Slashdot Mirror
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.
This can't do IBM's reputation much good - fortunately for them the damage should be minimised since they no longer sell hard disks directly (so little loss of business)
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.
Any comments from pactical experience as to the quality of the drives after Hitachi bought the division and started selling them under its own name? I currently have one of the 160GB, and I bought it at Fry's back in January.
Get off my launchpad!
It's not rarely corporate policy to release faulty products. (Microsoft freaks, step aside, please.)
What happens is that internal politics turn problems into cover ups. Someone, somewhere decides that it's more logical to ignore the issue than to address it. The falacy continues up the line, since decisions are often based on information from 'down the line'.
The best thing IBM can do is to issue a general recall, offer generous replacement policies ("bring it in, we'll fix it on the spot") and try to recover their image as a reliable drive manufacturer. Otherwise their HD business is down the drain.
Oh wait! They sold it to Fujitsu! OK, sue their asses!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I had one. After about a year it failed, in summer so I suspect it had been running too hot. More and more bad sectors with the familiar scraping sound.
But after I got tired of running scandisk for hours to mark bad sectors daily, I erased it with IBM's DFT (drive fitness test).
And it has been fine ever since.
It looked like the heat made it lose its calibration, unable to find the exact position on the disk for some sectors.
Don't we build cheaper things that are less reliable so that you have to buy new ones more often. Many industries already do that. They can make a light bulb that goes for 10 or 20 years no problem. And I can buy one that is garunteed to go for 5 years. But there are still ones that have 2500 hours. This concept isn't something new.
Evolution or ID?
that two of three HDs failed within 2 years.. :)
Atleast I want to give credits to IBM for an excellent replacement procedure, I have received two new drives without any hazzles what so ever. Impressive actually, considering the trouble I've had trying to get replacement ASUS Graphic cards etc...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Forget IBM drives, Seagate or Maxtor produce the best quality hard drives
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
People, get real. This is all about the lawyers.
The lawyers are suing IBM. They are paying all the costs. The "class" is made up of losers who lend their names by affirming they bought a "defective drive."
In the end, the lawyers will get to keep 30% to 50% of the settlement or award (the cash component); the losers will get a coupon for discounts on the purchase of IBM stuff.
If you feel you have been wronged by because your 1,000,000 hour MTBF drive will only last 900,000 hours, simply tell 10 of your friends and don't buy any IBM stuff.
Believe me, that's a lot more painful to IBM and a lot less destructive to our society.
.. 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.
Yes yes, we know the 75gxp drives were defective. But I've known about 60gxp drives dying too (And I've had one happen to me. Not a pleasant sight.) Yet noone seems to care about that. What's MY recourse?
Can't we have one truly good corporation??
With the SCO business and active Linux support and marketing (Superbowl ad, etc), IBM was nearly at the top of my "Best Company" list...
Oh well. I'll go back to my belief that any and all corporations only want to reach the step 3. Profit!!! in the long run...
If a manufacturer only guarantees an item for one year (thought I notice 90 days is often the case in the US - it would be illegal here), as what point does a failure rate occuring after that first year constitute a problem with the product. If 50% fail within two years can this actuallt be seen as a problem with the product. In our modern-age ,Just what does guarantee actually mean...???
- - Sha la la la . . .
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.
Google cache, for those who need it.
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.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
IBM and Hitachi are two of the few manufacturers that still offer 3-year warranties on IDE hard drives. They are also two of the few mainframe manufacturers. I had thought that there was a correlation between these two facts -- perhaps that mainframe manufacturers regard storage as something more sacred or mission-critical than your average hard drive manufacturer. I am disappointed that IBM would knowingly ship drives with a too-high rate of failure. This is not consistent with their mainframe heritage.
I worked for a large retailer until recently and the hard drive of choice for our proprietary systems was an IBM drive of some sort. This drives were not the specific drive in question, but IBM nevertheless, and we had an unusually high and consistent number of failures with them. We finally switched to Seagate drives and the issue vanished.
The idea tat IBM might have a drive that fails even more than the drives we had in our stores is unnerving.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
"Do you really want 1000 IBM staff to be laid off because of a single hard drive model?"
Those 1000 IBMers shouldn't have too much to worry about. Whether they fixed it or not they would either go on to the next project or be laid of anyway when that project was over. Obviously they didn't fix it. I just hope they learned a lesson about reliabality from this.
Evolution or ID?
I bought a retail 60GB GXP back in 2000 or 2001 (forget which year). I understand it's basically the same drive as the 75GXP, but with one fewer platter. It tells linux that it is called "IBM-DLTA-307060".
This things's been in my machine running between 12 and 24 hours a day since then, and I haven't had a single problem with it. Both windows and linux have been using it. I have a passive heatsink on the drive, and my box has an adequate power supply for all the hardware in it.
I have a feeling that many retail hdd failures can be attributed to people letting their drives overheat, or else not having an adequate power supply for their system. Such problems were endemic back when the GXP came out.
An alternative explanation is that IBM had recently opened a production facility in Hungary. It is possible that they were still smoothing out the bumps there, so to speak.
But I really don't think it's a basic problem with the design --- my IBM GXP has behaved superbly.
I have two 75GXP running without any apparent problems. I've lost a 60GXP, but IBM replaced it instantly with a 180GXP that's been running non-stop without any problems.
So, all in all good experiences. The thing is, with capacities increasing as they do, a small problem can have increasingly disastrous consequences. That's why I've started using RAID1 setups for all machines containing non-expendable data. It's just not worth running the risk - failures happen, simultaneous failures are less common.
I had purchased two of these harddrives before, however something after a few months, and one of the harddrives did fail. I needed two working computers and could not wait for the long process of RMA to replace my harddrive. I went out a bought another one because that was pretty much my only option. Companies know that many people would not waste precious time to get an RMA for a product, and its really bad tactic to bring about consumer trust. I mean, how can you wait 6-8 weeks when you are running a company, you need your equipment to work and it really sucks to lose data. I would expect such things from IBM, but i havent purchased an ibm harddrive since then.
The biggest question is whether or not IBM knew the drives were failures and decided to make money on the drives selling them and then dump the business when lawsuits and RMAs were getting greater than the profit generated by their sells.
To those that RMAed more than 1 time, don't you feel like you are humping a pillow when that just can't give you satisfaction? Okay, bad part makes it to you. Okay, the replacement part is bad then we have a Quality Assurance issue. It is time to prevent the continue loss of time and break down to a new purchase.
In addition, those that RMAed the drives should not be part of the class action since IBM would not have profitted on a low margin being compounded with continuously replacing the drives. We make $2 each, but spend 70$ building them. We are 68$ in the hole for each one RMAed. See what I am saying?
At that point it is just Punative.
I think the problem was obvious when looking through forum posts of users who had 75GXP drives. It wasn't the number of failures as much as it was the number of failures per user. Sure, some people didn't have any problems, but many others had multiple drive failures, and the failure distribution was statistically abnormal.
As much as I'm happy that this is out in the open and that there's a class action suit, what will the users get out of this? In the tech world, two+ years is an eternity. Will they get the typical $20 voucher towards a new Hitachi drive while the class action lawyers get the millions? I had two fail on me in two months (on my VIA 686B south bridge while they worked fine on someone else's AMD south bridge). I had to fight IBM red tape as they kept trying to pawn me off on Acer but couldn't even give me the right point of contact at Acer (but I finally got through after six months).
You know what they say... in a lawsuit, the only winners are the lawyers.
We had a 20GB IBM Deskstar (probably 60GXP series) HDD fail at work recently; it was part of a mirrored (RAID 1) array, so no serious harm was done.
:-D
Being inquisitive folk, we cracked open the case to see what was inside. The cause of the failure was abundantly clear: the head assemblies had scraped the shiny, magnetic coating off about 2/3rds of the disk surface (on both sides) revealing the glass platter. I've never seen a glass platter before - they are so cool!
The extent of damage was equally impressive; our "museum" of salvaged bits includes various head-crashed platters of considerable vintages, but this disk will certainly take pride of place in the collection.
I know it was rumored that the problematic drives came from the Hungarian plant... was this ever confirmed?
What is the "click of death"?
;)
IBM don't need to get a free ride on Iomega's notoriously bad reputation, they have passed that mark on their own without any help.
Maybe there ougth to be a catchy name for the IBM deskstar experience, preferrably something that can follow their HD's reputation with them to Hitachi
I bought a pair of 30 gig desktars when they first came out and they are still humming away in a nice stripped array a few years later. Still work just like the day I bought them. While the failure rate on these drives was exceptionally high I think that the problem was probably poor QA and not poor design. A peek around the internet shows there are others with similar experiences to mine. Just my .02
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Sure, this is "just" a hard drive, it can be replaced. What about when corporate negligance leads to permanent damage of people (e.g., health care)? What about deaths at the hands of corporations?
Stop corporate
...if it's a wednesday then IBM are evil, otherwise they are good? ;o)
Or it could just be: support OSS=good, rip off consumer=bad.
I am NaN
I have had MANY IBM drives from that time period that failed horrible with the click of death from 15 gig to 40 gig. they ALL suffered the same design flaw that caused them to die 10X more than the same segate purchased at the same time and used the same.
I still have a pile of "out of warrenty" drives that are the replacements for the origional dead ones and some that are replacements for the replacements that are also dead now. as they certinaly did not extend the origional warrenty and made sure to tell you that fact.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I dropped IBM's like a bad habit after having witnessed three failures in six drives within a year, I will probably not buy hitachi either for at least a good while. It's irrational but they feel "tainted"! /. I imagine I will soon know why they suck and why it's SCO's fault) are Maxtor and Samsung.
The IBM's and two 1.2 GB seagates are the only disks I have personally known to actually fail. Naturally I stay away from seagate as well. Not that I carry a grudge or anything, I just stay clear of the fsckers. (No euphemism. Fsckers. Get it? heheh eh...*crickets*)
Western digital had a IDE compatibility issue with linux some time back (The details escape me, but I am pretty sure I'm not imagining it) so I overlook them as well. The only manufacturers I haven't experienced or heard anything bad about (yet, anyway, this being
I got on IRC right after bringing home my Hitachi Deskstar 180GB drive (I wrote it as 160 elsewhere, oops), to brag about Fry's price of $70 after rebate.
The response? "You bought a DeathStar?"
Needless to say, that didn't please me much. Nor did Fry's lying to me about how they'd handle the rebate when the store didn't have the forms on hand, but that's an issue with them...
Get off my launchpad!
I can't believe no one is going after Maxtor.
The lawyers are suing IBM. They are paying all the costs. The "class" is made up of losers who lend their names by affirming they bought a "defective drive."
So? Class action suits take a lot of time and effort, why shouldn't they get paid for their work?
If you feel you have been wronged by because your 1,000,000 hour MTBF drive will only last 900,000 hours, simply tell 10 of your friends and don't buy any IBM stuff.
Inefficient, useless, and kind of dumb. First of all if my friend tells me that he had a problem with a piece of hardware, I'm not going to assume that manufacturer makes generally shoddy merchandise. I'll just assume he got a bad drive.
Secondly, it doesn't fix my problem, namely that I spent money on a drive that didn't perform as it was supposed to. IBM breached a warranty, they should compensate me for the money I spent buying the drive in the first place.
But we like IBM... we should go out and help them fend of the lawyers shouldn't we?
Shouldn't we?
I had two 75GXP's in my main desktop machine. A 45GB for win2k, and a 30GB for linux. The windows drive died about 6 months ago, so I pulled it out and went merrily on my way with gentoo only. Then the other night gentoo hung up on me. I power cycled, and the root FS was crapped out (ext3). So that machine is now a paperweight until I get off my lazy ass and go buy another drive and sit through the painfully long gentoo installation/build process. Oh well, no harm done, all my important data lives on an old PII-300MHz in my basement with two 160GB Maxtors in RAID1.
Still pisses me off though, I bought those drives because of IBM's supposed reliability.
Now only if we could get PNY to admit it sold defective GeForce 4 cards. Anyone tried calling their very secret tech support number to get a replacement via their "Lifetime Warrenty" lately ?
Seems after waiting on hold for about one week will get you a live tech person who will deny your problem, but if pressed you will need to mail them your orig reciept, the name of the sales person who sold it to you and a DNA/credit check for them to even consider a return/replacement.
If you need proof just Google PNY RMA and see how many sites you will come up with.
I bought one, and admit it was fast, loved it.
Read the article on the drives being defective, and didn't want to believe it.
Then my drive made a few clicks, but didn't crash imediately.
Turned my computer off, and ordered a new Seagate Barracuda IV. Copied data over. Never used that 75GXP to this day. Still sitting in a box.
IBM owes me. I had to get 2 HD's in a year, rather than one.
I don't have any mod points today, somebody make sure this AC gets noticed. Tort litigation is out of control. It should be the last contingency when a company will not be reasonable, not the first line of defense. Say no to greed.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
". . . A plus B plus C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
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.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
(although I have never owned an IBM drive so that could be why :)
:)
Only time I know of where I lost hard disk data was with a 40gb (I think it was 40gb, may have been a 20gb though) and that failure coincided with a blown motherboard & a fair amount of repair cost.
Plus, there was what looked like a burn mark on one of the large surface-mount ICs on the hard disk circut board. So, in this case, I can say that it probobly wasnt a manfacturing defect
I have a IBM deskstar with firmware ER4OA44A, and the firmware utility recommends I update the firmware to A45A version. I downloaded the update, however, I don't have access to a floppy-drive to boot the update disks.
:)
So, is there another way to do this? (ie. I have a CDR recorder).
Anyone got a tip for how to flash without a diskdrive? I promise +5 karma
While I agree hurting IBM's reputation isn't worth borhting as they sold of hard drvies anyway. Class action suits do take a lot of time and effort but it would seem the leeches are getting a lot more than fair compnesation for there work. Yes I relize it's a gamble as they dont get anything if they loose either. If they dont feel they have a strong enough case to win they should not be getting into a class action suit and removing the rights of thers to sue individualy.
No sir I dont like it.
Your point is not without merit, especially with regards to coupon settlements. If coupons aren't good enough for the lawyers, they aren't good enough for the plaintiffs.
That being said, the class action lawsuit does benefit society with respect to one thing. It strongly influences how often a recall is done on shoddy or unsafe merchandise when it would otherwise not be done. By making not recalling known defective products more expensive than recalling known defective products, the public (which paid for those products in the first place) benefits. Without these class action lawsuits companies would shaft their customers on a far more routine basis than they already do.
- You can use it as a fridge magnet. Keep a pry bar around to detach it
- Stick one on a toolbelt, it's strong enough to hold a magnet!
Fujitsu's MPG-Series HDDs experience a similar problem (>90% failure rate due to defective chips; see The Register).
Fortunately, there is an unofficial tool available to recover all of your lost data.
If you *are* being serious - then why are you posting as an AC?
I'm hoping I'm not being trolled, but as a person who has had 75GXP failures AND still have a handful of (very lightly used) 75GXP drives, and really hope that it's not a 100% failure rate, and could do with I-am-willing-to-back-up-what-I-am-saying accounts, which is needless to say not the case with AC posts.
simply tell 10 of your friends
;-)
I dont have 10 friends, you insensitive clod !
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Most people I know associate "IBM IDE drive problems" with "DTLA". Is the GXP series the same as the DTLA series, or did IBM have two different IDE disk product lines which suffered from severe quality problems?
What would you consider to be fair compensation then? Lawyers in class action suits generally don't get the same percentage that lawyers in regular civil suits get. You can find information on the subject here.
As most people have agreed, this is a bad mark on IBM's record. I respect them for their pro-Linux attitude (despite the fact it may partially be due to retaliation on MS) and think they have contributed a lot to the field, this is why it's so unfortunate.
:)
Thankfully this problem doesn't effect me as I use almost all SCSI devices, however I have noticed my IBM SCSI drive hasn't quite been up to par recently. And I had to RMA it already once... hmmm. I think I'm sticking with Seagate from now on, I love my ST336607LW.
# fuser -v
#
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.
If you want reliable glass platter drives, try Toshiba laptop drives. I think my 810MB drive is glass, and it only has ~200K in bad sectors, due to the laptop being stored in a truck in the middle of August :-(... Before that, it had ZERO bad sectors.
So anyway, you can chalk me up as a Russian Roulett success story. No complaints here.
Class actions do not remove the rights of others to sue individually; they can opt out. Additionally, the judge can disallow the joining of a class if it would not represent the best interests of the class. But that's exactly the point-who would sue IBM for the $100-$200 a hard drive is worth? The only viable way to hold them accountable is with a class action. Class actions keep companies in check and make sure they don't screw us over in the future. The fact that lawyers take 1/3 is a different issue altogether.
-MDL
Happy meals fund terrorism
actually, "punt to longhorn" is a quote from the microsoft os team when they encounter a bug in winxp (from an earlier slashdot article). If they can not resolve it easily they just "punt to longhorn" and try to come up with a solution in longhorn instead of patching xp. thanks for your time.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Casual Day Has Gone Too Far
on Page 33!
I'm such a Dilbert fan...
You're right! Apparently you only have three!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It constantly amazes me how bad technological companies are at relationships. Having sold bad drives damages IBM's reputation enormously. Many managers of tech companies seem to believe that business is 98% technology and 2% relationships. Probably it is more like 50-50.
Relationships with employees are part of the relationships of business. Perhaps 10 years ago, Intel forced employees to take a pay cut just before business became extremely profitable for Intel. In my opinion, Intel has a history of pushing its employees too hard. Look at the result. Look where Intel is now: AMD is ahead in 64-bit processors.
Of course, Intel managers undoubtedly have rationalizations for this, but in extensive conversations with Intel employees, I have developed the idea that there is a connection between Intel's lack of interest in good relationships and Intel's recent poor performance.
Interesting. I wonder why. This may be the reason for the difference in our experience: Our WD hard drives are all in aluminum removeable trays that have their own fans. The drives stay cool.
Also, we are VERY careful with the drives, never moving them while in operation, or subjecting them to shock while off.
I hear you.
I just got a thing about a class action agreement in the mail. The lawyers get $6.9 mil. If I can find proof of purchase and purchase date on my five-year-old TV, I can get a $15 or $25 off coupon good towards another RCA TV. Woo hoo!
(Not, mind you, that I deserve anything, since I haven't had the problem claimed in the complaint; I'm just not in favor of enriching lawyers for what seems like a non-existent problem.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The units that were sold to distribution WERE NOT FAULTY. A contract fell through, they had extra drives, and they sold them to customers. It happens every day, all the time.
That's not damning. It's everyday business in thousands of companies. It appears here that there are an awful lot of people trying to hang IBM with no good reason. 10,000 vs 1,000 DPM? In the auto industry that's a different between world class (13 PPM) and NORMAL SUPPLIERS, at 100 PPM. Hardly damning there either is it? So what do we have here? We have another set of ligating fools who don't understand manufacturing. Tell me.... how about every time we find a bug in a program, we count that as a defect, and multiply it by the number of programs in the field? Think you'd come anywhere close to only 13 PPM defect rate? Um.. nope. So what were saying is that modern manufacturing has a quality record FAR better than that of modern programming, and yet because people don't understand engineering and manufacturing, they're going to litigate. Let me give you some more statistics. Are you aware that ONE IN FOUR ENGINES built by ALL the manufacturers ends up being repaired before it leaves an engine plant? Are you aware that on a car, you're expected to have at least 4 NOTICEABLE failures of equipment before you hit 30,000 miles? But hell, let's litigate, because we don't have the FAINTEST clue how real manufacturing works. We expect 100% quality all the time. Sad folks. Just sad. The only thing I see in those letters are engineers who KNOW their product is not as good as the competitors. And marketing not advertising defects is hardly a new thing.
I'm with you- just had a sudden and catastophic failure of my "Deskstar" a week ago. It was the only IBM drive I've ever owned, so in my case, it WAS a 100% failure rate. The drive wasn't that old. I have antique drives that been running non-stop for 7 or 8 years without a hiccup.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
Having worked on many bad HDs, I keep this list of links to all the manufacturers HD testing programs:
a x.htm
l
Maxtor/Quantum
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powerm
IBM/Hitachi
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.htm
Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools
Fujitsu
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download/hard-drives/
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
i had no luck at all. ive gone through 4 of these drives before Dell just gave me a wd cavier which works to this day. the failure would always come after working the drive hard for an extended period say 6 hours. for instance encoding a movie. it would then make what some people called the scratch of death. i remember dell saying there was 'no reported problems with the drive'. after the fiasco, i promised never to buy an ibm drive again, and what do you know they sold off their drive division (to hitachi) not long after. but now i probably wont ever buy a hitachi drive
f you feel you have been wronged by because your 1,000,000 hour MTBF drive will only last 900,000 hours
Huh? It's far worse than that! More like a failure within 1000 to 5000 hours for many people. I knew a guy that maintained a 18 node cluster that had to send in half of its IBM drives, and all the replacements failed too!
Don't forget the classic tale of Two IBM Drives!!
Heh.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
They ALL suck. I've had within 90 day failures for all of the big name ATA drives. It's an inevitable byproduct of the ever-increasing data densities and the ever-tighter profit margins. They all have decent customer service (so far) when it happens as far as replacing the drive, but that doesn't help for the data.
As a result, I now require all new desktop computers for the college department I work for to come with three hard drives; a RAID-1 mirrored pair for the OS, and an external hard drive (ATA to USB/FW box + OEM drive) for doing daily backups on. (Weeklies go to the server, which has a more complicated backup arrangement). It's added about 15% to the cost of the build to the local white-box outfit... but now I no longer fear hard drive crashes.
I fear hard drive thieves. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I am amused by all the people who are saying "I dumped my unreliable IBM drives. I'll never use IBM again!! I am sticking -- to MAXTOR!" My own experience with Maxtor makes this sound to me like saying "I'm dumping my crappy Camry and sticking to Yugo from now on!" I've seen many Maxtor failures, SCSI & IDE both, which is why it was very disturbing when they bought Quantum. Did that make their whole line reliable? I doubt it, since I've seen two drives fail badly since then (friends, not mine).
Onceuponatime, it was Seagate that everybody was saying "I'll never use again!" about, then they bought CDC, and suddenly they were the hallmark of reliability. It seems like all companies have a few lemons from time to time that make their reputation sour.
So for those of you saying you'll avoid Hitachi like the plague, just remember, your favorite brand is probably one that used to be known as "avoid this like the plague." Which is how I still feel about Maxtor.
I think on IBM's part they've used risk analysis to weight the cost benefit ratio of doing a recall vs lawsuits and other expesnses. Whereas in the automotives industry, you can issue a recall by replacing a defective part, HDDs need to be completly replaced. I guess IBM might have seen this as being cheaper; if so, they might be wrong.
.... lawn mower , childrens' toys, mattresses, automotive manufacturers the list is endless. It won't come to an end any time soon.
I've read of many other industries that participate in these practices
IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40 GB ATA/100 Hard Drive (7200 RPM; IC35L040AVER07-0) and I never had problems. I have had this HDD since 9/9/2001. I ran the utility to see if I need the firmware update, I do. I will try upgrading firmware to be safe after I make a back up and when I have more free time.
:(
My office's machine former IBM HDD did die slowly (bad sectors).
Who else here still have a working old IBM GXP HDD without any problems?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That said, tonight I'll get home and probably find that all four of them are on fire or something.
I noticed that a while back IBM released some information saying that the problems might have something to do with the drives running idle for extended periods of time. One thing that my drives don't do is sit idle...there is always some kind of activity every few minutes from Fedora. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
-h-
We have several thousand IBM thinkpads and their death rate is about 10% and climbing. Most common failure is complete hard drive failure with no chance of data recovery. (We spent $6k and send one of the drives to Ontrack and got nothing back except person's IE bookmarks) :)
Since then IBM admitted that there are batches of laptops whose drives will definitely fail, sooner or later. They sent one of their tech to stay on-site to replace drives. (you just need to give them serial numbers and they'll tell you whether your drive is affected by recall)
So far we had a lot of T23 HD replaced and a few other models. Most of the problematic drives were manufactured in Hungary
Backup all your clients' data ASAP and inform them NOT to keep anything important in Personal Folders, unless they are stored on the server.
Same goes for My Documents - at least set up sync to network drive.
I have a feeling I shouldn't write this as it sort of challenges destiny, but what the heck:
I've got two 75GXPs. They're mounted to a striped volume (!) that houses critical data (!!). They have been spinning 24/7 since I installed them in this server in... uh... must have been 1999 or so.
Win2k (which is the host) says that one shows signs of weariness and should be replaced, but has said so for over a year now.
And yes, I do have backups. I also have a plan to retire the drives and find a new job for (the rest of) the server. Unfortunately, I don't have a job as of right now, so that'll have to wait a bit. Reality can interfere with utopia sometimes.
'I dont have 10 friends, you insensitive clod !'
I have 10 friends... if that is read as binary...
It's funny. We have fora such as Slashdot and Groklaw, where information gained from hundreds of dedicated people are put to the common good. We have systems like Linux and GCC that are similarly the result of large common effort.
What is lacking is a good system for tracking hardware failures. All we have are anecdotes, until somebody gets sued and we can see their internal documentation.
Imagine, though, that there was a system for tracking hardware. Whenever you would get a drive, you'd put it into the common database. Serial number, model number, date and place of manufacture. Granted, this would take a few minutes. When (not if, they all die eventually) a drive fails, you would call up the record and mark it, along with (perhaps) the symptoms associated with the failure.
But, if tens of thousands of people did this, you would quickly build up a spectacular database of hardware reliability. You would be able to instantly see what drives were better than others, or see if quality was slipping or improving for popular drive makes as time went on.
Soon, much like the moderation system of Slashdot has truly raised the level of discussion here, you would find that the reliabilty ratings driven by this database would force manufacturers to make higher quality drives -- they'd know that they could never force crappy drives on the market as IBM is alleged to have done here.
Now, I'm not volunteering -- yet. But I could be interested. There would be insane pressures from the manufacturers to influence the results, and there would no doubt be some attempts made to stuff the ballot box. But, it would be a good thing.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Your point about relationshops, while valid, uses a very poor example in Intel.
Processors are a commodity product and Intel has managed to make ridiculous profits year after year. Just because AMD got to 64 bit processors first does not mean that Intel is doing poorly. Rather, Intel has segmented the market and is going after the MUCH larger segment (32 bit procs in desktop machines and laptops).
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
Ive had 2 IBM 40Gb drives die on my in the last couple years. When the original died, I went through the retail stores warranty... took 4-6 weeks (turned into like 7). Then when the replacement died, I figured, hell, lets see how IBM does it. Sent it down there w/ like 11 days shipping (from canada). It gets there, they send the replacement back, overnight shipping. day 11, call from customs to approve it going over border, morning of day 12, re-installing windows. So at least we can be impressed w/ how IBM covers their RMAs. I cant remember exactly what it was, but they paid a pretty hefty price to ship that brand new drive overnight internationaly. So they get props from me... just no new money for drives ;)
Wouldnt you like to be a pepper too?
I've been using a 75 GXP in daily use since I bought it, and have been monitoring its S.M.A.R.T. conditions... no failures yet. It's lasted me longer than other drives :) Though I know this doesn't mean much, after all we're talking failure rates off a production line.
I've been running with 2 75GXP drives in a RAID 0(!) configuration nearly 24x7 for 3-4 years now (I bought the disks soon after they came out) and I've never had a problem. I recently broke the mirror, but both disks are still running strong.
For Chrissake, man, IBM knows relationships. IBM has been around for, what, 50 years now?
.com boom is probably a good example), but you chose IBM and Intel for examples of companies that are "bad...at relationships"? Come *on*!
Your complaint is true of some tech companies (the
May we never see th
IBM is a huge company. The people making hard drives probably have very little to do with the people making Linux other than the same style of standardized HR forms. IBM in particular seems to operate divisions with a good deal of modularity, from what I've heard from people working there.
May we never see th
I'm getting sick and tired of the AMD is cool now that they have _the_ 64bit processor.
They (64bit procs) have been out for over 10 years now, its no big deal.
Look where Intel is now: AMD is ahead in 64-bit processors.
But, when the whole system is still bound because the memory bandwidth is bottlenecked, how does this make it ahead of Intel. For example, take a look at the memory bandwidth of the Itanium vs the Opteron. Hint, the numbers for the Itanium are 3453.0 3453.1 4020.4 4027.8, and the numbers for the Opteron are 1975 1747 1945 2018. Yes, thats 2x the performance, and that is with a 1.0GHz Itanium from a few years ago.
You also got to take into account that the compilers for the AMD Opterons are about 6 months old, the Intel Itanium compilers are years old, and made by the people that make the processors.
It's not normal, and the return process is NOT handled very well.
I went through 3 60GXP's in less than 2 years -- that's an average of 7 months per drive. Yes, they spun 24/7 in a well-cooled case with ambient room temp. averaging 73F year-long (MRTG tracks that for me, too, courtesy of MBM).
The first drive failed after about 6 months. RMA process was a pain, and took more than a month to get a new drive. The "new" drive was actually a refurb with only a 90-day warranty on it. (Thanks, IBM. How gracious of you.)
The second drive began to fail on day #79, just 11 days away from its warranty run-out. RMA process was again difficult, and took even longer this time to get another replacement (again, a refurb w/ 90-day warranty) -- almost 5 weeks this time.
The third drive I let sit in the static bag for nearly 15 months because I was afraid to even use it. I only recently (last month) installed it, only because I needed some temporary storage space for a DVD project. I fully expect this drive to fail as well, and probably before summer. It's only a matter of time with the DeathStar line.
On the flip-side, I bought 3 Western Digital WD800JB 80-GB drives for a RAID array last January (2003), and immediately had one of them fail (wouldn't even spin up). Within 3 days, I had an ADVANCE-SHIPPED replacement, and the array was back to full power in less than four days. I sent the failed drive back a week or so later, and never gave it a second thought until now.
As a former IBM employee, let me add... no, nevermind, let's not go there. Don't get me started.
I've got an IBM 40GB drive. (Not sure of model number) ... I repeatedly run it non-stop for a couple of weeks before rebooting the machine. (And, even then, I only reboot it because I'm trying a new kernel compilation.)
It's been running fine for months, with a cron'd updatedb every night, and smartd running constantly.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Wondering if they were the infamous 75GXP deathstars under another label, I looked at the master table of part numbers at Hitachi. (Fortunately for me, they aren't -- the Hitachi 60GB and 80GB retail kits have Deskstar 7K250 drives.)
So the amount paid out wasn't anywhere near what the drive cost in the first place, and wouldn't have been enough to replace the drive at the minute the warranty expired and the drive failed, but it was a reasonable chunk of that, not anything like getting a couple pieces of blank CD media while the lawyers got rich.
I actually seem to remember I never got my $200 because I didn't stay on top of the paperwork enough, but that's a typical thing, like not sending in rebate coupons. I stay away from rebates for basically that reason.
IBM did exactly the same thing (ship a known defective part and plan to fix it with marketing) with the hard drive shipped with the then state-of-the-art IBM PC/AT Model 339 back in the mid 1980s. Back then, however, the tech magazines actually cared about users and PC Magazine had it as their cover story and as a result, IBM ended up replacing a LOT of bad drives.
Guess the greed and bean-counter folks at Armonk forgot the lesson.
I thought "deja vu"....o well...it would nice to know where I can file for losses I've suffered (9 out of 9 75GXP I own have failed at one point, costing me my data and $ when one of my most important drives dead and I paid to get the data back [they had to replace some chips on the drive]).
Hell one of 'em which I call the deathstar, can cause most computers to not boot (it clicks out of control). My deathstar and it's unaffected as of yet cousin of the same make and model have one other flaw; unlike the other 75GXP's I have, they couldn't be firmware updated with firmware that's suppose to "extend" their lifespans. And I was never able to RMA any of the drives as all my requests were rejected (even though the drives were in warranty at the time).
Dell 4100 sounds like an Inspiron or Latitude laptop model number. If it's a laptop, it doesn't use a Deskstar 3.5" drive. Next.
Coincidentally I'm waiting for UPS to haul away my IBM drive for its third exchange. And that's just one drive that isn't the model mentioned as the problem.
I'm a small business owner who for awhile built systems for customers using exclusively IBM drives. They used to be rock-solid. But over the past two years every IBM drive I've shipped has failed. On two systems, the replacements failed within six months and now, as mentioned above, one system will be on its third replacement. At least they keep sending me new drives but I have to eat the cost of giving my customers good drives while the IBM replacements go in my media servers as scratch drives that can't be relied upon for any length of time.
It seems QC went down the tubes for IBMs HD business. Guess what Hitachi? Think I'll ever buy any inventory from you?
In theory the problem was mostly the heads accumulating some of the platter lubricant on them from continuously moving back and forth in the same area, leading to an eventual head crash (click of death.)
Again, in theory, the firmware update fixed that problem.
Did this help in reality? I don't know. I haven't bought an IBM hard drive in a long time thanks to this mess.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Sorry, just testing a theory I have on moderators here.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Where I come from, IBM DeskStars are now known as Death Stars.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If you don't keep em cool the klickity-klickity will munch your bits like homer eating a hamburger...
I've got one running 24/7 but with a 3 fan bay cooler blowing over it....
It's noisy....but not as noisy as "Klick-Klick-Klick"..hehe
Business is Business and Business must grow, Regardless of crummies in tummies you know... -Onceler
Between 1988 and 1991 I was running a department whose responsibility it was to set up IBM PS/2 Model 80's for a pharmaceutical firm. We were moving the model 80's so fast that offtimes when the truck came in, they would be moved directly from the truck to the setup room and bypass the stock room entirely. Typical setup day was to get 20-30 machines set up, add on cards installed, Dos installed, and running loop diagnostics overnight for a 24 hour burn in before they were repacked for delivery to persons at the pharmaceutical firm. Our task was to unpack the 80's from the boxes, examine the work order, install the needed PS/2 microchannel adapters in the machine, configure the hardware accordingly (which meant getting the machine to recognize the card(s) using IBM configuration diags) and then format the machines drives and install dos. Loop diags were loaded and the machines were run overnight. Normally if a failure occurs with a factory machine it happens within the first 24 hours that it is run.
Problem was, we were unable to make delivery most of the time, ON time. Not because we were slow or slacking off, but because simply between 10 and 50% of the machines we pulled off of the truck were DOA. I sh** you not. True story: one time we opened two PS/2 Model 80's in the setup department and neither one of them had a motherboard. Systems were due for delivery to researchers the next day.
IBM said (when we called them on this outrage) that since we were a dealer, and since we had accepted delivery of the machines, at that point it was we who were responsible for fixing the machines and getting them out.
Sometimes we had the motherboards or defective parts in stock. Most of the time we didn't. The real fact of the matter was revealed later when we found out that IBM was unable to keep it's manufacturing schedules, and as a result was purposely shipping incomplete or untested hardware directly from the assembly line. We became convinced that in most cases, when a factory machine came in bad to us, that it had in actuality been evaluated as bad, but SHIPPED ANYWAY.
Therefore, to make a long story short, we in the setup department were forced to become an unwilling extension of the IBM factory assembly line in the late 1980's early 1990s.
I like IBM drives. But when a pinhead manager at IBM makes decisions like the IBM model 80 fiasco and the 75GXP HD drive series fiasco, then those pinheads need to be called on this via the public at large, and their asses need to be fired. If the company is made to be accountable for it's shortcomings, then it usually somehow magically and miraculously tends to work it's shortcomings out of it's system. I know for a fact that IBM can produce quality computer subsystems that rival anybody else. The key to keepig that quality up is the public holding them to account for their piss poor managers.
Yeah, I got my 30G deskstar 4 years ago precisely because it was a glass platter and so (in my opinion, this isn't really backed up by much more then my physical intuition, which could very well be wrong) perhaps a bit less prone to thermal problems.
I was going through my previous orders for systems that I have built over the years, and I thought for sure they were 75GXPs. Unfortunately I was wrong. I purchased over 20 hard drives, all IBM Deskstars: 60GXPs, 120GXPs but only a couple 75GXPs. EVERY SINGLE DRIVE HAS FAILED. What a crock. I still have several sitting here. It would have been nice for IBM to let us know about these failures at the outset, because I had to eat the cost of those drives, and I'm not a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation. I was just a college student who made money during that time of my life selling white boxes. And now, since I only have two 75GXPs, I'll still never see any restitution from IBM.
It makes you wonder what the world would be like if there had never been Microsoft... Not that it's a lot better now, but think of what could have been.... shudder...
We got a Dell early 2001, and it shipped with a 45gb 75GXP harddrive. It worked great for 2 years.
In the last year of our 3-year warranty, we had 1 replacement harddrive DOA, another only lasted a month. They sent us an 80gb harddrive (also an IBM GXP, not sure whether it was 120GXP or 180GXP). I was very happy with nearly double the harddrive space. Too bad it only lasted 2 months. After that, they sent us another 45gig 75GXP, and our warranty expired. The harddrive failed shortly after our warranty expired.
So 4 replacement harddrives later, I was SOL, and the India-based tech support was not much help.
So, in conclusion, we went out and got a 120gig Western Digital for about 80$ and have been happy for nearly a year, no problems.
I've been something of an IBM supporter for some time. I always buy a Thinkpad when I buy a notebook computer and I and other friends and relatives have had excellent experiences with their tech support and customer service.
Throw in the fact that they have (arguably) done more to increase Linux public mindshare than any other company, and I think quite highly of them.
I guess no company is perfect, but if you had asked me if I thought IBM was capable of something like this, my reply would have been, "No way, IBM takes care of its customers."
How sad...
/.: why the hell am I here?
I'm the proud owner of 2x 40GB 60GXPs, fastest things i've had, not very noisy, all around a good drive. I upgraded it's firmware (which was a pain to obtain) after it once "Click Click Click" on me. When it does that, the drive isn't recognizable by the OS and the CPU just freezes at IDE detection.
When i brang it to the CPU shop for checking (was still under warranty, now isn't so i pray), the next day they told me i was crazy and it didn't do it again since then...
Very, very weird problem. How come it hasn't failed yet?
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
IBM and Hitachi .... Samsung and Western Digital
And Seagate -- I just bought two 160 gig baracuda's, they are excellent drives (speedy and quiet), running in RAID-1. They have a 3 year warranty
Joseph?
I think all consumer-level CD players are probably made like crap these days. I have a boom box (JVC) and a bookshelf system (Aiwa!), and both have kaput CD players despite working fine otherwise. I run CD audio to my Aiwa from my DVD player. And my Sony Discman is starting to act funny lately... skips on brand-new CD's even with 40-second antishock on...
Freedom: "I won't!"
I've been through 3 of these drives. I want the price I paid for them, at least partially, back.
Actual failure rates for the drive in question were much, much higher than what would be expected given the advertised MTBF. If we let manufacturers get away with wildly over-optimistic MTBF ratings, then we can't trust anything in the tech specs. We should hold them to what they promise.
I have a 24 node cluster that used 40 Gb Travelstar drives. Out of the 24, I've had 5 HD failures in one year. I would suspect that this is actually better than most folks 'cause we don't run our cluster 24/7.
Is anyone else seeing "Ibm Deskstar Hard Drives" Google ads on the right? :-D
I have the IBM Deskstar 75GXP DTLA-307075 (76.8 GB) and am getting Delay-Write errors all the time on Windows 2000 Pro. I'm going to try the software upgrade listed by a /. reader located here.
I'll let you know if it works.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.