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IBM 120GXP Revisited
Andrew sent us a link to an article about the
IBM 120gxp controversy.
This is about the fact that the drive has been declared unfit for server use,
and to back that up, IBM says you should only use it for 333 hours a month.
This is a good summary of the issues and worth a read.
pair.net replaced all server drives that were IBM with Maxtor:/ driveswap s.html
http://www.pair.com/pair/support/notices
I've been buying Maxtor since, and haven't had a single problem.
This sig is self referential.
When will hardware sites stop writing about this? Yes, we all know IBM's IDE drives are shitty now, and that we shouldn't buy them. We've had this drilled into our heads since last June. Can we please find something else to write about??
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I think part of the trouble here is that IBM is selling these drives as OEM parts, and not retail drives. OEMs generally don't sell systems to the enthusiast market (The group most likely to leave systems running all day). In your average Dell/Compaq/Cow computer, it's preset to go on standby after an hour or so, powering off the drive. Since all of us "power users" don't like those performance-detracting ACPI/APM functions, we always disable them.
Furthermore, the DeskStar isn't intended to be a server part - IBM makes the UltraStar for that.
So, in essence, it's buyer-beware with OEM parts. Just like with the ATI video card debacle - You're buying parts that aren't intended for *you* to use. It's your fault if you're tryin' to skimp a couple of bucks out of IBM/ATI/whoever by buying on the grey market.
Now, that said...it's pretty fscking ridiculous to be making these drives and all but marketing them as the fastest ATA drives on the planet. That's practically hyping it up to the enthusiast market right there. And I really think it's asinine to expect these drives to *only* be run 8 hours a day. Factoring in the average lunch break when the computer will most likely get left on, that means that the drives are generally running out of spec on a regular business day in your average workstation.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Beware of the Leopard.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If they aren't good for the server market, the 120GXP aren't good for anything- since what regular home user ever needs that much space?
Oh, and BTW, the article also mentions problems with the 75X and 40X drives.
Conclusion- Somebody at IBM QA has screwed up- vote with your $$, folks, and make IBM take notice of this problem- we should not have to replace a HD after only 1 year (or less!) of use!
..I'm going to buy two of them, and build a machine of pure eeeeeevil..
That's not 333 hours MTBF, mind you, even if some would claim that it's close to the truth.
Take a look at this.
Scary.
I bought a computer with a 75GXP in it last may, by Thanksgiving, the read/write heads had started making sounds as though it were thrashing, looking for a landing zone. By the time I was able to call the manufacturer of my computer (Christmas time), the computer had completely failed to boot.
Hopefully, the replacement they sent will last more than 6 months. But, just in case, I have a Maxtor 60GB in place as a backup. At least this time, if it goes down, I won't have to wait for the replacement.
Randal Graves says: I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class... Especially since I rule.
What bothers me most about IBM drives is they get more and more noisy through time. When I bought their 40GB 5400rpm model I was pleased by its quiet operation. After six months I noticed the drive is somewhat noisy and later the noise became unbearable for me. The same happened to a 20GB. Can anyone confirm these problems? What about their newer drives?
Ok, I'll just tell the boss we have to shutdown the webserver every day before we go home! What a great ecommerce solution :P
bbh
Why is there a fuss over these drives being unsuitable for servers? Were these drives marketed to the server market? I think I'm out of the loop on this one.. can anyone fill me in on the full story? I was a little confused after reading the article.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Geeez... Firestones where good untill a few models a few years ago, now they only sell Bridgestone :)
:)
Wouldnt be suprised if IBM starts selling BMI drives
I have a light-duty server that has been running two 60GXP drives for the past 6 months with no trouble. After I heard about the problems with the 75GXP I switched from striping to mirroring in my raid configuration just to be safe.
When I heard about the 120GXP I figured that IBM was releasing the modified (glass plattered) version of the Deskstar drive in order to clear up any perception that the line had problems (due to the issues with the 75GXP). I decided to buy one to put in the new Athlon XP box I was building at the time. I've been using it for 2 months with no trouble (so far), but since I purchased it from a retailer I found on pricewatch, I doubt that I could follow the article's suggestion and return it. The performance benchmarks I've done suggest that the drive performs relatively well (135% of the 7200 RPM ATA100 reference drive in SiSoft Sandra's HD benchmark).
I probably won't buy another IBM drive for a while, however, based on the unresponsiveness of IBM to the problems as reported in the article.
Amazing magic tricks
Have each person buy one rather than just avoiding it... Put non critical data on it wait for it to fail, when it does return it, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one...
The point here is that the cost to jack up the cost to IBM. Returns and costs related to returns are a diffrent line item in the accounting Ledger. People tend to look at losses and see what can be done about it...
and should be punished as such. Does anyone have connections with the fbi so this guy can be brought to justice?
I have seen these stories about the IDE drives and have heard people saying that IBM isn't doing well with IBM drives, but I have expereinced that QA in general with IBM is crap. The other day we received a system direct from IBM, a rackmount server. The thing shipped with no hard drive. Additionally, an upgrade we ordered pre-installed came in a separate box. When calling to get the order fixed, the order number on the box was not listed in their database. Eventually they said the order number on the box was only a 'partial' order number, and the hard drive was shipped.
Three of the four CDs they shipped were cracked beyond usability, packing was horrible. IBM needs to get QA better before I'll considr them again for purchases.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I had a Western Digital drive fail less than 3 years after I bought it, and they refused to replace it. Their warranty starts 3 years from manufacture date. See my site for more details.
(password forgetting coward)
So heres the text...
The IBM 120GXP Revisited
The revelation that IBM's 120GXP line of drives was only rated for 333 hours of usage per month kicked off a storm of controversy and discussion both here at VH and at other websites as well. With little actual data to go on, however, speculation has run rampant and official response has been scarce. VH launched its own investigation into the issue with the goal of examining IBM's claims regarding the 120GXP's optimum usage, whether such claims were sufficiently documented, and how consumers may wish to respond to the situation. We've organized this article in a question-and-answer format to allow for simpler organization and easier reading, with the questions themselves designed to walk a reader through the situation.
IBM, unfortunately, would not provide additional information or official comment on the 120GXP situation, despite repeated phone calls and requests for data.
Is there a reliability problem with IBM hard drives?
This isn't an easy question to answer, especially with IBM withholding comment. While large numbers of readers responded to the questions I posed regarding drive reliability, their emails present very different pictures. Some of you swear by IBM drives and their reliability, while listing many of the Seagate, Maxtor, or WD drives you've seen fail in both a corporate and a consumer setting, while other readers had horror stories of seeing IBM drive after IBM drive bite the dust.
Based on the emails and feedback we received from earlier stories, however, the IBM drives seem to have one distinguishing characteristic--they fail faster. Most of the emails and commentary we received indicated drives that survived only a few months past their purchase date. My own personal experience mirrors this--of the three 75GXP drives I've replaced for customers, two of them were less than a year old, with the third being just shy of eighteen months.
If you take into account the fact that IBM is currently facing a lawsuit alleging that the 75GXP line is defective, it seems fairly clear that, at the least, IBM's 75GXP line is suffering from problems. How widespread the problems are, which drive models they affect, and what IBM is doing to fix them, however, is not clear. It's been suggested that all of the defective drives have shipped from a certain factory, but Big Blue has done nothing to confirm or deny this, or even acknowledged that a problem exists.
How does the 333 hour limit fit into the current situation, and what does the limit mean?
Last week, IBM dropped a bombshell on the hard drive community when Storage Review published a conversation between IBM and "a long time SR participant." The conversation stated that these drives were unsuited for any type of serious server role and should not be used as such.
To some, this is simply IBM covering the bases of liability by stating the drives should only be used eight hours a day, but means nothing else. Others of you have expressed grave concern that the newly-emphasized 333 hour limitation is, in fact, a tacit admission by IBM of problems with the 120, 75, and 60 GXP drives.
While there are arguments to be made for both sides, the bulk of the evidence points to the latter rather than the former. Several websites (including Tweaktown) have published articles indicating that the 75 (and possibly even the 60 GXP) drives are failing because of excess heat. Certainly it's true that using the drive less would be one way of keeping it cooler over its total life, allowing for greater reliability.
Also of note is that IBM has never emphasized this 333 hour-per-month usage rate before on any of its products. While the specification exists in the technical literature for the 120, 75, and 60 GXP drives, websites reviewing these drives for months have recommended them for placement in low-end servers. IBM's own press releases have targeted the drives for these areas as well. It's extremely odd that a company would both encourage websites to review its drives in a low-end server environment, target them into that market, and then suddenly pull an about-face and claim the drives should not be used in such arenas.
One argument used to support the idea that the 333 hours-per-month is merely a liability trick is that companies like VIA ship their C3 processors with a heatsink and fan, yet publicly demonstrate the chip running with only a heatsink and are known to encourage the use of the processor in such a configuration.
The problem with this argument, however, is that VIA doesn't state that the chip can only be used for a fraction of its original time OR at a fraction of its original speed in exchange for removing the fan. By stating that the drive should only be powered for 333 hours per month, IBM is limiting usage to about eleven hours per day. In other words, VIA sells the chip with a heatsink and fan, but also deploys it in a heatsink-only configuration with no loss of performance. The fan may be there, but only for liability reasons.
By stating that their drives should only be used for eleven hours per day, IBM is drastically limiting the performance of the drive (as compared to its competitors) as well as its appearance in the market. The ability of the VIA chips to run with less cooling than expected is a tremendous positive--but for IBM drives to be perceived as only recommended for eleven hours a day when their competitors make no such recommendations about their own product is a tremendous negative. The argument that the two situations are comparable, therefore, is false. One company is demonstrating a product that exceeds market expectations, while the other is demonstrating a product that fails to meet them.
Part of the confusion regarding this situation could be resolved if IBM would clarify whether the 333 hours-per-month stipulation referred to hours the drive was powered on, or hours the drive was engaged in reading/writing. Once again, however, the company has not deigned to comment on the situation.
Has IBM properly disclosed the operating conditions of the GXP line of drives?
The one comment I DID get from IBM when I brought up the 333 hours-per-month operating time restriction on the 120GXP is that this stipulation has, in fact, been present on ALL of the GXP lines. We investigated their claim and found the following:
*
The restriction is not noted on any of the GXP drives itself.
*
No documentation was included that mentioned this monthly restriction to purchasers of the GXP line at either the consumer or business level.
*
No information mentioning the GXP's recommended hourly rate is discussed in any press release related to any GXP product. Furthermore, the drives are expressly and explicitly targeted to high-end enterprise buyers.
*
No data about the restriction is present on IBM's Deskstar homepage.
*
There IS, in fact, information about the various restrictions present on the specific pages for the drives themselves, but the information is in different places for each drive.
*
For the 120GXP, the restriction is noted in the two-page "Data Sheet and Specification" document under the "Reliability" section.
*
Neither the 75GXP nor the 60GXP have the 333 hour-per-month specification mentioned in their own versions of that document, however. The 60GXP lists this setting only in its "Functional Specifications" document--a hefty 195 page engineering-level PDF. The specification in question is located 'prominently' on page 50 in a relatively small section. The 75GXP, on the other hand, does not have a "Functional Specification" link and does not mention the limitation on its data sheet either. I was unable, in fact, to even FIND mention of such a limitation for this particular model.
So, we're left with the following situation: A limitation IBM claims is specified on all three drives isn't mentioned in the shipping documentation, on the drive itself, or in any press release. The specification, in fact, is mentioned only in three different places on three different websites, and is only easily found on one. Furthermore, the limitation in question is placed on drives IBM markets as being "enterprise solutions", suitable for high-end workstation use for multimedia and graphics presentations. Its not as if these are IBM's budget line of drives, after all--these drives are (theoretically) the top of the line models.
This does not strike me as proper disclosure of a drive limitation. Even if the drive limitation stretches beyond the IBM Deskstar line and into its competitor's products as well, the company has essentially switched performance metrics without informing anyone of the change.
The best example of a proper metric-switch is AMD's recent decision to use model numbers instead of MHz. When they made the change, AMD highly publicized it and openly disclosed their measurement data, their specifications, and the reasons for the metric switch. Whether people agreed or disagreed with it, the quantifiable data was laid on the table for examination.
In this case, even if IBM were to argue that other IDE hard drives from other manufacturers suffer from the same limitations; their failure to explain and discuss this new "hours per month" metric has drastically hurt their drive's perception in the market.
This situation actually reminds me from a scene in the popular book "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" where Arthur Dent (who's house is about to be destroyed) questions a public official about when the plans to destroy it were made and how he was informed. The following quote illustrates the situation quite well:
"But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available [and on display] in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
Sound familiar?
is found to suffer one of the following about 3 days later:
"Is a complete ballache to use under linux"
"Has the life expectancy of a bunny in the crocodile enclosure"
"Starts house fires. On purpose."
And yes, I did buy a deskstar, but it got nicked within a month so who knows how it's doing?!?
Tom Newton
Seriously, though, online polls are completely meaningless. They are swayed by rigging and mass canvasing, and that's ignoring the basic tenent that only the motivated (or bored) bother voting in the first place.
Having said that, I find this whole debate intriguing. Firstly there is the fact that the 75GXP was a very big seller (performance and value packed into one), so the industry standard failure rates indicate that with normal failure rates there will still be more people with failed drives. Anecdotally I can say that myself, and several other people I know, have had zero problems with our 75GXP, but following standard Slashdot-esque thought processes I should extrapolate that out and say that therefore no one has every had a problem, and therefore the drive is perfect. I have heard stories about people who had to "replace it X times!", but in almost all cases you'll find that they grossly inproperly installed the drive with no venting space on both sides (and this is a case with drives from any manufacturer. I had a Maxtor die and opened the case to find that the OEM had sandwiched it between two other drives).
I saw an interview with one of the plaintiffs against IBM, and I'd swear I saw them subtly shift gears from saying that the 75GXP had a higher failure rate (I would guess that that they can't find numbers to back that up, and no numbers determined by a Slashdot polling are not sufficient to convince anyone but the converted), to saying that instead this is a lawsuit expressing outrage about any failures, and it is really a bellwether against all hard drive makers. Uh huh. Now there's this article that is basically thrown off by standard marketing and reliability metrics: The drive IS made for desktop use, and desktop use is normally about 8 hours a day of infrequent use, versus 100% usage 24 hours a day for some server drives. Perhaps they simply realize that the latter will naturally have a higher failure rate so they built that into the server drive prices, but they don't guarantee that for desktops? The article makes the contention that it is a usage heat issue, but that seems a bit silly as the drive will reach maximum temperature minutes after going to 100% usage (i.e. It's not still creeping upwards after 8 hours).
Wouldnt be suprised if IBM starts selling BMI drives :)
Except Broadcast Music Inc. is a group of songwriters and music publishers. Watch these new "BMI" drives enforce copy protection to protect the rights of BMI members.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Also, these drives do show up in retail... I saw them at Fry's last week and I think CompUSA has them too.
I'm going to get my hands on two dead but RMA'able 75GXPs...the 45gig models, for the cost of shipping them to my house. Both are replaceable under IBM's warrenty, I don't exactly trust it though...
I'm probably going to run them in RAID 1 (Mirroring?) I think off of my KT7-RAID. That way....well...They'll both fail, just hopefully not at the same time.
I have used WD drives for about 5 years now and their higher-end EIDE and SCSI have been great workhorses for us.
A shame for IBM. Their hardware used to be top-notch in quality. Period. I guess that leaves HP....
They have some pretty interesting information from an unnamed IBM source...
http://www.storagereview.com
I'm finding this story rather spooky as my 75GXP failed on me (ironically in the middle of my first real backup) yesterday after 18 months of "average" use (less than 6 hours a day). I use the IBM drive as my main system drive, and keep a 5GB for data backups "now and again".
I bought the drive way back in October 2000 with the confidence that "it's an IBM drive: these things are not only fast, but are meant to be reliable". When I started to see the horror stories of other peoples' drives failing I felt quite lucky (read: smug) that mine was still going strong. Now I realise how stupid I look: that whiz, whir, crunch, grind noise that I heard yesterday from the disk *above* the sound of my rather noisy fans scared the life out of me.
I'm now faced with the nasty task of not only attempting to salvage what data I can before I send it to IBM (yes, as other people have mentioned, at least IBM provide a fairly decent 3 year warranty), but also shudder in anticipation at what IBM decide to do with my drive. I believe there are 3 options:
1. Attempt to "fix" my drive and send it back (although having the "Drive Fitness Test" return "Defective Disk" should quash this option). That means I'm stuck with the same drive which is most likely to fail on me again sometime in the (not-too-distant) future.
2. Replace my drive with the same spec, from the same product line & production factory. Again, this worries me as I'm probably ending up with a new disk which has the same defects and thus is also going to die on me.
3. Replace my drive with a newer product with an equivalent spec. Yesterday I was hoping for this option. However, having read the ViaHardware article, this doesn't hold much hope for me either.
And that's the crux: it's alright having the drive under warranty & returning it, but who's to say that any drive they replace it with is not as faulty?
This whole fiasco with the GXP line has certainly put me off IBM drives, no matter how fast and "great" they may be. Shame.
"Unless you pay your shareware fee this harddrive will stop working after 333 hours."
I have trouble with passwords among other things.
I as a poweruser dont turn off my pc ever... ever... and ever... so do many other users who use Linux or Win2k/XP... what should we do? Turn it off? What about business users? No overtime ;-)...
there are so many examples in which these IBM drives should not be used that it makes them essentially useless.. hard drive failures are not something anyone would want to mess around with so in future I will just make sure that whatever I buy does not have IBM drive in it
I was in the market for a new HD, I knew that certain models of IBM ATA drives were flaky, I was still looking for a DeskStar though, now that has changed. I'll go for the Maxtor.
How about IBM's microdrive? Is that any good?
I recall about a year to two ago, when the 75GXP line was unveiled, reading a review of it and the 60 in one of the two linux mags i read(LM & LJ).
I'm at work right now and don't have a copy on hand, but I do recall the article saying that the drives were too expensive, and if you considered the average life span of a drive you would be better off both financially and reliability-wise buying two cheaper 30-giggers.
The reviewer had decided that just judging by the size of the drives, you were taking your data into your own hands on the GXP line. It turns out he (or she) was far more on the money than they ever knew.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
or has anyone else noticed all the Visual Studio .NET banners popping up on slashdot?
/ B9 45236;sz=468x60;ord=101646648101646648
http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N1942.OSDNSlashDot
have this active on my screen right now..
slashdot == hypocritical?
return true; ?
You want quality, service and accountablility? Guess what, don't buy cheap stuff and bitch. That's one reason I buy high end parts when I know it has to be totally reliable.
For a while, they were playing fast and loose with the UDMA spec and produced a line of drives that weren't safe for UDMA use- they'd work, but a lot of them would corrupt data if you operated them in UDMA mode.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
from the article:
:)
While large numbers of readers responded to the questions I posed regarding drive reliability, their emails present very different pictures. Some of you swear by IBM drives and their reliability, while listing many of the Seagate, Maxtor, or WD drives you've seen fail in both a corporate and a consumer setting, while other readers had horror stories of seeing IBM drive after IBM drive bite the dust.
On the general topic of hard drive reliability, I've noticed a similar trend -- every sysadmin to whom I speak seems to have a poorly-founded personal hatred for one hard drive manufacturer. Sure, I admit, having a hard drive fail on you really sucks (esp. if you've been lazy with backups and don't have RAID).
What's weird about this is that people who are otherwise rational will take a single experience with a bad drive and use it to justify an opinion that all drives from that manufacturer are unreliable. It reminds me of D&D players who will, after rolling a d20 four or five times, decide that it "rolls high."
Here's the deal: hard drives fail. Get over it and design your systems such that your important data isn't relying on a single hard drive. In fact, two of my hard drives (a Quantum and an IBM) are slowly failing on me right now. Before that, the last one was a Seagate.
Now, I will admit that there must be some models from some manufacturers which are more prone to failure, just as there are probably some d20s which are prone to "roll high." Perhaps some manufacturers tend to make more reliable drives than others. However, in all the times I have heard someone bitch about a hard drive manufacturer, not once has someone referred to a study that did a statistically sound comparison of drives (I'm not sure that one even exists that compares, over time, all the various models of the manufacturers). It's always "Seagate sucks! A Seagate drive failed on me once, and I had to do a bare-metal recovery."
Of course, in this case, lots of people have reported problems with this drive, so it's a little different. If, sometime in the near future, someone tells me not to buy a cheap-ass OEM IBM IDE drive to use in a critical server, saying "remember the 120GXP?", I'll probably listen to them. However, based on my limited anecdotal evidence, I doubt that will happen
</rant>
Bad idea: Letting your drive melt.
I had problems with my 40GB Quantum AS (bad sectors, spinning down and refusing to speak to anything); I noticed it was getting rather hot (bare in mind this is in a well ventilated case at the bottom of the 3.5" mounting bays with plenty of space above it) and wondered if this had anything to do with it.
So I mounted a card cooler I had spare, put it on top of a small speaker just outside the case (I leave the side open) and had it blow over the system.
The result? CPU temp dropped a good 6c (43c fully loaded for a 1GHz Athlon clocked to 1.2GHz, compared with ~50 before) and now both my drives (Quantum Fireball 20GB and Quantum Fireball AS 40GB) are cool to the touch. There's been absolutely no sign of any problems with the drive since either.
Should I believe this or may I be on the road to IBM-GXP style hell?
IBM is claiming in some places its unsuited for server use because a restriction of 333 hours per month of use.
But I haven't turned my PC off in over a year (does anyone do that anymore?). Does that make it a server, or simply just a normal use?
Seriously, for those of you with broadband, don't you keep your PC on all the time? Why would you shut it off?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
How will people use their 1,000 free hours of AOL in 45 days if their hard drive, and hence their PC, can only be on 333 hours per month?
I have a 30GB 75GXP one at home that's been working for 2 years, powered 24/7 (the machine is on to answer faxes in NT4.0, but the Bios is set to spin down the drive).
I've got a 40 GB 60GXP at work that's been working for about 6 months, though not too heavily, and both of them seem to work ok (I run DFT on them when I heard about this and it couldn't find any errors).
Non sequitur. How does one reconcile their MTBF claims against this restriction of 333 hours/month?
That being said, I've installed about 25 of the 75GXP and 60GXP drives with only one failure. The difference in this case, a dead 40GB 60GXP, is that the cooling for this drive was far less than for the other two dozen or so, and the resulting heat buildup was significantly greater (>30 degrees F higher) There have been claims around the net that heat is the culprit here, specifically overheating of the largest ASIC on the controller board. I tend to agree with this statement, as my still-working drives are in heavily used workstations and servers, with positive external ventilation blowing around these drives.
My advice to owners of these drives: keep them cool and back them up often.
when you mean "one on at a time".. what happens to the other 2 drives?
:-P
personally, i'd disable any power management of any sort.. i've had problems in the past where i've had blackouts.. and most HD's that failed to boot or had any boot problems afterwards were running some sort of a power management mode.
then again, i'd assume any smart company would consider in running a UPS
Tip: Check if the drive temperature is not exceeding the specified limits with something like this tool. Many case designs do not provide sufficient ventilation for 7'200 RPM drives, especially if they're mounted closely together. Use a HD cooler if the disks get too warm, it's still less expensive than reconstructing data and/or reinstalling.
Irony: big ad from IBM on my page of the "IBM 120GXP Revisited" article, saying "Time to update your critical systems security!". Yes, indeed 8-)
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
There's something I don't understand here. IBM's an ISO9000 certified company. That means they have to document every bug, alledged or otherwise, against any of their products. This is so they can prove that their products do in fact meet the quality standards that are claimed.
If IBM hasn't been sharing this data with the public, then who exactly is supposed to see this?
There's something funny going on. Maybe Underwriter Labs will be the next Arthur Anderson.
... will take about 2Tb. I'm planning on doing that in two years with a rack of HDs.
Microsuckers, obviously? Or where else are you going to store your 1GB/page Word XP documents?
- http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/prod/deskstar.htm
"...delivers Non-stop leadership..."Late last year when it was Quantum Fireball drives that were dropping like flies in our office I got on the phone with a drive repair center in Canada. We were going through the "How much will it cost us to actually retrieve the data from these drives?" discussion and I thought to ask him what brand of drives he sees the *least*.
"SCSI" was his response. "Oh sure," he said "there are fewer of them out there -- but we hardly see any at all."
One of the other interesting things he told me is that the drives included in Quantum's Snap Server appliances, despite being IDE, are *NOT* drives you can buy off the shelf. And he hasn't gotten in a single Snap Server drive in the two years they had been selling them.
I switched from Quantum to IBM drives at the time (ugh!) but had the forsight to put them all in a RAID-1 configuration. We've sent three DeathStars back for repair so far. The good news? IBM had replacements to us in under a week.
I recently switched from IBMs to Maxtor (making sure I wasn't buying Quantum's old stock) and have already had one of their 80Gb drives fail. For the record they are not as responsive as IBM in the RMA department.
So what's the answer folks? You get what you pay for. If you care about your data buy an Adaptec 1200A RAID-1 controller and two drives, or spend the money on a SCSI controller and SCSI drives. So far I haven't found any IDE drive vendors that can sell you a reliable drive (I have dead fujitsu drives around here as well, but must admit that I still haven't tried Western Digital.)
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
hrmm... havn't had any maxtor fail in years? i remember when maxtor drives were like prizes in cracker jack boxes, every once in a while you got a good one; but since maxtor and quantum combined forces, maxtor has become a very decent drive. i'm even thinking about getting some of their 160gb drives to make up a file server.
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Until I saw this, I had, for some reason, been under the impression that IBM drives were the most reliable IDE drives around...
Which leads me to wonder... What IDE drives *are* good?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
IBM is giving a classic demonstration in how NOT to handle a problem. It has been demonstrated time and time again that the tactic of denying everything does not work. It doesn't work for politicians, it doesn't work for accounting firms, and it doesn't work for electronics manufacturers.
IBM could have come right out, admitted to a defect and paid the price for that. By admitting to it, and making sure to replace all of those defects, they would have bought themselves a huge amount of credibility. We'd all buy IBM drives knowing full well that if there was ever a design problem we'd hear about it and get it fixed.
Now, IBM is risking the reputation of their entire drive line through these shenanigans. Before IBM stood as one of the best drive manufacturers, but repeated issues with the GXP line are quickly submarining that. In the ultra-competitive hard drive market, this sort of problem could put that unit completely out of business.
I personally owned an IBM 75GXP, and it is the only hard drive I've ever owned that had a problem. I've been using hard drives since a 20MB box attached to my Atari 1040ST, and not a single one of them ever made a fuss. My defective drive has since been replaced, but it's of course with another IBM drive and now I continue to be concerned that maybe this drive will be defective too.
I wonder how long before people learn the lesson that covering your tracks, especially in this era of rapid distribution of information, is a bad policy.
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Two out of the three Deskstar 60GXP's I purchased died within four months, a replacement for one arrived last week, DOA. I have an 80mm fan blowing cool air directly over them when they are on, so heat can't be an issue. I DO leave my computer on 24/7, but the disks are not accessed continually. There has to be a serious problem with these drives if I can't have all three running properly at the same time.
as anyone that put's IDE drives in a server is pretty much a moron.
SCSI U160.. anything else is pure stupidity in a server.
I have not really trusted IBM drives since my DGHS 18 U died. Not because it died, but because IBM Customer Service handled it extremely poorly. Not only was the drive purchased from an authorized IBM agent I had full documentation. They had initially said I needed documentation to replace it, but when I obtained documentation they said the warranty was only a year. The paperwork I had clearly showed otherwise, but they sternly refused. Since, I have acumulated about 14 dead IBM drives in the 10-30 gb range...
Anyway, I think we're all misisng something here. I've seen IBM drives installed in a Raid config die within hours of eachother, just days or weeks out of warranty.
I think the thinking at IBM drives is along this line "Lets manufacture the drive in such a way we can undercut our competition, but as a result, it will make the drive only last this many hours.." The failure rate could be related to the fatigue rate of metal of a certain purity used in the drive, stability of ceramics used, how good the air filter is inside, etc etc. From my experience seeing each class of drives die, The MTBF is amazingly similar between drives that die.
Lets say the warranty on these is 3 year. Isn't that IBM saying that the drive has a lifetime of 11,998 hours, or just about 499.5 days? If I'm right, even if you follow IBM's reccomendation, the drive will die, but more likely to be out of warranty. Will they replace the drive if I don't follow the reccomendation? I would like my drives to last 5 or 10 years.. or until I don't need it anymore. Period. Not a year.. or three years or whatever the warranty du jour is.
The oldest drives I have and am using are Seagate FH 5.25" 9 gb scsi drives. They're 10 years old. Their MTBF is clearly published, and about 800,000 hours, if memory serves.... this is far more acceptable.
Wendell
However, I have 3 server that are always on but the other computers are off when not in use. There is no point in leaving a computer on when you go to bed on a sunday night, wake up and go to work the next day and then come home. That's almost 24 hours of power with no use. Typical American motto >> Why save? You'll always make more next year anyway!
As the owner of a Deathstar 75gxp, I'm realizing I need to get my data off there as soon as possible. It's operated flawlessly so far, but it's increasingly seeming like my days are numbered. Since this isn't a boot drive, I was wondering if I might see increased longevity if I were to buy a 5400 rpm drive. I was expecting a price break, but the people I can find who sell Western Digital's 5400rpm drives aren't selling for any less. Is there any benefit, or should I just get the 7200?
I have a 75GXP that went South after less than a month of use, and another that died after a couple of months. After that experience and having seen several stories about the unreliability of certain IBM drives, it's going to be a long time before I buy another one. I suspect that there are a lot of people like me, and that IBM's drive business will be taking some bad hits for the foreseeable future.
They will bite you in the a%&. I wasn't paying attention to the quality of recent drives and purchased an IBM 60GXP based on my previous impression of IBM drives. It started giving my problems after a week of use. So I called the place I ordered the drive from, http://datadrive4all.com. They told my to run the IBM Drive & Fitness Test. I did, and it showed no errors. Then I installed my OS again, and after a few days of use, it crashed. So once again, I ran the DFT test this time stressing it for several hours. I managed to get an error, and processed the RMA through datadrive4all.com.
So I sent that place the drive, and they called me to say that they tested the drive with DFT and found no problems. I couldn't convince those idiots otherwise. So they charged me a 15% restocking fee and put the drive back on their shelves to sell to some other poor sap.
I realize all drives can fail, but further research revealed that there is a class action lawsuit against IBM for the quality of their GXP line of drives!!!
I then bought the "Caviar" of IDE disk drives (Western Digital). Its been running great and is quiet and fast.
At least IBM was kind enough to warn you of this on their spec sheets:
60GXP Spec Sheet, Pg 50 of 209
120GXP Spec Sheet, Pg 2 of 2
There's probably one of these for the 75GXP line. But I think it is implied from the get go already, if the clicking doesn't kill you first.
What ever you do, just don't put two of these babies in a TiVo!
I've had very good experince with them. I have a 800 MB drive that still runs well. I don't use it much any more becaues of the size. My drives are exclusivly Maxtor now. (no I do not represent Maxtor or any seller dealing with Maxtor)
I have had a Quantum Drive fail after 1 month so badly that even a data recovery company could not recover any data from it. It had anihilated the 'sync track' by scratching it to death.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
While I'm not normally one to accept anecdotal evidence, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of it for these drives. I mean, name me one other hard drive that has had these sorts of problems? Certainly there are people who have had various problems with various drives from various manufacturers. But I'm hard pressed to recall a story of any one drive model becoming such a routine problem for so many.
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333hr MTBF means that they fail (on average) every 333 hours?
Hm... 333 hours / 24 hours/day ~ 13 days.
So, you've got to replace your drives every two weeks or so? Hahaha.
Please, tell me I'm reading this wrong.
*/me reads article*
Ah, they're just not recommending them for low-end servers anymore. Maybe they want people to buy their SCSI drives for a bit more for those cases. That'd probably be the smart thing to begin with except that, with the proliferation of home networking equipment, more and more people will want to build servers and they will not want or need to spend over $10k on them for their family of 4 to share files.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
I had a Quantum drive fail by 'click death'. They told me the clicking sound was the heads hitting the stops. It started to become worse, and after a month it had died. The data was unrecoverable even by a data recovery company and their clean room.
My advice - Beware!
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I'm working at a small business with their servers and stuff and they needed a second one, so the owner just said "Another server? OK, I'll just run down to Fry's and pick up whatever's on sale and you can load NT Server on it."
I was aghast with horror.
Over 100 75GXP's in our organization, 30 of which have failed in recent months, with total data loss. Oh sure, we're going to get them replaced by IBM, but do you think they're going into machines? Hell no, we're going to turn them into wall clocks!
We've switched to Seagate Baracuda IV's, screw the 120GXP. Once bitten...
Anyone filing a class-action suit against IBM in Canada?
from the GXP technical pdf
Product Lifetime: 5 years@333 hours/month with 20% of that time being seeking/reading/writing.
Translation "This drive is designed to live for 19,980 hours with 3996 hours of that dedicated to reading/writing/seeking."
But the warranty is 3 years, and IBM has shown themselves to be untrustworthy with this whole fiasco. So that means a drive lifetime of 11,988 hours with 2397.6 of those hours reading/writing/seeking. This seems less than ideal for even an entry-level workgroup or internet server.
What happened to measuring failure rate in MTBF? What happened to MTBF in the hundreds of thousands of hours??
Wendell
Only 8 hours a day? Next thing you know the drives will be demanding 15 minute coffee breaks twice a day, full medical and dental, three weeks vacation each year, job security, and so on.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
As stated before, this line of HDD (Deskstar) are *CHEAP* ones.
...
and for hardware (even if it may not be true for software), you get what you paid for !!!
I've go 3 IBMs SCSI drives (UltraStar) ranging from an old 2 Gb 5400 RPMs to a (recent) 18 Gb 10000 RPM and guess what ?
Not a single bad cluster, not a single problem with them.
Oh, yeah they have a 3-year warranty
What is the warranty for an DeskStar ?
#include "coucou.h"
My 7200 rpm 34GXP IBM died after only 12 months of light usage (1-2 hr a day) during a game install. I have heard 34GXPs died a lot in other people's boxes (Apple used to ship them in their G4 - we have some in our office - all have died). I have 2 other disks (RAID1/Fujitsu disks) that run 24/7 with heavy usage (busy server) and they have been OK for 2 yr now. My new 7200rpm WD that replaced the IBM has been fine as well.
Of course this doesn't compare to horror stories of people where all 4 IBM disks in a RAID dies within a month. I think the whole GXP line smells bad.
D.
Anyone building their own system should pay attention to heat problems. I'll bet that you won't see these drives failing in systems built by Dell and others, they have engineers to deal with airflow and heat removal. If you put a fast drive in a case meant for a piddly 5400rpm drive, then you're begging for trouble. All the systems I build and sell with 7200 or greater RPM drives have fans blowing air on and around the drives. Any fast drive is going to fail without direct heat sinking and airflow.
This is a lesson learned from installing a dozen fast track raid cards into servers, with the second drive (and often both) being 7200RPM drives. We had all sorts of failures until we looked at the case airflow.
Obviously, however, the IBM drives are failing at a higher rate than other manufacturers. The reason is probably due to slightly smaller tolerances given for heat problems. The other big problem is selling their drives to the inexperienced consumers - one of the reasons you can find certian drives only in prebuilt systems. The manufacturer knows to sell only to people who know what their doing.
With the hard drive being the slowest component in the system (the bottle neck) people want to get the faster drive, but they fail to think of it in terms of heat production. As much time needs to be spent dealing the the hard drive's heat sinking as with the processor's heat sinking.
-Adam
I have owned two of these drives for over a year now, and the other two for nine months. I have had great performance out of them, and no problems. I do however have each drive in a 5 1/4 bay with a drive cooler on each.
Maybe everyone should just put a hard drive cooler on them and the problem would be solved... I have used harddrive coolers ever since my first 1g SCSI drive.... a LONG time ago.... Usually I want to replace my drives with bigger ones before they actually go bad.... hell my 1g scsi drive is still good.... I have only had a handfull of drives go bad on me over the years (my personal ones... tons of drives have gone bad for companies I have worked for) WD, Fuji and Conner were the only drives I have ever go bad...
IBM management has hacked and chopped the drive team to the point that they are "below critical mass" What does IBM expect if you threaten the best engineers in the world with 3rd world replacement?
Needless to say, this sucks, I've had this 60GXP drive for about 6-12 months (somewhere in between)
and I've certainly used it for more than 8 hours/day average, this is on my desktop machine, although it hasn't been used as intensively as a server drive would, and there's plenty of airflow in my box ( I have a large fan strapped in one of the corners, and the chassi is wide open )
I don't want to take any chances.
It's about time to get a new one, and I wouldn't want to make the same mistake twice.
Can someone recommend a drive in the same price range? Obviously, a drive with a longer life span,
and SCSI is currently not an alternative.
or just plain Good Taste?
o n.html
IBM Sweden is promoting artist Jonas Torstensson in glass-ware collectibles using recycled monitors - http://www-5.ibm.com/se/ibm/environment/torstenss
It doesn't supprise me that VIAhardware.com is reporting on malfunctioning hardware. They probably have more practice than any site on the internet.
333 hours per month is only 13 days per month. 45% working time. Working 12-7 or maybe 24-3.5
If you look at the competition Intel had at the time when they had their problems, it was nearly non-existant. All the other chip manufacturers were making products that barely kept up with Intel. Now it's a little different with AMD giving them some real competition, but overall it was a very different playing field for Intel.
In this instance IBM is competing against a number of manufacturers in a market where it's very hard to distinguish your product. Nobody really has a substantial lead in drive technology so the only thing to compete on is brand. Will I buy a Seagate, or a Maxtor, or a Western Digital or an IBM? Well, since they all offer fairly similar products, it comes down to prive and brand.
Also, keep in mind that with Intel's problems the FDIV bug effected very few people in an obvious way. The box I use as a router still has a genuine Intel P60 with an FDIV bug and it's never caused me a problem. On the other hand, these hard drive failures create a much more obvious problem because of the potential for data loss.
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...that a news site for VIA stuff has a problem with things that aren't built well enough for server use...
The problem is companies will change something, Fab, fab mamagment, a new brand of soldies in there boards, and it will have consequence later. Company ABC could have the best IDE drives, ever. The they get some new management in a Fab. The managment changes some small thing(in there eyes) and suddenly, drives start failing after 3 months.
It happens. I've seen management skip on a fab filtration system for a week to get a bigger bonus, only to pay for it later.(these where NOT HD fabs).
All companies go throught this time to time.
there are two things you can do to protect your self:
1)Buy SCSI. there higher quality. Most IDE drives are drives that didn't meet SCSI specs.
2)Don't buy the newest drive. Drives are large enough now, you can live 1 year behind the curve. This way you can evaluate drives based on some history of the specific drive, and not just company rep.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have an IBM drive. IBM makes a drive tuning utility that offers a "quiet" mode and a "low power" mode. Although, as far as I can tell, "low power" mode effects mostly noise, and "quiet" mode mostly peak thermal power, they make a big difference in drive temperature. I ran a burn-in test on an IBM drive in an embedded configuration (crammed box, not the way it was meant to be used), and the temperature started rising, going above spec. I turned on both modes, and it started falling very quickly. If it's a thermal problem, and you don't mind a performance hit, that may be a good solution. The utility has a built-in burn in test with temperature monitoring, so you can check on how your drive is doing.
That said, I always bought IBM for the reputation of reliability. Historically, IBM drives cost maybe 10-20 percent more than competition, but I didn't mind paying a little extra to get a drive less likely to fail. Now, on pricescan, IBM drives are, in many cases, the cheapest on the market (I was looking at 50gb+ 7200 RPM drives). I think IBM would do well to raise prices and reliability levels again. If they want profits from lower-end markets, they're better off doing what they do with notebooks, and licensing their technologies to companies with weaker brands.
This is really bad for me right now, because I need to buy another hard drive within the next couple of weeks, and I don't know what brand to get. I certainly won't risk IBM, but historically Matrox and WD haven't been very good either. Any suggestions? How are Quantum and Seagate? I really wouldn't mind having Tom's Hardware or Storage Review get a dozen IBMs, a dozen Seagates, a dozen WDs, etc. running them pretty warm for a few months, and documenting failure rates.
I bought a 60GXP. I failed within 3 months. I have a seagate drive thats over 5 years old thats even been on holiday with me and its never had a problem. I noticed on news groups that many other people had problems with this (60GXP) drive as well as others in the range. It starts by making a clicking noise. A week after that it will be dead. Ok, so its not like IBM arn't honouring their warranty, but when a drive fails within a few months of normal use then something is wrong. They should have pulled all the units from sale.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
How to buy hardware in 4 easy steps:
1) Choose device, lets call it X.
2) Search for linux drivers for X. If less than 2 found, go back to 1, choose different device
3) Google: "X sucks" "X fails" "X problems" "X conflict" "X.company sucks" "X.company uses cheap labor" If anything found. go back to 1.
4) Buy device, keep all receipts.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
My 60gb is running fine, damned fine.
At least IBM acknowledges their problems, unlike say, Western Digital, who can stand amidst a pile of smoldering drives and say, "Yeah! We're the best!"
I am currently using two Quantum 4500 rpm drives in my linux box. They're not the fastest drives, but they were cheap, they are quiet, they don't overheat, and most importantly, they still work.
Shopping around at the local computer show and picked up a couple of drives. Lot's to choose from including Maxtor and IBM all lined up side by side. Prices were pretty close, RPM, capacity, etc. etc. but ya' know - I could recall hearing all sorts of CRAP about IBM drives failing of late. Sorry IBM, I chose a pair of 80gig Maxtor drives this time. I don't replace drives very often and seldom have them fail on me but if IBM isn't supporting those that do fail or coming clean about a problem then I'm not supporting THEM either! There are way too many other choices out there and I made mine, hopefully IBM will get it together and come clean but until then I'm not going to trust them. Bummer too - I used to think highly of their drives...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
It would be nice, in a way, if the problems were only with overheating. My Maxtor Romulus D540X-4* runs considerably cooler, but it's getting a little fan, too. Seems that faster rotational speeds also imply faster electronics, which run hotter.
HTH, Enby in Waltham
333 hours per month, fool, not total lifetime....
For our company we have bought about 25 75GXP drives 30GB drives a year ago.
In a 12 month period, 18 out 25 have already failed.
Luckily, our vendor has agreed to replace the hard drives with a different brand and usually as soon as the weird squeaks started, before major data loss occurred. On the few occasions the hard drive was replaced by the another drive of the same model, it exhibited the same problem.
1% is a normal failure rate for hard drives.
70% FAILURE IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.
I guess if we'll wait a few months, the failure rate will be near 100%. The problem is that we have to wait for the drive to fail before we can replace them.
I used to be in the clone mfg business. One thing we determined is that companies go through cycles. For instance, WD has at various times been among the best AND the worst of the manufacturers out there. Seagate has made some wonderful drives and some absolute crap.
Here's a resource I've been watching lately. If anyone has similar things (published reports of reliability from places that deal with dead drives) please follow up to this message.
http://www.driveservice.com/bestwrst.htm
Wow, I hadn't seen anything online about that. Sounds cool. er, I mean hot, like you said.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Overclocking is causing the drives to fail? I'm sorry, but that seems pretty far out there. I've seen drives fail to respond when PCI timings were WAY out there but fail? Nah, I don't think that's a very likely cause. The drives have got to have their own internal clocks (okay, I know they do - I see the oscillators on the PCB) and should have checks inside to make sure that commands don't send the heads off into lala land. If tey don't have the latter then would you really want to use that drive?
;-)
Heat and power fluctuations sound like much more likely external issues. Either that or there's simply an internal flaw that didn't show up in testing. Wouldn't be the first time that's occured now would it? I still recall the grease problem seagate had years ago where heads would get mired in the stuff. A quick "twist start" would usually free them up but if you shut them down and allowed them to cool it would stick again. I replaced DOZENS of those damned htings doing field service. when I hit up a Seagate rep at a show about it he officially denied the problem - and then proceeded to tell me off-record just how bad it was. I didn't buy a Seagate drive for awhile afterwards
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
This was sent to me by a distributor as a communication from IBM, it supposedly addresses the 24/7 issues. Too little to late?
"There has been a recent development with in IBM directly effecting the
Vancouver line that I thought you may need to know.
The effected parts are as follows
1) 07N8082... 40GB, IDE/ATA-5,3.5"LP, 7,200 RPM
2) 07N8083... 60GB, IDE/ATA-5,3.5"LP, 7200 RPM
3) 07N8084... 80GB, IDE/ATA-5,3.5"LP, 7200 RPM
4) 07N8086... 120GB, IDE/ATA-5,3.5"LP, 7200 RPM
****PROBLEM: *****THESE UNITS ARE EXPERIENCING PERFORMANCE ISSUES WHEN
RUNNING IN A RAID ENVIRONMENT****
****SOLUTION: *****IBM HAS RELEASED NEW PARTS ( SEE BELOW )WITH UPDATED
FIRMWARE TO CORRECT PERFORMANCE ISSUES WHEN
RUNNING IN RAID TYPE ENVIRONMENTS****
THE REPLACEMENT PARTS ARE AS FOLLOWS:
OLD PART REPLACEMENT PART
07N8082 07N9208
07N8083 07N9209
07N8084 07N9210
07N8086 07N9219"
Subject covers it, you can stop reading now :)
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Okay, so being an owner of a 45GB 60GXP in my Win2k setup, I'm sufficiently concerned. I have full backups, but I've already seen what Win2k can do when it thinks the drive isn't the one it used to be. I don't want to purchase a new non-IBM drive just to find out that I can't successfully restore my backup set to it.
Is there any info out there about doing this, or would I be better off just doing the full re-install?
Thanks,
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Here is an email response from IBM. German original followed by Babeled translation:
---
Sehr geehrter Herr Holmes,
Danke für Ihr Interesse in unsere Deskstar 120GXP Festplattenserie.
Die angegebenen 333 monatlich 'empfohlenen Betriebsstunden (POH - Power On
Hours)' in
dem Datenblatt der Deskstar 120GXP sollte nicht als oberste Grenze
angenommen werden.
Es ist lediglich eine Betrachtung des typischen Einsatzes in einer Desktop
Umgebung,
in der die Mehrzahl dieser Festplatten vorwiegend eingesetzt werden.
Das Deskstar 120GXP Model eignet sich für einen 24/7 Betrieb, sollte es
Ihre Applikation erfordern.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen
IBM Technology Group Support Centre
Anja Ruf
email : drive@uk.ibm.com or drive@de.ibm.com
Homepage : http://www.ibm.com/harddrive
---
Translation:
---
Dear Mr. Holmes, Thanks for your interest into our Deskstar 120GXP fixed disk series. The indicated 333 monthly ' recommended operation hours (POH - power on Hours) ' in the data sheet of the Deskstar 120GXP should not be assumed as the highest boundary. It is only a view of the typical application in a Desktop environment, in which the majority of these fixed disks are predominantly used. The Deskstar 120GXP Model is suitable for a 24/7 operation, should require it your application.
Yours sincerely IBM Technology Group support Centre
Anja call email: drive@uk.ibm.com or drive@de.ibm.com Homepage: http://www.ibm.com/harddrive
Are they back-tracking on the previous back-track? (is that possible?)
I currently have 2 x 60GXP and 2 x 120GXP in my machine (40G each) running 24/7. Max temp as reported by IBM's fitness tool was 34deg/C. Strange clicking noises do happen from the drives, we'll wait and see how long it takes...
My current primary machine when I first built it, had an IBM 34GXP drive in it on a Abit KT7A motherboard.
I had the machine for 2 days and the hard drive corrupted. RAN DFT, which found no errors and low leveled the drive. the second install it happened again, two of the three techs where i worked swore up and down it was the Drive going bad and that I should put a different drive in it, to which I would reply there's no way cause it's IBM and it's not clicking or producing any DFT errors. later On I found out that the VIA 686B had problems corrupting drives. after 7 Bios flashes, 6 or so 4in1 drivers, and windows XP, the system finally got stable.
Currently, I have a 20GB 60GXP in it. (the 34GXP is being used in my secondary) i've had it since they released the series and i've yet to hear anything from the drive that would suggest it failing. I also test it monthly using DFT to see if it's generating bad sectors and it hasn't yet. It currently is not breaking the 333 per month limit yet however. it's probably used at least 6-8 hours a day.
I have seen 2 IBM SCSI drives go bad, and a 75GXP, but that about it for them.
WD were basicially Crash test dummies. I lost count sometime after 25. they would always spin out, click, or whine. We even had them coming in dead in new boxes.
Seagates, although I never seen a 'Dead in the box' one, would tend to fail over time. They tended to fail a little less than WD. I had at least 15 of these fail. Their SCSI end, however, was the exact opposite. their SCSI drives are some of the most reliable drives in the industry.
JTS just sucked. if a machine was crashing and it had a JTS, 99% of the time it was the drive. thats why they went out of business.
Samsung, fujitsu and conner, I never seen a dead one of these. they are a little less common though and conner got bought out by WD.
Maxtors are probably the most reliable to get right now for ATA. I had a maxtor for three years and had no problems with it. I have yet to see one die. We started using them for the machines we built and they were just reliable. They weren't the fastest drive out there however. The clocest thing I have seen to a Maxtor death was one drive that would SMART error. I ran powermax on it, which said it failed, So I low leveled and recertified the drive. after I did that there were no errors. it's been working for 2 months now with no problems whatsoever. right now Maxtor seems to be the reliability leader.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
As I sent over to Kyle at [H]ardOCP a week or so ago....
d el=WD1200BB
4 766e.html ) this drive has a MTBF of 150,000 hours.
2 5.html
Well lets see if we take your math further that;
333hours/mo * 12months *5 years (off the graphic you posted) = 19,980 hours total. That's Horrible!
([H]ardOCP http://www.hardocp.com had posted a graphic from IBM's documentation that said the expected life of the drive was 5 years, hence the 5 above)
Lets see WesternDigital rates their 120G at 500,000 hours on the bottom of ; http://www.wdc.com/products/current/drives.asp?Mo
Lets compare a High end, high quality drive the Cheetah X15 it has a MTBF of 1,200,000 hours!
Ok lets play fair and compare it to something a little older like it is how about a Seagate ST4766E 667meg hd circa 3/29/90 (according to the bad sector sticker on the drive). According to Seagates web site ( http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/esdi/st
Lets try something older. How about an old ST 225, nope that's got a MTBF of 100,000 hours. http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/mfm/st2
Hmmm do you think if we grind enough IBM drives up we can make some lemonade?
Sick of stupidity? http://www.patentlystupid.com
You will get a new drive.
I can identify with the horrible noise. My own 75GXP _woke me up_ with that horrible noise.
On a slightly hopeful note; I've seen reports that you can temporarily revive the drive by mounting it upside-down. Try it, you have nothing to lose.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
My case sits 6 inches from where i sleep, in Saugeen, so there is not much room. I have developed an advanced silencing technique called the pillow system. Using advanced cusioning apreatus, often used in areospace aplications and hospitals, I have been able to silence my computer. The only problem is my roomate's computer makes to much noise.
Having trouble with another IBM Drive.
It no longer accepts writes, and is giving me all these strange errors...
hpb: read_intr: status=0x59 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error}
hpb: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=2381391, sector=2381328
end_request I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 2381328
The only other IBM drive that I've used died awhile ago, the power receptacle got flaky and detached. The one giving the above errors was not a replacement, but another drive.
Sigh.
Guess I'm never buying anything from IBM again.
(Glad our enterprise systems are using EMC. They don't use IBM drives, right?!?)
I have an old 3.2 gig IBM drive, got it in 1997, dropped it once accidently but it still works good.
That clicking sound you are hearing are the heads going from stop to stop, in a process we call "scrubbing". It's levelling the media so it would not crash so often or lose data. From my read on this, either IBM is selecting crappy heads, or their batches of platters are not meeting spec and they are letting them slide. In any case it's gettin ugly for them. :p
Ugly for me as well.. I got a WD400BB that blew it. She was almost a year and a half old, TARE and Boot errors.. I didnt lose much, just my desktop and settings. Upgraded to a WD1000 7200 RPM... Boyoboy, I dont think i'll fill this puppy up! Of course, thats what i thought when I bought my WD400 and WD450 drives, both 7200 RPM, both close in birthdays.
If anyone wants to grouch about SMARTDrive, they will have to deal with me! That little killer app saved my bacon.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Then around August, I started hearing about problems with the 75GXP & possible problems with the 60GXP. Sure enough, in November the drive developed a bad sector. IBM replaced it (finally) in early January. However, they replaced my 40GB 60GXP with a 40GB 120GXP. Now, the article stated:
So, here's my question. I sure as hell wasn't aware of the limitation when I purchased the 60GXP. I read most of the documentation, but I don't have the damn time to read a 195-page engineering manual for a limitation whose existence wouldn't have even occured to me (or most other people, for that matter). The tech who processed my RMA mentioned heat as a problem or the Win98 HDD cache shutdown bug as problems. When I told him that the machine only got powered off once a month and the drive was mounted in a 5.25" bay with dual fans on the front & nothing above or below, he was satified & didn't mention shit about any 333 hour-limitation. I didn't look into the limitations on the 120GXP, because "Hey, the new whiz-bang model should be able to do all the same stuff as well or better, right?" What I want to know is, when this drive tanks, is IBM going to say "Tough shit, you ran it for more than double the monthly limit! Forget about your warranty replacement."? What kind of recourse will be availible to me when the drive containing my OS partitions (Linux & Windows) shits itself?
I'd wager that most hard drive failures are caused by either in adequate cooling, or poor quality power supplies. I've come across a fair number of machines that were regularly getting bad clusters, and occasionaly weird noises. Replacing the power supply with a pcpower&cooling, or at the worst an antec tended to make both of these problems go away.
On a side note, although the enermax power supplies are all the rage right now, they're NOT good power supplies. Hardware review's for powersupplies mostly read like "Wow, looks cool...fan spins....and look, it's got a gold grille cover!" I've yet to see a power supply review break out a multimeter and scope and look at the supply lines under load.
A few informal tests by forum members over at www.storagereview.com have revealed that the line regulation and actual loaded power output of the enermax supplies are aweful. You're far better off with a sparkle, antec or PCP&C if you can afford it.
I've never understood hardware fanatics that spend uber cash on a dual cpu rigs and lots of hardrives, and then slap in the first power supply they can get their hands on. A power supply is NOT like a case; It's a critical part of reliable system design.
In the case of the 75GXP, i have no doubt that the original had a serious design flaw. I do think however that once news of the 75GXP's problems because widespread, ANY IBM drive failure was then lumped along with it. The fact of the matter is that i've heard of ten-times more 75GXP failures then 60GXP failures (based on percentage of sales), however people seem to lump the 60GXP's along with the 75GXP whenever they talk about drive reliability.
Lastly, www.storagereview.com DID have a drive reliability survey in operation until a slight SQL mishap...well...we don't like to talk about that. There has however been talk of starting it back up again. -Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
I guess that pixie dust IBM uses isn't so magical after all.
The 75GXP models were a complete nightmare. Two drives arrived DOA, one right after the other. Replacements were refurbs - and I'd *paid* for *new drives*. They didn't last long, despite active cooling with Ion Storms. A half dozen friends and co-workers had bought 75GXP drives as well and experienced similar problems. Although I didn't experience any significant data loss (backup,backup,backup) two went through the pain and agony of massive data loss.
After that experience, zippo cooperation from IBM, and sharing my experience with other hosed netziens, I blacklisted all IBM products from corporate IT purchases, recommendations, and personal purchases.
When a corporation won't take responsibility for its defective products, won't replace them with products of equal value, and won't even fess up about problems with their products then I won't do business with them.
See my post above. When my 40GB 60GXP bit the big one, they replaced it in January with a 40GB 120GXP. I suspect that that is their new practice with RMA's on the Deskstar line, so you'll probable get a 120GXP - Option 3.
If you can't make normal drives that can run all day, you shouldn't be in the harddrive business.
Do you ever turn off your Linux machine? I don't...
'nuff said!
I can't stand hype, and thats what this article does. It polarizes the two sides of potential conflict. Yes the drives from hugarian factory failed. Yes these drives get very HOT. So, get some spacing and have a cooling system in place, or at least some sort of air flow maintanace.
...
I have on 60GXP from Singapore(?) and & 75GXP. I spaced them properly, and placed holes where they are located, so that powersupply fan would pull air around them. I never had any problems yet!
IBM excellent drives, if they be more understanding to the issue, it would be great, but making people hate great product, instead of instructing them how to work around the problem, that most other drives have is to say the least is counter productive. But then thats what reading slashdot is all about anyway
Again, I think it's a really bad idea to copy and paste an article into a
Mod this how you like, but it's already gotten /. into trouble over Scientology and will probably get it in trouble with the New York Times and other sites at some point.
{/rant}
MOD THIS UP!!!
Oh, actually, if that is the drive family I'm thinking of (just won't spin up anymore) it was a bearing/grease problem.
We had a number of WD drives die in this era, but I was able to "manually" loosen the spindle by spinning the disk around quickly on the axis of rotation of the platters. You could actually feel the platter spindle loosen with the inertia. It was good for copying data off...
Disturbed quite a few technicians that way. "Hey, that drive is dead." "Oh? Is It? (spin spin spin)" "Try it now." "
Wendell
It seems that the larger my drives the shorter their life. am I just using the drives more now? I doubt it. I would like some recommendations for rock solid drives in the 40-80 gig range. I just got a maxtor 40 gig not long ago. (have to keep the pr0n and mp3s someplace) it cost me like 100$ which isn't bad at all but how long will it last? I've been buying cheap so I don't feel bad when the drive dies in a year. You can't say that you get what you pay for either cause I've seen super expensive drives that were trash, case in point the 120gxp. so i call on the minions that read /. and use drives more than anyone. what do you recommend? 5400s are fine for my uses.
-
I always power-down my systems when I am done using them. Why? Here's why.
Northridge Earthquake, January 17th, 1994. Two anecdotes.
Anecdote 1: One friend lives less than a mile from the epicenter. Whole house trashed. Powered-off Packard Hell computer literally flies 6 feet across the room. Computer written off as probably dead meat. One day, friend plugs the thing in just for the hell of it. Boots like a champ, keeps working for two years more before the Curse Of Packard Hell does the beast in.
Anecdote 2: Another friend runs a BBS. He is 5 miles from the epicenter and lives in the mountains where the house is literally sitting on bedrock. No liquifaction problem at all. Several computers on 24/7. Several hard drives lost.
Yes folks, I live in California. Earthquake country. Want to have your computer survive an earthquake? Keep it powered down unless you plan on using the thing. Hard drives had parking mechanisms and spin-down idle mode in 1994...the main things that have changed in the state-of-the-art on HDs is density and UDMA. Mechanically most HDs are pretty similar to those available in 1994.
If I wasn't living in California, I'd probably keep my machines on 24/7. Powercycling does take its toll. But earthquakes are a reality here and hard drives aren't at the disposable cost point yet. Ultimately you have to view hard drives as having a finite lifespan. But I want to maintain as much of a lifespan as possible.
BTW one last point...pre GXP IBM hard drives are very good. The Maxtor Diamond Max drive is based on an old IBM design. I wouldn't touch a GXP if you paid me but the old IBM hard drives are good stuff.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Uh? How is that statement not ironic? I don't want to get in an American Heritage vs. Webster's argument here, but it could only be described as ironic if your hard drive fails _while_ you're backing it up. What other word is appropriate there?
The problem with Alanis Morissette's song was that she gave lame examples of irony. It's not really ironic for it to rain on your wedding day because there is not a strong enough correllation between the event and the weather. It would be ironic if I loved rain and it rained on my wedding day. 'A black fly in your chardonnay' is weakly ironic because of the incongruity of the 'classiness' of the drink and the 'dirtiness' of the fly--but it's overly contrived and needs more context. Someone with a fear of flying finally getting on a plane that crashes is ironic, but it's also cynical. Ironic means that there are multiple, disparate, but related meanings associated with a statement or scenario (as opposed to sarcasm, which is when something is said when the opposite is meant). So it is ironic that the harddrive crashes while backing up, since the intent of backing up the harddrive was to save the data in case the drive ever crashed--especially given that the poster now gets to read about how the drive is known for failure. Then again, it sounds like a troll.
But in trying to be witty and sarcastic, you end up, ironically, sounding like a dense jerk.
But who cares, anyway? Irony is dead.
I don't have a clue what you are talking about. The IBM drives don't use an unusually large amount of power. I'm not tying to be dense, but what are you trying to say?
Bought a 75GB 75GXP in August of 2000 and it was dead by December. What really horified me was it took 3 months for IBM to acknowledge the drive I bought from IBM.com was an IBM Product... I entered the P/N and S/N on their automated RMA form... No such listing... called tech support... We have no record of drives being produced with those numbers on it... It took three months for them to figure out the drive was made in Hungary a year before. I have since switched to Western Digital for desktop drives and Fujitsu for Servers. I was very disappointed in IBM and will NEVER buy another IBM storage product.
When I'm buying IDE, I buy Fujitsu. I don't want to hear that they don't make the largest or fastest drives around. Someone tell me stories about failed fujitsu ide drives. I've never had one fail, and I've used enough drives to see many other brands fail.
When I'm buying SCSI, I buy a quality Seagate model. These also have a decent lifespan and generally have good performance as well.
So, what kind of experiences do people have with FUJITSU?
I'm having problems not only with the 18GB Netfinity (10K RPM UW SCSI) drives, but having to fight IBM "Customer Service" every time. For the money (and warranty) we have on these servers, the only acceptable answer from them is "Sorry, Sir, we'll have a new drive in your hands first thing in the morning." Instead, it takes days to get the replacement parts. I once had our main production server completely down for 5 days waiting for them.
I think the problem goes way beyond a batch or line of sketchy drives. It's the whole slapdash approach to customer service.
My policy with new servers is to buy an extra drive for every ten to keep on the shelf handy for the inevitable failures. This has saved me a *lot* of aggravation. Yeah, you could say I'm giving up on getting the service I've paid for, but there's only so much a person can take.
If I could find just *one* reliable vendor who delivers products and services as promised, on time and to spec, they'd have my loyalty and I'd sing their praises. Instead, I find I find a bunch of whores who make big promises, take my money, and then just phone it in. Bah.
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
I realize I'm in the minority here, but I can't believe I'm that unusual in leaving my home desktop running 24/7...
Maybe I won't replace that 9GB IBM Ultrastar (SCSI) drive with a large IDE drive just yet...
And in many corporate environments desktops do run 24/7, 'cos of things like backups (that typically run overnight). Yes, there are ways round this using ACPI, etc, but they're not universally deployed, particularly since many corporates are still running NT...
Yes, the higher-end SCSI drives (with associated higher spindle speeds, up to 15,000 RPM) are designed for full-time use, but aren't the mechanisms functionally the same? Isn't it just the case of a faster motor, more heatsinking around the drive (such as the Compaq 15K drives that have a big aluminum sink built into the tray), and an interface board for U160 instead of ATA100?
Almost. There's one more difference in there, and it's a big one: quality control. Same way the low-speed Athlons are just high-speed models that didn't pass QA checks, consumer drives are not manufactured to the same standards as server drives. To do so would be cost prohibitive--the cost increases exponentially as tolerances get closer. To build a drive that is capable of handling server-esque duties requires much tighter machining tolerances, better heat dissipation, better wear characteristics, etc. than a consumer drive. With that improved quality comes greater manufacturing cost. Think of it this way: would you put a cheap no-name printer on a network, send it a thousand pages a day, and expect it to stand up to the load, or would you step up to the plate and get a network-class LaserJet rated for 30K pages/month duty cycle? Yes, it's disappointing that these drives are big enough and cheap enough for us geeks to use them in servers, but at the end of the day, you have to remember that they're still consumer drives; by a strict definition ("to use wrongly" (dictionary.com)), using them as server drives constitutes abuse. If you want server drives, pay for them; if you want to pay for consumer drives, don't expect more than consumer quality. Enjoy it when you get it, but if it counts, pay for it.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
... IBM uses pixie dust but forgets to glue it to the platter ;-) Recommends underclocking hard disk RPM or periodic powerdown to allow the pixie dust to settle back down.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
When did you become Ralph "Jew Hater" Nader? Or have you always been?
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Why doesn't IBM just say sorry???
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
333 hours/month = 11 hours a day (including Christmas), or 16 hours per working day. No good for a server, adequate for most desktops.
However, there are two big issues here:
1) IBM sure didn't do much to make this limitation obvious as they were selling the drives. In fact, it's not at all clear that they posted this limitation before the first GXP's were sold, and according to VIA they have not _yet_ posted this limitation in the 75GXP data sheets at all. And if "60", "75", and "120" mean GB, then where in hell did IBM expect them to go but servers?
2) AFAIK, it's a nonsensical limitation. Most drives last longer running 24/7 than being turned on and off daily. It sounds like just a ploy to blame their bad design or workmanship on the customers -- "You ran it too much". Or does IBM know the bearings have a predictable and rather short wearout, and figures that 333 hrs/month will get you to that point in some fixed period (end warranty?). If that was known, building them at all indicates gross misunderstanding (or not caring) of what customers expect from their hardware, and ever selling them without being clearly marked "NOT FOR SERVERS, LIMITED OPERATING TIME" is grossly irresponsible, at least.
However, anecdotally it doesn't sound like a predictable wearout exists -- many of the reported failures were premature by anyone's measure, unless they were operated in a time warp for about 72 hours a day. Which brings me back to the first theory -- put bogus and unreasonable limitations in your data sheet so you can blame the customers for failures, even though the running hours probably weren't why they failed...
Several months ago, I purchased an IBM 75 GB GXP hard drive for use on my personal system. Formats and tests worked fine and without any flaw. However, I first started noticing problems when I reached 65 GB on the drive.
A loud scratch-scratch-scratch noise followed by seek complete errors would occur whenever trying to do anything in the file system. Usually the errors were recoverable, but were major problems because they would hault the system while the drive tried three or four times to read from what seemed like a crashed head. Something like a file search would take hours because of these errors.
I determined it was the drive at fault by wiping it and writing 0's to all the sectors using IBM tools. After 65 GB the drive was completly useless, and furthermore once you reached this "magic barrier" files located elsewhere on the drive would suffer similar errors.
I called IBM and after insisting it was a hardware error ("Well, Linux tends to disturb the drive's caching abilities."), I informed them I would require a drive to be shipped to me as I didn't feel like reinstalling my custom-built Linux OS which I have been tweaking for the better part of a year. I offered to give them a credit card for obvious reasons, but they would not accept it.
This was odd to me, because shipping the goods and then receiving the defective unit back in a box in the same package is common practice for many hardware manufactures. Apparently, not IBM.
So I buckled and I went out and bought a new non-IBM drive. I sent my DeskStar back, and I am still waiting for one after two weeks. The tech support person I spoke with indicated I would receive the same exact model and part # back, which means it can be potentially from the bad batch of drives. After reading previous Slashdot stories on these drives I brought the general reliability of the product line to his attention, and his only comment was that return rates were "Nothing out of the ordinary.".
This whole experience has left a bad taste in my mouth about purchasing from IBM again. I expect products which are not defective and if they are, a replacement is sent immediatly without having to burden the customer with YOUR mistake.
Frankly, I am disgusted with the reliability of these drives and the grief IBM has put me through trying to get what I paid for ($270). I would not suggest IBM drives for use in any kind of production enviornment as the one I had couldn't even survive personal use. I also suggested to my employer that THEY NOT purchase from this line (for both the reliability and service issues) when they do their upgrades next month.
Maybe I am just one of the little "end users" out there, but that kind of damage hurts.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
...but you've hit on the hidden secret of the drive market.
There's nothing about the SCSI interface that makes drives more reliable, but because SCSI drives are sold to the higher-spec portions of the marketplace (professional workstations and servers), drive manufacturers send their higher-quality parts in that direction.
Check the MBTF numbers on any manufacturer's similar-size IDE and SCSI parts, and you may be rather surprised. Remember: you get what you pay for.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
What the hell are you referring to?
Hmm. I have here next to me, 3 Ultra Star 20Gb drives that failed within one day of each other.. Bye Bye RAID server
Oh, only use it 1/3 the time.. Sure. Right.
What's next? Raid Level GXP?
333 hrs/mo is about 1/3 the time.. so.. You know, just get three drives and hack the kernel raid code so that only one drive is spun up and they take turns being used..
If you ever need the electronics for the 18GB Netfinity drives, just let me know. About four of my dead drives are the 18ZX. I opened one up.. you know.. for giggles.. and the entire magnetic coating on the top platter was scraped off. For some reason, the drive had not powered down when the head crashed... I came in monday morning with the server happily making a circular-saw type noise followed by what sounded like a decompression.
Lately, I've taken an interest in Seagate drives.. I have tried out some Cheetah 10k rpm drives under *extremely* heavy load, and they're still going strong. We also have a mix of Maxtors and Seagate Barracuda drives in our desktops (20-50 gb range).. I've only had to replace a few of those.
Wendell
Is this the future that globalisation will give us? These drives are made in Hungary, Thailand, etc. Is it wise to make precision moving components in countries that don't enforce standards and have widespread cloned parts?
Surely IBM must take full responsibility for enforcing their own standards if they choose to manufacture their goods outside 1st world nations.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
I've had numerous hard drives fail and for numerous reasons.
My PC remains on 24/7. It gets switched off during power outages and for transportation to/from LAN party events, but other than that, it stays on all the time. I have *never* had a hard drive fail in this machine, mind you, I've always bought good qualtiy power supplies although I have never paid any real attention to cooling as I have seven hard drives in a full tower case, there's not much room for a fan!
My brother's got a small, average systen. His power supply died a year ago and ( I suspect) took a Quantum Fireball CX with it. 13GB of data is still there on the disk but the controller board stopped spinning the drive up, then the main IC decided to burn. The Australian distributor for Quantum told me that they would not replace the drive due to that fact. He also lost a Quantum 3.2GB disk in it which I've swapped controller boards on - it's a physical problem. He turns his PC on and off all the time.
My current PC has the following drives:
4x Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB ATA disks in RAID 0
1x IBM 75GXP 30GB (as primary boot drive)
1x Maxtor 60GB 5400RPM disk (bought a week after I got cable Internet almost two years ago).
The IBM drive has been flawless although I back-up frequently. The Maxtor drive has also been fantastic, although you'll find that the 5400s are more reliable than the 7200s these days. The Seagates have been fine, too, and while the IBM outperforms them, they're silent and solid.
The point here is that hard drives seem to prefer 24/7 operation than being powered on/off every day. By spinning these drives up and down, you not only increase the chances of a head crash but you place more strain on the drive.
On topic, I've had several friends who have had their IBM drives die on me. Some are in 24/7 machines, others in desktop machines with low usage. It's interesting to note that I know two people who have had 75GB 75GXP drive and both have had theirs replaced, one of them twice. I know three people who have had 45GB drives fail on them. I know one person who's had a 30GB drive fail on them. I don't know anybody who's had the 20GB or 15GB models fail.
Mind you, i know a LOT of people who have the 30 and 45GB variants. So it seems tbat it's related to the amount of disk platters in the drive. More platters = more heat. So cooling seems to be the culprit here.
What bothers me, is that I recently suggested an 80GB drive to a friend, a 120GXP series drive. Now that IBM have announced their little limitation, I'm now going to look VERY bad in the eyes of that friend. Sigh.
The last thing I wish to mention is with regards to my Seagate 80GB drives. These drives underperform a single drive when placed in a RAID 0 configuration. While this bothers me, Seagate have offered a refund for their drives apparently. Pity Seagate won't admit to it publically, so it's not just IBM who are doing this sort of thing...
.t
I just got a Quantum (now Maxtor) Atlas 10K III for $320 (Canadian - that's just US$200). The premium which you pay for a SCSI system is really not that bad - basically US$100-200 for the host adapter; plus US$100 more per HD, if you don't need booming capacity. In return you get superior performance and reliability.
IDE is OK for X terminals, as well as the ubiquitous, shitty and disposable, Win9x boxes in the world. But *real* computers, be they serious workstations or servers, deserve SCSI.
The performance advantage for SCSI drives is larger than you would guess by just looking at the spindle speeds. And in my experience, the failure rate for IDE drives is vastly higher than for SCSI drives, under similar workloads - they're just built for a more demanding life.
-- Mike Greaves
I had to RMA a 75GXP after 4 mos. IBM gave back a 41GB drive. That still sets in the wrap -- I'm not going to use it.
Of all the drives I have had (& I have used them since MFM and RLL days) ONLY the IBM's have failed. WD's seem to last -- my parts box is full of old working WD's. I have drives from companies no longer in business -- but the drives still work. But no IBM drive's made it to old age yet.
It occurs to me that IBM's plants are too diversified. In my experience, IBM drives from Japan seem to stay together, the ones from Thailand fail fast, the ones from PI also, and the one from Hungary seized up tight after 6 mos.
I no longer use IBM drives.
One year ago I nearly always bought IBM-drives.
Not any more. Nothing else to say.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
IBM offers programs for managing their harddrives. Sorry, no URL, but look out for
IBM Drive Fitness
IBM Feature Tool
Those fine programs can measure the temperatur inside a IBM drive, so you can at least see if you are running at risky temperaturs.
My drives are running with 34-37C while havin a room-temperatur of 20C - you will most likely not be able to get such a low temperatur, I am using a 12cm-220V-fullsteal-ventilation. Be happy if you get below 40C...
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
This is the first I've heard about this. I wish I'd known this when I got my 60GXP (IC35L060AVER07) I would have never got it. I read all the Press Releases and Spec Sheets too, Exp That 200p one. (Stuff like that never even crossed my mind).
I don't think I'll recommend IBM hard drives from now on. This reminds me of that problem western digital had with its drives back in the day. Seem though that they've got the problem fix, I was given a 30gb W.D. hard drive for x-mas last year and its been working nicely (with cooling fans though), its filling up fast, that's why I got the 60GXP
Luckily though I haven't loaded the 60GXP with data yet (knew there was a good reason) coz I'm lazy. I'll have to work on some cooling options and a backup plan; years worth of "crap" on here don't feel like loosing
Personally I've always like Quantum (Hard drive line soled to Maxtor) and Seagate drives.
If you ask why I got the IBM one instead of those other brands, I had only so much "gift money" to spend and the others were out of stock.
Temperature: 5 to 55C*
Relative humidity: 8 to 90% non-condensing
Maximum wet bulb temperature: 29.4C non-condensing
Maximum temperature gradient: 15C/Hour
Altitude: -300 to 3,048 m
*The system is responsible for providing sufficient air movement to maintain a surface temperature below 60C at the center of the top cover of the drive.
Mean
Time
BEFORE (or BETWEEN it means the same)
Failure
i.e. not if but when it fails
Sure IBM has screwed up some batches, but if you haven't backed up to tape or CDR/whatever and you're complaining then nobody is impressed.
Our production standard for data is
1. Mirror RAID-1. either in software or hardware, but you must do it. hot swap of course make this a lot less painful.
2. Backup daily off machine and offsite. You can use a replicator technology, now they are becoming so much better.
Anything less has to be a little foolish. Downtime is money remember.
http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/download/ind ex.asp?fileid=r34161
In other words in some corner of IBM's website it says that 120GXP is for 333 per month, but all of the resellers and suppliers and OEMs say 24/7
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?