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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.
.. 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
it's in my head
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.
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' :)