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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."
How's the ventilation in your computer case? Is it possible your drives are overheating?
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.
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
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 !