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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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
This is why I like companies with an advance-replace model for the general consumer. I get replacement Maxtor's in 1-2 weeks and can copy data if I need to from the failed drive to the new drive before shipping the failed one back. IBM/Hitachi doesn't have A-R. :(
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So anyway, you can chalk me up as a Russian Roulett success story. No complaints here.
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.
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?"
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 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
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.
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
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)
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
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.
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...
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?