBM drive has been fine, I did recently have to send back a Maxtor drive that decided to stop working. Maxtor's RMA process is great by comparison though - just give them your credit card number and they'll advance ship you a refurb drive... whereas IBM doesn't offer this option.
is how my 75gb 75gxp goes whenever I access certain bits of it.. :/
its horrible
eek:/
I didn't have a catastrophic failure, just creeping bad sectors on the drive... The replacement drive also had the same problem, the replacement for that(ARGH!) fianally worked. These drives are pieces of crap and I recommend everyone stay away from them.
This is a Hard Drive Crash Leaderboard that we had where I Used to work. It's probably changed since I left in July but the Idea is still there.
Hard Drive Crash Leaderboard: July 2001
WD: 12
Seagate: 10
Quantum: 06
JTS: 03 -Out of Business
Samsung: 01
IBM: 01
Fujitsu: 00
Conner: 00 -Out of Business
IBM: 00
Maxtor: 00
We used to use it to decide which drives we should by for the systems we built. We decided to use Maxtor Drives because they were a good performer and reliable for the price. Never had a major problem with them. Before we were using WD and that was a disaster as you can see.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I bought a 6GB Deskstar 'way back in 1997 or so. It lasted 11 1/2 months and failed. It was replaced under warranty with a refurbished unit - which also failed in about 11 months. At that point I gave up and bought a Western Digital.
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
Hi, I have been reading your comments and I too have been having problems with the IBM Deskstar 75GXP. I wanted to buy high quality products for my new computer so I bought the IBM Deskstar 75GXP 60gig and a Abit KT7A-100 RAID. The reason I mention the Abit KT7A-100 RAID is because of this...
The Abit KT7A uses the VIA VT82C686B Southbridge, this has been known to give problems with Data Corruption. Could it be coincidence that most of these people having problems with their IBM HDD use the VT82C686B Southbridge? I find it ironic that only a select few are having problems with their hard drive and others aren't.
Is there any way we can find this out? Maybe ask slashdot to do a poll that states "If you own a Deskstar 75GXP HDD do you also use the VT82C686b southbridge? If anyone wants to share some ideas with me, please email me at pburkett@callatg.com
Thanks!
I've built about 75 systems with 15GB IBM 75GXP drives over the past 6-8 monthes. So far I have only seen 1 failure (no data loss). Another 25 systems with 30GB IBM 75GXP, 2 failures. Out of the 6 systems with 75GB IBM 75GXP drives, I have seen one failure (with data loss). These have been a mixure of OEM and retail drives that have been shipped and handled properly. It would appear the larger the capacity of the 75GXP drives, the higher the failure. What we really need is some statistics from the distributors to know for sure.
I've had the same problems - clicks of death, not only on my home drive, but also on several at work (all 45GB models).
I replaced it with a new Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB drive - 1 platter, two heads. As simple as you can get - and my bet, very reliable, like most Seagate products.
No more IBM 3.5" drives.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I don't buy from you!
Could we get a recall on these with the FTC?
I was under the vague impression that the IBM drives were better than average quality. I am not always diligent about checking storagereview.com, but that's the impression I had from word of mouth.
So thinking, I purchased a 75GXP as a 2nd drive for my TiVo. It's been working day in and day out for two months now. It's a little noisier than I'd like, but it works.
Your bad experience, though, prompts me to think a little more about reliability and the quoted figures for it.
- When a vendor reports a MTBF for a component like a disk drive, is it the vendor that measures this figure or an independent organization?
- What kinds of testing conditions are used in the MTBF tests and do they account for the typical variations in use in the field?
Other posts have mentioned something about cheap power supplies and the possibility that this can shorten the life of your components. Perhaps the IBM drives are more sensitive to such perturbations than drives from other vendors.Some users may power their systems off and on more frequently than other users, thereby shortening the life of their equipment.
I live off a dirt road, so I have more air-borne dust that can damage moving parts. (I don't know if it's just me, but I've had to contend with CPU cooling fan failures more than I thought was reasonable.)
In summary, field use of equipment can vary substantially from a lab bench. Do the MTBF figures we see reported take that variation into account?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Most newer specs I've downloaded i.e. WD and Maxtor don't have the MTBF's anymore but state a reliability 0.5% rating for returns.
I wonder why Maxtor doesn't make high capacity drives at 7200 RPM i.e. 100, 160Gb vs. WDC.
I noticed that WDC is a little noiser than Maxtor,
a little slower and consumes a little more power based on the specs. These differences could be due to WDC being 7200 and Maxtor is 5400 which means the slower drives will have better specs than the faster ones. I also read somewhere that is pot-shot luck that in the Maxtors you may either get a regular bearing or a liquid bearing for the same type of drive (not printed on box) characteristics of RPM, capacity etc.
As for all 10K drives such as IBM, Seagate, and others are unreliable due to I guess the bearings wearing out from the heat.
Bob buys HD from IBM.
Tom buys HD from IBM.
Bob's HD goes boink, and he sends it in..
Tom's HD goes boink, and he sends it in..
IBM "MacGuyver's" both drives and sends Bob's HD to Tom and Tom's HD to Bob.
Repeat from step 3.
I thought maybe SW raid was having troubles though I knew my old disks worked OK. But to give IBM the benefit of the doubt ,I bought a new 3ware 6200 raid card. Tossed the IBM 60GB drives onto it - mirror dropped within 2 hours. I installed the new 3ware firmware for their cad with ECC bit checking. Once I did this, the mirror stayed up but I get an ECC bit error off the same drive at least every other day - thats what was taking the array down before. Errors are always on the same drive.
Needless to say I have a 2nd 3ware card that just arrived to put in my older server whose root disks keep dropping out of sync. WE'll see if the HW raid controlelr cna handle the IBM bit errors that always pop up.
I knwo there are people out there who SWEAR 75GXPs are OK and theres no problem - but I've seen WAY too many complaints about them. I'll never buy them again given the trouble I've had. As a note - I just had to swap out my IBM drive in my laptop after 9 months - it died a horrific death (but not before I got a ghost image thank goodness)
Funyn thing? The SCSI mirror on my new server works great - IBM UltraStars - not a peep out of them. Go figure. I honestly believe the 75GXPs are having seriosu trouble. Once I get both servers going on HW raid I'll be RMAing the two drives that always have bit errors - I just hope I don't go into a vicious cycle of returns as refab drives die
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I have a 1.5 yr. old 20 GB 34 GXP that saw only light usage and it died once already. Maybe 75 GXP isn't the only bad series. On a side note - I'm running a Fujitsu-s in my server that sees heavy usage and they are just fine ...
D.
I have heard only a few people reporting problems with a 45 GB model.... Which is the one I have..
It's been running in my system since Christmas.
I know there were different 45GB models; as it is I got a different M# then was on the receipt.
Does any one have a list of the specific models that are having problems?
=1000101
Western Digital drives, and bad luck with Maxtor drives, when Maxtor is the one who makes the drives Western Digital distributes (read: slap a new label on them, and you're done with WD's involvement)
Hi,
I'm in the data-recovery business. That makes me "recognize" many drives by their looks, and not by their labels. So even if a drive has an "HP" label, I recognize it as a "quantum Atlas" or a seagate.
WD makes different drives from Maxtor. They are really different.
Maxtor bought the disk division of "quantum". Thus we're starting to see quantum drives labelled "maxtor".
Roger.
Can you provide a link to support this?
:)
:> )
:)
:)
:)
Absolutely!
here
A safety ramp feature virtually eliminates damage to the data area caused by drive mishandling before installation.
The first desktop drive with the IBM safety ramp feature (head load/unload capability) helps protect data by moving the heads off the media surface when powering down.
you can wander around that link to get all of the documents referring to this technology and the abilities therein. Take a look at the pictures to see where the heads are parked for shipping.
Not that I don't think IBM drives are not great.
WOAH that response did not compute. Forget the double negatives, let's just go triple! So you think that IBM drives are not great?
It depends on how the overclocking is done. If you're just choosing standard CPU multiplier and FSB speeds from BIOS settings, or even jumpers, it should not change the PCI speed (but can). The small 1MHz tweaks that some BIOS support, can change the PCI speed also. You can also explicitely change the PCI speed too if you have the right mobo and read the manual. Just choosing different default CPU speeds should not though.
Woah, sorry to say but you are very misstaken on that.
Everything in your system is based of multiplier settings of a base clock rate (with exception of ISA cards and keyboard/mouse/etc ports). In normal cases that is a standard 33MHz, which conveniently is what the PCI is spec'ed to run at.
For example, with a PII/333 processor your base clock rate is 33MHz, your FSB clock rate is 66MHZ (at a 2x multiplier) and your AGP is also at 66MHz (at a 1x multiplier of FSB, Since the AGP is tied into the FSB it runs at a multiplier of that). Internally to your chip you have a 5x multiplier giving you a nice 333MHz (rounded up of course). On your nice tidy 933MHz system, the clocks are 33Mhz base / 133FSB (4x base) / 66MHz AGP (1/2 FSB). On your 1.4GHz Athlon you're doing funky stuff, and run at 33MHz base / 133FSB (4x base) w/ DDR to the chip ( fires on the leading and falling edge of the signal ) / 66MHz AGP (1/2 base).
You can get DDR memory too which does the same as the CPU. The P4 runs at QDR rates, which have a 33MHz base, 150MHz FSB (4.5x base), QDR to the Chip, etc.
Now the problem is that when you up the clockrate of your chip, you're really changing the BASE rate, and everything else changes in tandem. The options are usually given as an FSB rate, but what they're really changing is the BASE rate. This is why you'll see options like 100/3 112/3 133/3 and 133/4. The first 3 run the FSB at 3x the BASE rate, and the last one runs it at 4x the BASE rate. The problem is that most motherboards only support a maximum of 4x BASE for FSB, thus when you run your chip rated at an 133FSB (or 266DDR) at 150FSB (or 300DDR) you're running your BASE at 37.5MHz, which is in turn running all your PCI peripherals at 37.5MHz, which includes your IDE controller. amond other things.
The specs for AGP is 66MHz and PCI is 33MHz. As with anything else, sometimes you can't overclock your chip at all. In these cases you're lucky that you (usually) have a thermal diode in your chip which can throttle (or in the PIII's case cause a "catastrophic thermal shutdown", I LOVE that term, it's a technical term!). You're also lucky that in most cases your chip will fail from heat problems BEFORE causing silicon damage from the heat, but this can happen. Since you HD doesn't have any termal protection on the chip, much less active cooling, it is indeed easy to fry your IDE controller chip on the HD itself, especially if you like running your FSB at 45MHz (which translates to a nice tidy 180MHZ FSB).
And the techs (there have been more than 1 that have said this) that I was talking to are knowledgeable, it's pretty easy to figure out when they know what they're talking about (or more appropriately, when they DON'T which happens far too often
Possible, but definetely NOT the most common reason. I've been over clocking since it required soldering ; ),
As I pointed out, since the HD has no thermal protection there are many problems that can be caused by overclocking, and I would think that the O/Cing in the time that it required soldering (386?) wasn't nearly as intensive as it is now =). I remember hacking a 386 mobo up to 33MHz from 25. Oh for the days =).
I'd wager a guess that any HD problems that have bad sectors are NOT caused by overclocking, but drive failures that are intermittent or just stop working or cause the system to do funny things (which, since I sell computers on-the-side too, in my experience with about 12 defective HDs over 3 years only 2 have had the bad sector problem, the rest were the wierd failures, and 8 of the 10 admitted to overclocking their systems) I can conclude that what the techs were saying is true
But of course, I could just be TOTALLY off my rocker
However I think that the IBM failure problem has nothing to do with overclocking. The CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK-SCREEEEEETCH noises tell me there's something else going on
If God gave us curiosity
but I was speaking about ranks of say 500 drives.
The odds catch up with you then. Power off a Hitachi data frame and let the disks spin down to a stop, then do the reverse, if they all come back I'd be SUPRISED.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"those IBM drives have their heads parked off the surface of the disk when powered off..."
All modern drives have this feature. This allows them to have a much higher shock rating when off then when operating.
"... by far the most common reason [for drive failure] was due to overclocking."
Interesting. I have no experience with overclocking.
"... I've had about 3 drives of each company fail..."
Western Digital had a very bad run of drives about 3 years ago. They acknowledged this. Since then, their drives have been excellent. I have 3 WD400BB 40 GB drives spinning next to me as I write this.
ABC News article: "Abu Sayyaf
Bush's education improvements were
You are correct. It was not my intention to imply that there are no drives that are badly designed. Definitely some drives fail because of bad design.
Bush's education improvements were
"it's pretty much impossible for reasonable abuse
I agree. The case takes all the shock by bending and deforming.
"IBM uses a system that actually moves the heads off the platters when the drive is spun down..."
All modern drives have this feature. The heads do not lift far, but they pull up off the platters due to spring action. All modern drives require power to put the heads on the platters. If there is no power, there is no contact. Apparently some marketing literature has implied that this is new with IBM drives.
ABC News article: "Abu Sayyaf
Bush's education improvements were
Absolutely!
.edu) and the second largest (at the time), the ASX and a large legal firm. I assure you that NONE of the faulty hdds we got replaced were due to overclocking.
Thanks, that is really cool.
Woah, sorry to say but you are very misstaken on that.
No I'm not. Choosing say a standard 300MHz CPU option in the BIOS, will yeild a 33MHz PCI, 66MHz AGP, 66MHz FSB and a CPU multiplier of 4.5, or possibly 33MHz PCI, 66MHz AGP, 100MHz FSB and multiplier of 3, depending on whether the CPU is detected as a 66 or 100 FSB type. I had to open my PII 300 to doctor it a little for 100FSB.
Choose a standard option of 400 (PII), you should get 33MHz PCI, 66MHz AGP, 100MHz FSB and a multiplier of 4. These assume that the CPU's multiplier can be changed. And my point is, that overclocking CAN be done without increasing the PCI and AGP speeds. I have been doing it for many years.
Of course, some overclocking methods are achieved through increases that cause PCI, AGP and FSB to also increase. Are you trying to say that you can't overclock without increasing PCI? It is true that some hardware forces this method due to multiplier locks for example.
The thought that most hard drive failures occur due to overclocking, is absolutely ridiculous. The tech that said that, is either full of it or ignorant. I've been a hardware tech for 13 years and about 7 of that specifically with PC hardware (first with NEC then DEC).
Now the problem is that when you up the clockrate of your chip, you're really changing the BASE rate
That is NOT always the case. My CPU was a PII 300 with 66FSB. I opened it, cut a track, now it supports 100FSB. I choose in the BIOS 100 FSB, multiplier 3.5, and I get a PII-350 with 100FSB and the PCI runs at 33MHz and the AGP at 66MHz. So I overclocked my CPU WITHOUT increasing the the PCI or AGP speed. I can verify this with a CRO.
There are different methods of overclocking and there are multipliers in many places that allow for example 33PCI+100FSB or 33PCI+66FSB. It's too simplistic to say that all overclocking increases the PCI speed and downright silly to think that MOST hdd failures are due to overclocking! I have supported Australia's largest WAN (it's
fires on the leading and falling edge of the signal
I've been dealing with positive and negative edge triggering in digital electronics since 1989 for the Royal Australian Navy, Electronic Weapons.
Thanks for elightening me on the IBM hdd head parking though, that is very neato.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I've got two DTLA-307045 (75GXP, 45GB, IIRC) that have been in use for about a year now. When I first connected them up, they were both showing read errors and sounding like hell right out of the box. I checked the supply voltage and connectors and replaced the UDMA cable; all seemed good. I was about to RMA both of them when the new 550W power supply I'd ordered arrived (the old one on this box was an 'AMD-certified' 400W supply).
As luck would have it, I decided to wire up the 550W supply before sending the IBM drives back. Once I did, the drives formatted without further read errors and have been in service ever since without problems, streaming video to capacity about twice a day at around 12MB/sec. The other drives in the system (2xMaxtor 40GB drives) didn't seem to have the same trouble with the old power supply when all four drives were installed.
The system is an Athlon (Thunderbird) at 1GHz with 768MB RAM and a GeForce2 card, plus some video editing equipment, maybe enough to cause some strain on the 400W supply that wasn't serious enough to bug other equipment. My sense is that the IBM drives may be much more sensitive to power fluctuations or undervoltage than the Maxtor drives, which can be a problem these days with most users running at least one large CPU (Athlon, P4) and one heavy-duty video controller (GeForce2, GeForce3) on smallish (250W-300W) power supplies.
Of course, this wouldn't explain failures on larger installations with enterprise-class hardware, so all bets are off...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I've got two 75 GB 75GXP drives in a raid 0 configuration running for about a month. Everything is fine so far.
A boot disk which will let you configure settings such as that or accoustic and power management features can be found at http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m#FeatureTool (hey, this link bug is really crawling up my nether regions!).
It will be a speed hit in the writing arena, but if you have a system that shuts down fast it may be worth turning the write cache off on your boot drive to save yourself the joys of reinstalling OSes, loosing data, etc.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
the computer labs bought about 100 machines all with Zip drives installed, and one by one they all gave the "click" and died. all further disks inserted into the drive would be munged. eventually, someone figured out that something mechanical would break inside the drive if you inserted a standard 3 inch floppy into the drive. Thus why, one by one, they all almost died, because the students would come in and screw em up....
As I'm sure everyone here agrees, floppies are total dogshit in terms of reliability and capacity. So, at the college I work for, there are almost no floppy drives to be had on the Macintosh machines. We put one USB floppy on one machine in each lab, and Zips (and sometimes CD-RWs) on every machine. You'd think this would encourage students to not use floppies, right?
So far, the only change I've seen is that I spend three hours a week instead of one wandering around the campus with a pair of forceps fishing floppy disks out of Zip drives. Drives labeled "THIS IS A ZIP DRIVE. DO NOT PUT FLOPPY DISKS IN IT."
Oh, the humanity.
--saint
Yes, I'm sure. Before this feature existed, the failure rate was far higher.
Bush's education improvements were
I opened it, cut a track, now it supports 100FSB.
I thought that I said this, but in case I didn't: You changed the FSB and the multiplier. Can you change your FSB from 100 now to 112 without changing the PCI bus speed? Or from 66 to 75?
Can you show me any motherboards that support an arbitrary change in the multiplier (the BASE to FSB multiplier)? If you can, I would be very interested to know...
I have never seen a motherboard that can change that multiplier to anything other than 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and maybe on some 1/5, but other than that you'd need to set a bizarre multiplier in order to clock your FSB to anything other than 66,100,133 or 150. Thus since a lot of overclocked computers can't support a full jump of 33MHz to the FSB (which at the smallest is a 25% jump), they overclock in small steps. Going from 100 to 112 is popular, 133 to 137 or 140, etc, but all of those change the BASE rate (and therefore the PCI rate as well).
I assure you that NONE of the faulty hdds we got replaced were due to overclocking.
Thats fine, but do you have any facts or information to compare the base that you were working with to the rest of the population? I have no doubt that those HD failures had nothing to do with overclocking, but you're dealing with a base of computers that doesn't overclock their computers. How can you extrapolate from that base to the rest of the world? Especially the rest of the hard drive failures?
I've been dealing with positive and negative edge triggering in digital electronics since 1989
Ok, cool, but you couldn't have expected me to know that. I was just explaining it for others, and in case you didn't know =)
Yes, you are very educated, I don't doubt. However I still don't agree =) That and I have a tendancy to like to argue. I admit that I could be wrong about the hard drive failure rate, but I'm almost certain that I am right about the overclocking thing. I just searched on the internet and found no evidence to support what you were talking about and plenty to support what I was saying, so I would be interested to know if I am, in fact, wrong.
If God gave us curiosity
Hi Telek,
All I have said, is that not all overclocking causes the PCI bus to be overclocked and that I beleive that the thought of MOST hdd failures being caused by overclocking, is silly. Of course it IS possible to overclock your PCI bus in the pursuit of system overclocking.
I thought that I said this, but in case I didn't: You changed the FSB and the multiplier.
Yeah, what is your point? The PCI is still at 33MHz. I used a standard BIOS setting for the FSB and CPU multiplier. Choosing a 66FSB gives a PCI multiplier of 2 automatically, choosing a 100FSB gives a PCI multiplier of 3 automatically. They are standard increments that I am choosing that cause appropriate PCI speeds, not marginal increments like 112 that cause the PCI to be raised to 37MHz for example. It is preferable that I don't overclock the PCI or AGP bus as I am a beta tester for a card mfg that prefers results based on within-spec hardware.
Can you change your FSB from 100 now to 112 without changing the PCI bus speed? Or from 66 to 75?
No. But that does'nt disprove my point that overclocking can be done without changing the PCI speed, it merely proves that the PCI speed can be overclocked as a result of system overclocking, something I would never dispute, since I've been overclocking buses since before the existance of PCI or even VLB (My old SpeedStar 24X supported 16MHz ISA, but I could only go to 13MHz while being stable).
Thats fine, but do you have any facts or information
Hey, I'm not the one here making wild claims like " by far the most common reason [for hdd failure] was due to overclocking ", so perhaps you should provide some facts or information to support those claims.
I just searched on the internet and found no evidence to support what you were talking about
And just what was it that I was talking about? 1. Not all overclocking causes the PCI bus to run above spec? or 2. I highly doubt that "by far the most common reason" for hdd failure is due to overclocking.
I also love online debating, I've been doing so since 1991 starting with FidoNet and I avoid having words put into my mouth or arguing against things I do not dispute.
I stand by what I have said in this thread.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
My 30gig 75GXP that came in a Apple Cube died 1 year and 6 days after the manufacture date. The drive is stamped Oct 2000 and it died on Saturday. It's an OEM drive so IBM will do nothing, and Apple only gives a one year warantee. (I didn't by the cube new so I don't have the proof of purchase to get past the manufacture date.)
I have a Telesto DTLA-307030 which is a 75GXP, and I have been having problems with it for the past week. I've had the drive for around 8 months and had no problems. About a week ago it started whirring and clicking, and I found many errors on the drive.
A friend actually pointed me at this article, and I did some digging and found out that my drive is indeed affected by the symptoms described.
Whilst ordering a replacement (I need a drive now - will send the old one back for replacement afterward) the cause of the problem was explained to me by a technical bod..
Basically they overheat, and cant write data where they want, so end up writing it next door. Then cant find the data its just written and whirrs and clicks.
Damn!
Maybe the accoustic management mode gives the head more settle time, I'll try that sometime... Coupled with disabled write caching on the boot drive. Now to back up and restore the drive before those BLERs become unrecoverable.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I'm buisily moving my files from my 75GXP now, It's making a horible click and grinding noise and cannot read from certain sectors.. What a pain, I got the 75GB so I can keep all my stuff on one drive, now I had to span a partitoin across three disks so I can keep my files while I return the drive. Assuming I can get them all off. This is the last piece of IBM hardware I will buy.
I work for a system integrator which is an HP authorized service provider and we just got a system in that had the click-of-death failure. I was able to predict that it was an IBM Deskstar 75 made in Hungary before I even opened the case up. Surprised the other techs in the shop when I very accurately predicted it too. Anyways, you can bet I'll never buy one of these.
For obvious reasons, I am not going to identify myself...but this is the truth as I have heard it.
I am not an anti-Japanese hysterical patriot.
A few years ago, a new manager was put in charge of the storage division of IBM. This was back in like 1998... Seagate stumbled and IBM made a killing on server-class hard drives. The new manager decided to cut costs by moving the drive manufacturing to IBM Japan, where costs could be slid off of the right ledgers to make it look as if he had managed a cost-cutting coup.
Unfortunately, as is apparently often the case, some IBM Japan engineers forgot the first word in their company's name... The quality team in San Jose had problems with the drives produced by Japan from day one, and two projects later the manufacturing has been moved out of Japan and back to the bay area again...
There is likely many other pieces to the tale, but this is the inside line that I heard from someone at the San Jose facility.
One heartening aspect to the whole thing... IBM is doing a good job of letting its internal divisions stand or fall on their lonesome. The new Shark software that has been released uses Seagate server-class drives in their customer deployments-- they were smart enough not to try the latest IBM drives.
Most hard drives now-a-days are actually EXTREMELY resilient, I have a 75gxp 30gb drive and 75gb drive. The 75gb drive I have had for only a month or so. however the 30gb drive I have had for a year. In the course of this year my computer has gone to atleast 10 lan parties, 1 of which was a 4 hour drive and another an hour drive which included driving the streets of boston(many of which seem more like off roading due to pot holes). I think the drive has taken some decently large G's inside the case during all these trips. I guess nowhere near what it could outside of the case being dropped as the case absorbs some of the impact as does the car.
As for vibrations while running? You'd have to be banging the case with a hammer repeatedly to cause some sort of problem, someone walking by isn't going to effect it ever unless they're a 500lb gorilla and your floor can go up and down 2+"'s. Due to lack of space my case has a spot on the floor next to my subwoofer, any time I am listening to music, playing a game the floor is definately vibrating quite a bit and as I said that one drive along with a Seagate barracuda 45gb have been happily running for a year. Likely this does shorten their life span but we're talking from 20+ years to 19+ years nothing too drastic. Having a drive that was poorly manufactured or designed is going to effect when it fails far more than some vibrations.
My tests have shown that constant movement from an unstable floor does cause problems after perhaps a year. This is at a customer's site.
Government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Call me a karma whore, whatever. I spent long enough searching the IBM website that it's prudent to post a link to their drive fitness test utility.
. ht m
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/technolo/dft/dft
That's the main page which has a DL link and a datasheet. They have a linux version available also, which is amazingly impressive. Maxtor, Western Digital et al only produce versions which can fabricate a bootdisk on Win9x systems leaving everyone else hosed.
No sig is worth reading.