More on IBM 75GXP Drive Fiasco

FolkImplosion writes "Internal documents have been released suggesting that IBM was well-aware that its click-of-death 75GXP hard drives had a failure rate of as much as 10 times that of its competitors. IBM apparently sold drives it knew were faulty into distribution, and reportedly planned to deal with any issues with marketing spin rather than a fixing the problem. This new information should help bolster a class action suit that accuses IBM knowingly shipped defective 75GXP drives with abnormally high failure rates." The lawfirm pursuing the class action suit has a page of information, including the latest news report (pdf) on information coming out in the suits. See also our original story about the drive failures.

Comments

Never a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had one of these babies in my Dell 4100 for
years and never a problem. There was a firmware
update released ages ago.

Not only the 75GXP

[Troed]

.. the same problem applied to the 60GXP and the earliest 120GXP drives (a friend just had his 120GXP click to death the other week) aswell.

The problem can be solved with a software upgrade in the drive.

This site has it all: http://www.pheuron.de/index.htm?deathstar.htm

Any still running?

[eamber]

Does anyone still have one of these? I purchased two 30 gig 75GXP's - first one died after about 2 months. The second after 6.

I RMA'd them - drive 1 was RMA'd a total of 6 times; drive 2, 7 times.

I got so disgusted with dealing with them that I replaced them outright with larger Maxtor drives and haven't had a problem since.

I sold one of the IBM drives on ebay to some poor sucker - the other one is sitting on a shelf waiting to be taken to the firing range.

Re:Makes me wonder about the Hitachi ones out now?

[AGTiny]

I have 3 of the 3-year warranty 120GB/8MB models and 1 has failed within a year. Hitachi apparently doesn't do advance-replace so I bought a new drive to replace the failed one (they are in raid5) and shipped the failed one back. When I get a replacement I guess I'll have a 4-drive array. :) I think these drives are pretty good though, and a 3-year warranty makes me feel better.

Western Digital

[Futurepower(R)]

Western Digital drives have been extremely reliable for us: No failures. I haven't needed drive technical support for a long time, but a while ago WD had the best technical support. 3 year warranty on Retail boxed drives.

10 drive array working for 1 year

[The-Perl-CD-Bookshel]

I have a 10 drive array (75GXP series) plugging away at about 20% load for a full year now, no failures. I have always had luck with IBM drives when I keep them chilled. If you want to keep your 75gxp drives happy, or any drives for that matter, keep them cool.

Re:And i thought it was normal..

[n3k5]

I have received two new drives without any hazzles what so ever

Replacing drives, even if you can stay at home with your computer and have them delivered to your front door quickly, is always a hassle. Of course, if you don't have a backup, it's your own fault, but for most people it wouldn't be reasonable to do a _daily_ backup (automatic incremental backups are convenient and don't use up much space, but most users don't want to set them up and test if they really work), and also most people don't have images of their drives, but only copies of their data, so they have to reinstall their OS and all their apps. I haven't had a hard drive failure in over ten years, so I think it's very reasonable to spend a day or two recovering if and when it happens instead of spending a lot of time on cloning my drives every day. But the day it does happen, it will be a hassle.

Re:Makes me wonder about the Hitachi ones out now?

[13Echo]

I've purchased at least 6 of the 60GXP line. I've had a single failed drive in the past three years. I still need to RMA that thing, but I've just been lazy about it.

I'm not sure that the 60GXP fall victim to the same failured that the 75GXP did. It seems to be that when IBM went to the 20GB platter sizes, and redisigned their drives, things got better.

I have in the past had data corruptions on one or two occasions. I'm pretty sure that this was from my Highpoint RAID controller though. After I stopped using it, I never had another problem with the drive.

I still can't help but believe that this is why IBM sold off the mechanical storage division to Hitachi. IBM claimed that they were going to work on some newer types of storage, but we've seen very little so far.

Chalk it up as a complete loss

[CompWerks]

I personally owned three of these drives and returned them under warranty on three seperate occasions with a lengthy letter that I did not want refurbs as replacements.

The last time I sent them back, I had high hopes that Hitachi (who bought the hd business from IBM) would finally read my letter and send me some new replacements but no luck.

They are now on their way to the nearest landfill.

Re:Makes me wonder about the Hitachi ones out now?

[hattmoward]

Actually, temperature was an issue. If my memory is working right, the issue with the 75GXP disks was in the thermal compensation... that is, they incorrectly compensate for thermal expansion of the platters through r/w head positioning. It seems like this is actually one of the most common problems with 2.5" disks too... I've had many of those fail, and I can read from them for a few minutes until they get warm... Nothing like trying to recover the CEO's laptop using only 'dd' :)

Re:Makes me wonder about the Hitachi ones out now?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are multiple issues:

1) Temperature is a big one. At higher temperatures, the lubricant between the platter and the heads thins out so much that the hydrostatic wedge is no longer thick enough to protect against surface irregularities - causing oxide to flake off and pile up on the head. The new firmware upgrade causes the head to wiggle slightly from track to track while idling, thus preventing the loss of lubricant wedge.

2) Compensation for thermal expansion - this is another firmware issue.

3) Quality of the power supply. I've never had a problem with beefy name-brand ATX PSUs. Delta Electronics is good, Antec is OK.

4) The quality of the IDE connector and the molex power supply connector is poor. If you tweak the cables a bit, you risk a loose connection.

5) Overlooked, but may well be the main cause - the solder bumps on the PCB that make contact with the head electronics in the drive. The quality of the solder is critically dependent on its composition. It needs to be soft enough to maintain contact even after vibrations, thermal cycling, etc. If it's brittle (which happens in high-tin variants), the bumps no longer make contact after a while, causing sporadic failures.
You will often see one head drop out on multi-platter drives, while it happens less frequently on single-platter drives.

The fix for this is to unscrew and refasten the PCB, or even better, use a fine-tipped soldering iron to re-melt the bumps before refastening.

Stick it to Aiwa

[seven5]

The best part about this post was going to the lawyers' website and seeing that they also sued Aiwa for their crappy mini systems. I owned 3 of them and every cd player on them broke. To this day when i see one at someone elses house, i ask them if their cd player works. And they say, "no..."... Glad to see that someone went after them for that.

Re:DTLA?

[Anonymous Coward]

The most problematic is the 75 GXP, which was available from 1 to 3 platters in capacities of 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75GB. The 75GB model has the most problems, the 15 GB the least. These have names like DJNA-30.., etc.

The 60GXP solves some problems, but still has issues in multi-platter configurations. These are available in 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 GB capacities. The 20 has very few problems, the higher capacities have higher failure rates. These have names like DTLA-30.. or IC35..

The 120GXP also solves some problems, but introduces new ones. On the whole they're better than the 75GXP, but not necessarily better than the 60GXP.

Just in case your HD fails..

[xTK-421x]

Having worked on many bad HDs, I keep this list of links to all the manufacturers HD testing programs:

Maxtor/Quantum
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powerma x.htm

IBM/Hitachi
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html

Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools

Fujitsu
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download/hard-drives/