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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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
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.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.