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IBM 120GXP Revisited

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the spin-up-spin-down-repeat-until-dead dept.

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.

20 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Pair.net by elucidus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    pair.net replaced all server drives that were IBM with Maxtor:
    http://www.pair.com/pair/support/notices/ driveswap s.html

    I've been buying Maxtor since, and haven't had a single problem.

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    1. Re:Pair.net by ncc74656 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      (<a> tags are your friends. Use them when you post links.)

      pair.net replaced all server drives that were IBM with Maxtor:
      http://www.pair.com/pair/support/notices/driveswap s.html

      Ick...it's a wonder they're still in business. While the 130MB Maxtor in my parents' ten-year-old PS/1 still works, I have yet to see a newer Maxtor last a year. An 80GB drive in one of my work machines held out for 9 months before it started making weird head noises. A 20GB drive purchased a couple of years ago and a string of three 5.1GB drives purchased four years ago all crapped out after 1-3 months.

      By comparison, I haven't had an IBM go bad on me. I've had a 45GB 75GXP at home for a little over a year and a couple of 60GB 60GXPs at work for the past few months. I just added a couple of 60GB 120GXPs to a machine at home (the same machine with the 75GXP) in RAID-0 to speed up video editing.

      I suspect that most of the problems people see with IBM drives are brought on by inadequate cooling (stacking several drives with little or no separation and no forced-air cooling), crappy power supplies, or overclocking. The drives in the home machine have an 80mm fan in front of them to force air through the stack and are powered by a 330W Enermax. The work machines have only one drive each, installed in the lowest drive bay. (The power supplies are whatever was in the case...if it helps, they're AMD-certified for the 1.4-GHz Athlon XPs that they power.)

      --
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  2. Did IBM market these as drives for server? by zapfie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Did IBM market these as drives for server? by Arimus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes and no ;>

      They're pitched at the low end workgroup level servers rather than your enterprise server but regardless of whether they're server or home or whatever its pretty poor performance if you take the worse case interpretation of the 333 hours - 333 hours on as opposed to 333 hours of actual head activity (rw)....

      My home pc is usually on 24/7 which would soon eat into that 333 per month...

      Apart from the (skip milage concerns) how would y ou like it if GM told you you could only drive for 3 hours a month or your car would melt...

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  3. why not set up a /. poll to help collect data? by rnd() · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If the editors are reading this, why not link to a /. poll to collect some additional data?

    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.

    --

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    1. Re:why not set up a /. poll to help collect data? by Geek+In+Training · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

      I know what you're trying to say, I'm just not sure if it is technically sound.

      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?

      I have been buying Maxtor drives for four years; my current systems include a 7200RPM 40 gig in my machine, 5400 RPM 30 gig in my wife's box, and in the server, two 40 Gigs and two 80 Gigs (all 5400 RPM ATA 100). I've not yet (kock on wood) had any issues with them, but I keep in mind teh old adage:

      There are two types of hard drives, those that have failed, and those that will fail.

      The bigger argument brough up on HardOCP was duty cycle specs... the IBM drives were coming out at 333 hours a month for five years mean time between failure. That works out to 20,000 duty hours. They were spec'ing out older drives (as far back as 1989) that are listed at over a million duty hours. How can IBM justify this rating in comparison with their peers? Just assume nobody ever pays attention to that, and then when the drives fail, say "we told you so?"

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  4. Even 333hr per month is pushing it by fallacy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Even 333hr per month is pushing it by greed · · Score: 2, Interesting
      That happened to me. They replaced it with another 75GXP. The label indicates a new drive, but I don't WANT another failure-prone drive!
      This sort of thing has happened to IBM's hard drive lines in the past. Some of you may recall the 5.25" 857mb SCSI HDDs from the early 90s. It was well over a year from the time these drives started failing unusually rapidly (and loudly--the problem was in the bearings) to when they came up with a replacement from a different line. (A 3.5" 1gb with modified firmware so it only had 857mb available and a mounting bracket that was almost as heavy as the old drive.)

      IBM then issued an "Engineering Change" for the original drive: you no longer had to have a failed drive to get one replaced. It didn't even have to be noisy; if you had an 857, you were eligible for a new drive--while you could still get the data off the old one with "migratepv".

      The CSRs guys had been campaigning hard to get this engineering change--they really had better things to do than to replace drives they knew would fail with the same type of drive.... Especially since most people didn't have proper backups, so the CSRs had to do all the stuff to try and get the old drive up long enough to get the data off it.

      It got to the point where there were bulk cases of the 1gb-as-857mb drives at my site, so the CSR could just walk in, grab a bunch of replacements, and swap 'em out without having to wait for the warehouse to ship parts down. We did about 20 one afternoon.

      You would think they would learn from history. Or at least the warranty costs.

  5. Good idea: HD Cooling by Fweeky · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Drive Temperature by frozenray · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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-)

    --
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  7. Great quote by vohlish_n · · Score: 2, Interesting
    on IBM's web site:
    • http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/prod/deskstar.htm
    "...delivers Non-stop leadership..."
  8. How NOT to handle problems... by sterno · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  9. Trend toward drives with low MTBF? by hklingon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  10. Re:WD by Reziac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As to HD prejudice: I agree it exists and it can go for or against any mfgr -- I think it's mainly a matter of what HDs one had that 1) first failed, and 2) next didn't fail. And if you don't use tons of drives, that's usually a matter of dumb luck. It could just as easily have gone the other way.

    As to W.D. -- like everyone else, they've had bad production runs. The 1.6gb and 6.4gb come to mind, tho not all of those were bad either. Don't know for sure about the 3gb model, the only one I've seen died at the ripe old age of 5yrs by simply losing everything at once (but considering the system it was in, it may have had a bad power shock, and it resurrected well enough to use as a junk drive). However -- on the norm W.D. are reliable, and their warranty procedure is hassle-free (and they send you a NEW replacement drive, NOT a repair or refurb). As a result, I use W.D. in all my machines and my clients' machines. I've got about a dozen in use here right now, some over 7 years old.

    As to Maxtor, they have a generally poor reputation around here, and if a local clone dealer uses Maxtor HDs, it's a sure sign they're cutting corners all around. YMMV.

    As to IBM, the first time this topic came up, a guy who worked in their HD mfg'ing process posted a comment that explained why the recent IBM HDs are unreliable. Anyone got the link offhand?

    --
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  11. Re:333hr limit? by ahaning · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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  12. Reliability has a cost by dago · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 ?

    --
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  13. 45% working time. by AliCampbell · · Score: 3, Interesting

    333 hours per month is only 13 days per month. 45% working time. Working 12-7 or maybe 24-3.5

  14. Response from IBM by stefanh_uk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

  15. Re:Overclocking their HDD, eh? by Datafage · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IDE gets its clock from the PCI bus, so anytime an overclock raises that above 33.3MHz, the hard drives are overclocked.

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  16. 24/7 vs. on and off, failures and Seagate in RAID by zardie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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