Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
I have had no problem with these hard drives. I have 2 30 GB ones in a RAID-0 and 2 60 GB ones standalone partioned to 6 20 GB partitions. I also have a smaller one which I cant remember off the top of my head and I have never had any trouble with any of them. They are very quiet, and nice and fast. My friend also has a 60 GB one partitioned to 4 15GBs and he has had no trouble either. I have only seen people complain twice though dont know any people who had problems in person. Perhaps a particular batch of drives is buggy?
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
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...
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.
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 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.