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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.
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.
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'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.
How's the ventilation in your computer case? Is it possible your drives are overheating?
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...
I had a 45GB 75GXP fail two weeks ago and got a 60GB 60GXP replacement. No problems so far, so that appears to be right.
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.
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 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 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
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)
It's a good thing I sold my 60GB Deskstar to my ex-boyfriend for $200... ;)
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 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
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
My 30Gb Maxtor has been running perfectly for almost a year now, but I still make backups of my important data like any sane user should (not as often as I should though).
There are bad drives on the market from every manufacturer and everyone has their personal favourites. It's just like automobiles ( a few big manufacturers and loyal customers for each).
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!
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.
Actually, it's the reverse. WD sells relabled IBM drives. IBM invented the GMR technology that both brands of drives use.
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 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
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.
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...
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
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
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!
..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 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?
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.
Yep, I lost a couple of those drives. I haven't touch WD since. I've been very happy with my Maxtor drives.
Very true. We need a BIG advancement in some kind of flash technology to get rid of hard drives. Hard drives are the last (other than cooling fans) moving parts in most computers, and they also happen to be the most critical. Once we move onto a technology like flash memory for storing data, I predict that computer failures overall will drop significantly.
If you're going to be needing hard drives for anything critical, or are storing huge amounts of data (excess of 15Gb), I would definately suggest avoiding any Maxtor product, or you run the risk of losing important data.
Interesting. I've probably installed a dozen Maxtor DiamondMax drives (the cheap ones sold at CompUSA in the red boxes) over the past three years or so, with zero failures.
They're all in systems that are never powered down; maybe that's the secret to getting good service out of Maxtor drives?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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?
I'm guessing my sample size is roughly the square of your sample size. I've probably handled just shy of a thousand WD drives. My current employer has Dells, so once more WD drives abound. Yes, between the 540meg Caviars and the current drives, my WD experience has been virtually nil for the reasons stated, and those reasons still stand.
remember if they experience a 49% failure rate, more people will be happy then not.
Probably why he is trying to gather statistics
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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.
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
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 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.
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
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'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.
I won't touch WDs not because of their quality, but because of WD's insisting on keeping me in the dark about even the possibility of any problem. I have a problem with the company, not the hardware, which I won't take a risk on because of the company.
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
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 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.
Maxtor has regained my respect for top brand
Well, I won't touch them because I've had 3 dead drives personally in 3 years.
Then again, I've also had WD drives die as well as IBM drives now, so I don't know who to trust.
If God gave us curiosity
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.
> I just want a drive I can use without dying.
Well, about the only way this is a problem is if it exploded when it crashed. I've never heard any reports of lethal hard-drive-related injuries...8)
Virg
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
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.
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..
I've heard stories of magnetic drum memories hopping their gimbals, landing on the floor, and having enough rotational energy to smash in one side of a cinder-block wall.
I haven't heard any stories of anyone being in the way when that happened, though.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
RMA directly with IBM after the failure. The drives have internal error logs. Get IBM's Disk Fitness Test software over at http://www.storage.ibm.com/ and it'll give you a TRC code that you can use to RMA with. Do it after you hear the clicking noise.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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!
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!
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
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 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."
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
And then many people (myself included) have them in dedicated drive trays with dual fans pulling air through the tray to keep them cooled with outside air - I still have 2 systems whose mirrors drop almost weekly due to errors (and yes I've done everything from switch to 3ware from SW raid in linux, swapped interfaces (ie IDE Primary & Secondary) during replacements to see if that was the cause. No deal. The drives suck and thats that. I'll stick with Seagate - I've had soem trustly 9GB cheetahs, 10K RPMs - the originals which will burn you if you touch them during operation - each in drive trays pulling whatever air possible trhough them - the drive tower fan spits out REALLY hot air - these drives have run reliably since 1998 or so - can't complain a bit!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
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
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I have had the best luck with speed using IBM drives, make sure it is 7200 RPM, low seek times are always good and the highest possible media rate.
AFAICT the Deskstar 60GXP is one of the fastest drives out there (in IDE land), with the highest platter density, and a 40MB/sec sustained transfer rate (slightly higher than the 75GXP). The 60GB model has a mere 3 platters.
www.tomshardware.com just did a review on high speed drives, he claims that the Seagate Barracuda and the new Western Digitals are slightly better, but I would buy an IBM, having had great luck with them.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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...
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Yes, I'm sure. Before this feature existed, the failure rate was far higher.
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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
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.
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