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IBM Bails Out of the Hard Drive Market
DJ STORM writes: "IBM has decided to exit the hard drive market citing the market has become too competitive.They plan to sell 70% of the their HD business to Hitachi. The new company name is unknown.
One has to wonder if this has anything to do with IBM's troubled Deskstar GXP series." IBM will still have part ownership of the resulting venture, but it sounds like no more Deskstars. Update: 04/17 16:33 GMT by T : You may also find interesting some older posts about IBM's work on increasing hard drive storage (1, 2, 3); hopefully, the new company will continue that R&D effort.
will this be anything like the numerous times IBM has decided to get out of the desktop PC market?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Ive actually had zero problems with all my IBM drives, got about 500 gigs worth kicking about and not had a problem in 4 years. Always found their price to size ratio pretty nice. Oh well change as good as a rest.
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I very seriously doubt the deskstar caused IBM to give up. It was one version of a single product in a long line of products they produced.
Think about it. Prices are $1.4/GB, and people still complain about the price. At what point do you say "we're making...$.50 per drive we sell. Let's give up." ?
IBM has decided to exit the hard drive market citing the market has become too competitive.
Too competitive? They were the ones introducing all the cool features. They were the first ones out with quiet IDE drives, the first ones with adjustable noise levels, the first with the "pixie dust" stuff with awesome platter density, the first big (60+ gig) laptop drives. I can't think of another hard drive company that was nearly as competitive as IBM was, and for them to say the market is too competitive, that really tells you something.
What's your damage, Heather?
For following the "real" rules of capitalism, and bowing out when they can't compete. I've seen too many companies lately either using legislation (telcos, entertainment) or shady business practices (MS) to avoid competition, instead of re-structuring their business or leaving the market. All this does, in the long run, is stifle the economy and give capitalism a bad name.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
The situation you described sounds like a bad power supply. As others have mentioned, it's the controller, not the hard drive, that requests IRQs--that's something that is usually part of the motherboard chip set. So if the failure you described is accurate, you're seeing failures in multiple parts of the system, which is a strong indicator of a bad power supply. That could also explain why you had more than one drive fail in the system, though often with drives you do find reliability comes and goes in bunches.
I don't really think it's fair to condem them for one bad line of drives... For those of you with short memories, prior to the Desktar GXP, IBM drives were frequently (most often actually) the first choice for quality. Somehow this fiasco gave all their drives a bad name. They certainly weren't the first manufacturer to have serious problems with a particular line or model of drive (in fact, probalby all of them have been hit at one point or another.)
Years ago my 1.6 Gig Western Digital Caviar drive started to suddenly sprout bad sectors. I gave WD a call and was given an abusive and insulting runaround by the tech I got. I got so mad that I had to smash a few things to calm down before calling back to try to get someone else. The next guy was actually really nice and gave me an RMA# immediately once he realized I knew what I was talking about. After having the replacement several months, I booted up one day and the HD suddenly made the sort of noises you'd expect from a modem. That's when I discovered that the 3 platter 1.6 gig Caviars had been quietly recalled because they were extreemly prone to a variety of failures. I was rather mad, not so much because of the defect (stuff happens), but that the recall was apparently delayed and not well publicized.
IBM could have handled the situation better for sure - a well publicized recall is in the best interest of the customer. However, more often than not, keeping the problem as quiet as possible is in the best interest of the company. IBM apparently tried to keep this one quiet (or was simply blind to the problem for a long time), but they got blasted instead. Sadly, I don't think the loss of this competitor in the HD market is a good thing.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
For the last few years, IBM Management has been running a chop shop. We've been selling off real-estate and entire divisions. This results in a short-term gain on the bottom line and some relief from divisions that lose money, but hurt the company in the long run. Quitters don't finish the race.
Lou Gerstner was a horrible CEO, and this is probably his last insult to the company. Selling divisions only helps the stock price for a little bit.
Ever hear the line, "eating your own seed corn?"
"too competitive" for IBM means the profit margin is too small for them. That's the same reason they are getting out of pc manufacturing. IBM doesn't like commodity markets. The profit margin is too small.
IBM's drive packing instructions are pretty darned explicit. And they tell you right up front that improper packing is grounds for voiding the warranty.
I recently shipped a flaky DDYS-T18350N back to them for RMA replacement. I followed their packing instructions. The drive was replaced without incident.
They're not trying to invent reasons to screw you out of the warranty; they're trying to eliminate damage during shipping. Without careful shipping, how can they know the failure they're seeing was due to faulty manufacturing, or due to static buildup during shipping?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions