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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.
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!
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).
Besides, the poll title would have to be "Rant about your stupid fucking DeskStar HDD that ate your term paper here". The trolls would have a field day.
I've had no trouble with DeskStars myself, as long as they're kept cool and not put in a situation where thier duty cycle exceeds 40% or so. Anything above that means SCSI to me, anyway. Right tool for the job and all that, y'know?
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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>
Yes, we all know IBM's IDE drives are shitty now,
OK, maybe you were just trolling, but with your low UID I will give you a chance.
What drive manufacturer do you think is good then? From random reviews I was starting to think that IBM was one of the better ones. I have purchases several Western Digital ones and have had too many of them fail (for me that is). Therefore, I have been looking for a better HD manufactuer. Who makes the most reliable HDs today?
Yeah, no shit. All the "ultra cheap" HD retailers that you can buy from on pricewatch do exactly the same thing -- resell returned drives to consumers if they work at all. Lots of people on Slashdot, run out and buy the cheapest drive they can find online, which is why people around here have such ridiculously high hard drive failure rates.
A) You get what you pay for. Pay a few more bucks, buy from a big established vendor and you won't have to hassle with drives that have already been returned (same goes true for "new" (refurbished) monitors...pay a bit extra, buy from a reliable retailer).
B) You get what you pay for -- a cheap SCSI drive is not going to be any more reliable than an IDE drive. You get the better reliability when you're paying more.
C) Buy 5400 rpm drives instead of 7200 rpm drives. They're cheaper, quieter, more reliable, cooler, and have a worst-case scenerio of being 30% slower than the 7200 drives. Pop some RAM into your computer to cache your data and you'll be fine.
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.
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
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