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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.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Homo Janitors for trollercoaster (250101).
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
I guess they are shifting focus to there AS/400 support?
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Heheheheheheheheheh that was pretty cool
yeah firefirefirefirefirefirefire!
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.
IBM's suck and shout out to asciipr0n on dalnet.
I'd be interesed in seeing the effect this has on the price of notebook hard drives, since IBM's Travelstar series has a large share of the market.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
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.
Laptop Reviews
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." ?
Until all this recent shenanigans with the Deathstars, I thought IBM made "some of the best drives" now, I've sold my GXP, and bought Western Digitals..... 120 gig, 7,200 RPM, and 8 megs of cache, I love my new "media" drive.
What, me worry?
IBM invented the Winchester drive. This is kind of like GM not making the Oldsmobile anymore.
Such as shame, despite how much the Deskstar sucked. I got one, I know.
~S
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?
Those bastards.
I bought one of those 20 Gig deskstars and the thing died in six months taking out all kinds of wavs that there was no way I could back up. Tech support told me to send it to a data recovery center for two grand. Assholes!
"Hard-disk drives, similar to other components for computers, have experienced sharply reduced demand and corresponding reductions in pricing."
Price reduction? This guy must be crazy... memory, for example, is costing many times more they were costing last december. Same goes for LCD monitors and HD...
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
A friend of mine bought one of their drives. It was the only one he had that spun up REAL fast, then died immediately. The replacement for it worked of for 2 months, then decided it wanted all the other devices' IRQ numbers...caused conflicts. The drive after that seemed ok...4 months down the line, smoke started pouring out of it. I say "BAH" and good riddance.
Just my $.02
JoeLinux
...when you have a pending class action lawsuit, people complaining about dead drives, and that whole "only use it for 333 hours a month" fiasco.
I don't know a geek who's bought an IBM drive since last July, and there's a reason for it...
I just bought a WD 7200 RM ATA-100 60GB drive yesterday for $89.99. That's money that Big Blue could of used to prop up their share price....
IBM used to make good drives but then they really let things slip with that line of 60GB-ers. Quantum made Fireballs, IBM took "fireball" literally.
Surprised by Unicide! (fuck this shit)
Actually, IBM is going to stay in the hard drive market, but only for 330 hours per month.
personally, i hope they keep their labs working on the research end of data storage, because i'm not sure that there's anyone else to pick up the slack. if there isn't, the pace of "bigger capacity, faster, smaller footprint, more, more, more ..." just might slow down a little.
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
Just bought a 80GB this weekend
I really hope that this means they will be coming out with a holographic drive soon, I went to a science fair back in '99 (if memory serves) at the IBM Almaden Research Center. They demonstrated a table sized holographic drive to us - they played a IBM commercial off of it... I've been waiting ever since.
... about this, at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/24896.html which also details the preliminary agreement between IBM and Hitachi.
if you use a good enough junk-filter, slashdot.org will display a single, *blank*, page
Anyway, maybe that has something to do with the 'competetive' market.
This flies in the face of science.
FP I am eLEET!
IBM is unclear on the concept. When a market experiences a decrease in the number of suppliers, the market becomes less competitive.
I think what IBM meant to say is that they are less able or willing to compete.
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
Heheheheheheheheheheheheheheh that was pretty cool dilhole. Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah firefirefirefirefirefirefirefirefirefirefirefirefi refire!!!
Homo says "w00t!"
Does it really matter? Whether you had these WAV files on it at the 6 months mark or when it died 5 years down the line, would you been any less pissed? Trusting a single mechanical medium to store important, unrecoverable data sounds like a Murphey's law waiting to happen.
Something similar has happened to me, and although I was pissed as hell, I can only blame myself for not having backups.
Can't back it up? Ever heard of mirroring? There is always a way if it's that important, just not necessarily a cheap one. I know it sucks, but that's the nature of the game. You face trade-offs.
Just go to support.dell.com, select home or small business, pick any dimension or optiplex system. You'll get a search box in the upper left of the screen and search for the word "deskstar", two links for different series' of these drives will appear.
I have several UltraStar SCSI and Travelstar 2.5" drives - only ever had problems with one and it was about 5 years old at the time.
Hard drives have become a commodity - there's not much money to be made actually making and selling them. IBM makes money on its many storage patents though, and I'd expect them to keep up their R&D in that arena advancing the state of the art for years to come.
Does that mean no more click of death on IBM hard drives? I have a 75GXP just starting to click, so I will RMA soon and don't forget there's that class action law suit on the IBM 75GXP http://www.sheller.com/ibmclassaction.htm
Uhmmm .. this isn't exactly correct. From the article ...
Separately, IBM and Hitachi also said they plan to combine their various hard-disk drive operations into a new, stand-alone joint venture. Hitachi would own 70 percent of the joint venture and pay IBM for its hard drive assets, subject to the completion of negotiations, the companies said.
It would appear that the headline is more correct than the story, IBM is out, but own a 30% stake in the new company ... this is not the same as selling 70% to Hitachi ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
So IBM is no longer selling harddrives, not to big of a deal. One company can't be the best at everything and IBM is learning that. The question at hand is IBM currently has over 90% of the hard disk patents out there will they continue there r&d into the latest disk storage technologies? Heck, IBM probably makes more money off there patents on harddrives then they ever did by selling them.
Later,
Phil
No. IBM were just crap at making hard disks.
IBM has been innovating in the disk drive market for years, but it's important to note they've been innovating a sustaining technology. They haven't been as fleet-footed about leading the industry in alternative modes of storage, opting rather to make incremental improvements on a decades-old technology.
I think IBM has seen the industry getting undercut by small co's who are focusing away from the desktop/server market and onto other devices for their storage needs. Given these are still small (but emerging) markets, it's really tough for a company to wait & see what happens and THEN innovate on top.
I think IBM learned their lesson in this scenario from the disk drive wars circa 20 years ago, and they don't want to waste more investments of time and money into an ever-decreasing-margin business.
Trollercoaster could you explain, in 50 words or less what the suckiest thing about Linux is? I know its hard to choose just one, but I'd like to hear your opinion on the matter.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
AACK! what happens to the cool little IBM microdrives I love so much?!
Then, IBM's reputation got hurt; you all know that story by now. Of course, this happened after most of the IDE machines I run ended up with IBM drives in them. :-( I'm no longer willing to pay $50-100 extra for that IBM brand name. In fact, I don't know if discounting the IBM drives would convince me to buy them at this point.
I just wish IBM had fixed their quality problems, and without looking like they were covering something up. The "you are only allowed 333 hours of uptime per month" hack didn't help them at all.
I'd like to go back to the days when I could say "buy IBM brand drives or lose". Now I don't know what to buy or recommend. This sucks.
One reason could be shocking manufacturing yields. The IBM manufacturing plant in Ireland has had terrible yield problems (even after the Telesto upgrade (aluminium to glass platters)).
I suspect their problems could be due to badly designed and inefficient processes. The drives may work but if there is too many failures from the cleanroom no amount of sales is going to make a profit.
I know this because I know 3 techs who used to work there!
I am a man, not a toy.
when i was talking to my supplier last month about switching to seagate drives because of all the trouble i'd been having with ibm, he said he wondered if ibm would exit the biz. espcially since they were exiting the desktop biz.
now i just have to return my 3 dead ibm drives while i still can.
Does this include thier Microdrive products as well?
I remember when IBM drives were some of the best on the market. At the current time I have two 30gb IBM 75gxp, and two 75gb ibm 75gxp, and two 18gb IBM drives.... They were great drives, hell, they are still in use... I have had them for a good long time.
RIP
loses another death star.
Since IBM is the major (only?) producer of SSA drives, such as are used in their ESS product, is the new joint venture going to produce these now, or will IBM retain that part of the drive manufacturing business?
It appears that this is a move by IBM and Hitachi to develop a coherent SAN alternative to EMC - and having used both IBM's and Hitachi's SAN products, this will put EMC in quite a bind.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
They made the most absolute rock-solid hard drives as far as I'm concerned. I have a 14 year old ESDI drive that they made and it STILL works like a charm whenever I need to grab something off of it, but in the end it didn't save them. When things become commodities like ram and hard drives have, people simply won't pay extra for quality. Unfortunately for IBM, a rep for quality was the only thing that their hard drives had going for them before the whole Deskstar fiasco, and now there isn't even that. IBM cannot and SHOULD not compete in the commodity market, so this move makes perfect sense.
I find this kinda surprising and somewhat disappointing since IBM has always been at the forefront of harddrive technology, designing the technology that many of the other manufactorers use. Still.. maybe the whole deathstar thing was a wakeup call showing that IBM has lost their game a little.
IBM and Hitachi are *merging* their disk business so that IBM gets a 30% stake (and Hitachi, 70%). The story's comment "They plan to sell 70% of the their HD business to Hitachi." seems incorrect to me; IBM is simply estimating that its current disk business is worth 30% of the joint disk business. Also, note that Hitachi has a very strong storage systems business HDS (right behind EMC) that is very profitable (also resold by SUN as Storedge9900 series datacenter/enterprise storage products, I believe), so big blue may have merged their disk business with a view to ensuring future profitability in the overall storage space.
i can imagine hitachi is "buying" the HD "company" primarily for the microdrive tech, and to licence out the "pixie dust". the deskstar is no more. Glad i bought my WD1000BB when i did :)
so is IBM or hitachi going to keep good on their warranties for the umpteen billion deskstar drives on the market still under warranty?
why didn't WD or Maxtor buy this HD company spinoff? i'm sure IBM's hard drive tech research division is more than worth the money...
moox. for a new generation.
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Those damn drives practically took down the company due to down time, let alone any sleep on my part. I guess the real bummer is that IBM probably won't be replacing any of the new crap drives they've shipped out.
http://www.soliton.net/content/comp/ibm/
almost too simple to be true.
I hope the new enterprise continues to market those cool microdrives. They are so small and have so much potential. They also seem to have been integrated into a great number of devices. Although I haven't looked much into it, I don't know of any other similar options.
Of course, with all the fun people have been having with I-Pods, maybe we already have a replacement!
kinda sad to see IBM leaving the hard drive business, seeing as they invented the technology ... ibm came out with winchester drives way the heck ago (dates anyone?), and nary a drive today doesn't use this technology ... i've got two IBM deskstars in my system right now, a 13Gig and a 60 Gig ... the 60 started the "click of death" thing at one point, but after dealing with overheating / underpowering problems and marking those sectors as bad (there were only 2, adjacent, sectors affected), i haven't had any problems with it since ...
... this is akin to ford no longer selling cars, or something ...
...
first PCs, now harddrives
sad to see it go, but hopefully the new company can put out drives of the quality of the IBM of a few years ago
09
IBM hard drives kept crashing and id lose all my porn..that's bullshit man..I expect IBM to cover my lack of wanking emotional and physical anguish during the recovery time.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
Some where, IBM must have truckloads of harddrives waiting at a shipping dock clearly labelled with the big blue logo. Certainly Hitachi wont touch them with such tarnishment --- they must be sold at discount close-out prices! So, where are these bad buys going up for auction? ;)
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Could this also be a preemptive response to the CBDTPA? IBM has indeed driven much of the innovation in hard drive technology, so maybe they figure they should get out now while the gettin' is good.
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.
It may be that IBM is planning on keeping that share of the hard drive market, getting rid of 70% of their products, but keeping the bulk of their market intact.
If financial worries are part of their motivation to explore exit strategies it makes good sense to abandon all but the most profitable products. Of course, if that is the case, Hitachi has very little reason to bother getting involved at all, except perhaps to ride on the prestigious coattails of IBM.
Liora
Hint: the answer lies at this marvellous page.
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you may not think
that it is obvious
was shot in the face
with a gun.
was a little baby
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Once upon a time there
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was shot in the face
with a gun.
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While it's technically a hard drive, it's not used for typical hard drive applications...
so does this go to hitachi with the rest? I sure hope they survive...
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Hitachi HDS has some nifty SAN products/technology. Merge that with some of IBMs SAN (think ESS) technology and you got yourself an interesting outcome. Come to think of it, IBM and HDS have been in bed for awhile now. This seems more of a formality and merging of technologies to compete againts EMC.
It's sad. Many of the major improvements in storage technology have come from IBM Almaden. They're one of the few remaining corporate labs that does fundamental research. Remember Bell Labs? RCA Labs? Xerox PARC? They're still around, but shadows of their former selves.
The company I work for has about 10 IBM boxes (P-series) and the failure rate on the disks is one about every 3 months. I was told by one of their FE's that they see about a 1 in 10 failure rate, which from experience is right on. We might start buying more systems from them now that the disk drives might be a little more stable.
They'll wait for the community to forget the word 'DeskStar' and come back with a brand new line of 'enterprise class storage systems'
A loss of a competitor, especially one as innovative and competitive as IBM, is always a loss to the market. IBM had many advances in HD technology over the years and I do think the DeskStar problem may have tarnished their reputation, but I don't think that it pushed them out of the market.... Even if Hitachi purchases 70% of the division, it won't be the same.... better move on to that WD Caviar 120 w/8 mb cache....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
I don't see this as "IBM Giving Up Hard Drives Forever", not at all. Imation is more closely tied to 3M than this new company is to IBM, but it's certainly not as vaprous and useless as, say, Taligent.
-sn
IBM|Hitaclick click click grrrrrrrrrrApr 17 11:15:12 ben kernel: hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Apr 17 11:15:12 ben kernel: hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=11288143, sector=11288080
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
[rant]
This disgusts me. Many Seagate drives run noisy and hot, and you're paying for a name to boot (pun intended), I trust Quantum about as far as I can throw my minivan, and don't even get me started on how I feel about WD!
FWIW, I use SCSI drives pretty much exclusively. I've had good results with older Seagate units (Hawk-4, some Barracuda, and the 'Elite' full-heighters), but the best stuff I've ever used has always come from IBM. My experience to date has been that IBM drives run cooler and quieter than anything else I've tried, and their durability is amazing (especially the Travelstar series).
IBM will do what they feel they have to do, of course, but I think I'm going to run out to the local used-computer place and stock up on IBM'ish drives before they're all gone.
[/rant]
Now, with all that said... Hitachi is no slouch, at least on their higher-end stuff. I can only hope that they don't take one look at IBM's great designs, and then try to "fix" things that were never broken.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
At least we can look back on the history. Pretty interesting stuff...
I've got IBM SCSI drives running raid5 in w2k servers. When they shut down (if I use the restart option) they go into failed mode. IBM, after having to pull teeth, gave me the microcode to do firmware upgrades; this was a known issue with my Adaptec 2100 series card and these drives. What happens to people who need access to this type of stuff? Can't imagine Hitachi wants the tech support hassles...
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?"
I know lots of you have had problems with IBM drives, but my personal hard drive failure anecdotes all involve other companies. In fact, if you avoid the "problem" drives, I think I'm not the only one who likes IBM drives, because the non-problem drives seem to get pretty good ratings from other people, too.
But now I'm being forced to change brands. So my question to the collective mind of slashdot is: Of the remaining companies, who's the best? I prefer reliablity and compatablity over cost and speed. (Not that cheap and fast are bad; I just usually make the trade off in favor of reliable). Thanks.
"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.
im surprised that big blue wouldnt sell there hd's to western digital since they used to partner with them before. im not to into the hitachi drives, but then again this is coming from someone with an ibm drive, a seagate drive, and a maxtor drive (yeah i have a maxtor but hay its never failed me)
Ave Molech Setting
If the GXP 120 series proves to be unstable, who is going to replace my HDD in the next 6 months?
I need to replace my faulty 2 year old Hitachi monitor, too. No end to troubles?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
fp
I can't remember who made it, but it was a vendor who low-bid for the contract and won.
You managed to get across the 'true' meaning of your post. But too bad; everyone still thinks you are an ass-wipe for storing critical data on a single low-end drive with no back-up.
And so do I. That's the moral of the story.
"Our products have defects we won't admit to and can't fix, so we're getting out of the business."
Too bad Microsoft didn't do the same thing after Windows 1.0. The world would be a better place.
So with a little more R&D you can 500 gigs of data on a drive that you have to get a special permit to access because if the use of the hard drive is not regulated the data will become nothing more then a piece of metal with plexi-glass on top of it. (Assuming you performed that mod)
IBM has been pumping out good stuff, Thinkpads, Servers etc... at a premium. But with hard drives, 60GXP, they provided a good product at a good price. Its the best HD I have owned. Fast, quiet, and no slightest form of failure yet. I even have one that has been taxed hard for the last year, year and a half and it runs like new.
I heard the 75GXP had their problems but the 60 series run rock solid. As far as I know the current leader is the Maxtor series but I wouldnt know because I havent had to change HD's yet.
Also I dont work for IBM just a happy consumer of their HD's.
This is great news for Sun, since Sun's two major disk suppliers are currently IBM and Seagate. (Having two vendors in the first place came as a result of some nasty supply problems with having only Seagate). With IBM's disks going to a business largely owned by a now-very-important and mutually-benificial major storage partner (Hitachi), this means Sun won't be getting their disks from a competitor anymore.
Hitachi has some excellent storage R&D in their own right as well, and arguably have the best technology in the SAN market. As we all know, most good tech starts on the high and and filters its way downhill.
I just bought a pair of 80GB IBM 120GXP's a few weeks ago. Now I wish I'd bought the Maxtors with the fluid bearings instead :-(
After my GXP failed on me and they revoked my warranty for shipping it back without a static bag I'd just as soon see the hosers disappear altogether.
Off topic.
Great sig. But if your junk filter is *perfect*, you will get a 404:Page Not Found.
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
The company obviously had some technical difficulties to acknowlege, that they have experienced with one factory they had. Clearly this corporate benemoth, rather than admitting technical incompetence would gnaw off one of its own limbs, that in fact was producing excellent hardware! I see things like that every day in corporations, where they will go through different controtions like that, so they would look better on the paper to investors.
Come on, these people were making some of the best drives in the industry. They have built a second rate factory in hungary that was cranking out shitty drives. So what? All other factories are making great drives, I have two, one failed on me, it had "Made in Hungary" thing, now two are made in Singapore or something, and they work very well. This is exactly kind of idiotism one would expect from IT company, but revised IBM?
balh.
The name for the Hitachi-IBM joint venture would be ... " Hit'M "
As another FORMER Western Digital customer, I fully concur with your experience. It happened to me, as well. In fact, EVERY Western Digital drive I've ever owned has developed serious problems within the first 3-4 months of usage.
:(
Western Digital's response is to ignore the customer, plain and simple. Even when they put out a defective drive that they eventually recalled, they would NOT replace it for me. "Sorry, you're out of luck" was the best I ever got from them.
I went to IBM drive because we were using them at work in our servers. Why? Because they were RELIABLE. I've had the same IBM drives in constant use in my home machine (they never get turned off) for almost 3 years now, and they still work great. Western Digital has never been able to do that, EVER. And IBM gives me decent support, unlike Western Digital.
IBM getting out of the HD market is terrible, terrible news. They made GREAT drives. What will be left when they leave? Why is Western Digital still in business?
If you read the article it says that IBM and Hitachi are spinning off the sections of their companies and forming a new company that IBM will own 30% of and Hitachi 70% of. So all the engineers that made the old IBM drives and the drives themselves will probably just get a name change, but otherwise they will come out with the next version of them. It also states that Hitachi and IBM plan to use this company as the primary source of their hard drives (surprising!). IBM is not really leaving the HD market, they are not closing down production of their hard drives, just changing the name of the company that does it. It's not like they are going to put Maxtor drives in all IBM computers all of a sudden.
It just ends up with stuff like Rambus. Unbeatable specs, but once it came time to move it to production it turned out to be no better than SLDRAM (which unfortunately it had already been able to kill by hype alone). So in the end no usefull innovation, but a lot of head aches all around.
I am wondering if they just invented a new
storage technology, which will be faster and cheaper than theese sucking slow harddrives.
(100MB/S is slow compared to silicon!)
The real problem that is causing IBM to move away from the hard drive business is their own choice in model names.
IBM DYKA
It's like being taunted by maxtor users every time you boot. Berating customers is no way to compete.
Consider the possibility that IBM has made a breakthrough in solid state technology that will put HD mfgs out of business.
But for some reason, it would sometimes stop working. I thought it was a power problem at first, and kept it in my linux computer for a while. I trusted it with all my mp3s (big mistake)
:( (yes, i was using a journaling filesystem).
Then, one time, after the computer crashed (again) i lost all my data
So I went out to get a maxtor one which works fine. I figured the IBM one was basically no good, so i opened it up for fun, only and i found that somebody wrote on the drive with a black marker!
I mean come on!
if your junk filter is *perfect*, you will get a 404:Page Not Found.
I beg to differ... "404 Not Found" is a *server*-generated error; the junk-filter processes the web-server output, hence it can strip the page completely... but can't generate a 404.
Here at first I thought that IBM was bailing out the hard drive industry, not bailing out of the hard drive industry. I was thinking, "Who'd buy them, considering their track record?"
But I see this as a very good thing.
the matchbox sized hard drives? Is IBM going to continue research on those?
Under the terms of the preliminary agreement, the companies plan a multi-year alliance to research and develop new open standards-based technologies for next-generation storage networks, systems and solutions.
In addition to, and separate from, the systems alliance, the two companies intend to combine various hard disk drive (HDD) operations into a new standalone, joint venture company, integrating their world-class research, development and manufacturing operations, as well as related sales and marketing teams. Upon completion of negotiations, Hitachi is expected to hold 70 percent of the joint venture and make a payment to IBM for its HDD assets.
Seems you're mostly right - they'll still do research; they're just leaving the mfg business to Hitachi.Details on this IBM storage research from the Watson research facility can be found in this PDF file.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
With the reliabilty record of their DTLA drives, it doesn't surprise me.
I have 2 IBM SCSI drives and they have worked flawlessly so far.
IBM makes good, reliable drives. Sure you pay a bit more for quality than you do for crap. That is the case IN EVERY OTHER INDUSTRY.
I won't be buying any drives from the new company, I want to buy American and keep Americans at work - I don't want to buy Japanese products.
So what would be a good alternative for high quality, fast SCSI drives?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
A faster/slower would go faster, but use gas more slowly.
My new IBM drive is bigger and smaller than by old drive.
Lasers Controlled Games!
In 1997 when I visited and spoke with a number of their people, we discussed how as a storage medium, disk drives use a relativly unprepared surface with a sophisticated head, unlike memory which uses a sophisticated surface preparation to store data. In drives the money is spent on the head.
As I recall it, the trend was then toward preparing the disk surface more and more in order to give the head a fighting chance to distinguish between bits.
The limit of size was near (at the time they were finilising their coin sized drive) to the point where information was being stored close to molecular size.
Perhaps they have now reached that limit and have decided that funds are better spent on other storage research.
|>>?
I have a 40Gb Deskstar in one of my computers, and it has really rocked. I picked it because it had superior seek time, and was made by IBM, who is really putting alot of work into R&D. I'm sad to see them get out of this business, I was hoping to be a good customer of theirs.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
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
IBM seemed to have bad luck in the past year with the GXP series, perhaps it does have something to do with it. I'm still happily hacking away with my 22GXP without a problem and i'm glad I didn't bother buying the 75, 60 or 120GXP series. My next drive will be the Seagate Barracuda ATA series, anyone have any good or bad experience with these drives?
Sorry, Iomega already has a similar trademark.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Did IBM kill their own business by making
drives so cheap and fast and high capacity
that the profit eroded?
Should they instead have created fast, cheap,
huge hard drive technology, patented it, then
not made the drives nor licensed the tech to
anyone else?
We could still be buying expensive 2 gig drives
just like 1994, but NO.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
In my datacenter, the Hitachi array is is every bit as fast as the EMC Symetrix that the Hitachi replaced. The Hitachi array sports 160 GB dual-ported active-active fibre channel drives. They were the first to deliver 160 GB drives in the enterprise market and AFAIK they are the only ones that have dual-ported active-active bus connections.
Hmmm, for the price of two SCSI drives, I could buy like 6 IDE drives. I could save money and have a whole ass-load of IDE drives to fail and replace. Plus, mainboards with onboard SCSI are more expensive too.
Firstly, does IBM need manage several factories to manufacure HARD disks? I do not think so. look around, is there any hard disk without IBM product? Almost no. And is any body know the next generation memory material? I think it is ferroelectrics thin film. Recently I saw some sample in one lab, on 1 sqare micrometer, that kind of film could store 1bit. This ability is fantastic, and it could be retrieved in 1 microsecond. Much better than magnetic disk.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I have a 20GB hard disk, it has 17GB free and thats been the same for almost a year now.
When I had 200Mb I filled it up, when I had 1 GB I filled it up, When I had 5GB, I didn't fill it up, but wanted something faster....
Now I have no reason left to upgrade it.
I figure there are lots of people like me.
SO IBM are getting out of that market before the market collapses. Smart move.
A friend of mine inherited a bunch of huge (68 MB) Micropolis disks that got stuck in legal limbo. To avoid a huge tax charge they had to be dead by natural causes.
So the company that owned them puts them in a card board box, and drops them three stories down, thinking that would kill them.
A year later my friends asks if he can have the dead drives for parts. Low level formatting showed not a single bad block has developed since the drives were shipped from the factory.
Incredible. I ran one of the things for years in my PC, and later in a MicroVAX 2000. It never died, it just became a bit small over time...
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
For example, I got burned by a bad lot of Maxtor SCSI drives (bought 10 identical drives, and 8 failed within 18 months) almost a decade ago, and ever since have been reluctant to purchase drives with the Maxtor logo.
Others have similar tales of woe about Seagate, IBM, Quantum (now merged with Maxtor) etc.
Regarding the message suggesting Seagate is good, I have had mixed results with them. The drives tend to become noisy within a year or so, and once the bearing noise gets really loud, it becomes a game of russian roulette -- every time you power down a system with a 'loud' seagate drive, you never know if it will ever come back up...
I don't have this particular problem with Quantum or Fujitsu drives. OTOH, I have around 100 Seagate drives, but only a dozen or so Fujitsu (Sun shipped every system with Seagate for years, only recently using IBM and Fujitsu branded drives).
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Yeah, but a 100% failure rate for drives made in different plants a year a part within 3 months is really really unacceptable. One of the drives I got back seemed to be shorting my system, I'm glad I got the damn thing to tell me it was bad fairly quickly.
This coupled with one account of someone opening up their drive to see writing on the platter and my old IBM voice recognition software that won't install on my W2k box until I upgrade to windows 95/98 (I got the damned thing new) makes me think really nasty belittling things about big blue.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Not to start a flame war here, but capitalism is really nasty stuff, think about it, maximize capital accumulation. There is nothing in it that espouses how you accumulate that capital, just do it.
While the country has been force fed this "Capitalism is good, it is what the country is founded on" tripe for years now, what we were really founded on and what is good stuff is Free Market.
People may chalk it up to semantics, but the differences are huge.
Cheers,
Scotto
I've had very good success with these drives, but I hear that seagate does not recommend them for use in raid configuration. As a stand alone drive, though, i'd have to say they are quite good.
So much for the internship at the hd plant in Rodchester I was hoping for. That is one of IBM's hd R & D sites.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
But not so soon. IBM was having trouble making money off of their HDDs, simply because it's a small profit commodity, a thing that IBM doesn't do to well, even though their hard drives are really good. I remember when I was a summer intern at IBM, one co-worker jokingly said "IBM is number 3 in the hard drive business! Good thing we're not #1, else we'd be losing even more money!" My co-workers agreed that IBM can't do small profit large manufacturing operations, and they also thought that this would happen. At that time, I heard that IBM was selling drives at almost cost.
Although, I really wonder what will happen to the people who work in storage....