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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.
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
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.
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.
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 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'm in a similar situation - I have 4 of the 3-yr-warranty 180GB/8MB models in a RAID 5 array (with the addonics scsi to ide adapters). I've had them for about 8 months now, no problems. I also have an older IBM 120GB drive that still works fine. My parents and sister have had 40GB and 80GB IBM drives with no problems for years, except when I dug around in my parents system and when I put it back together, their 40GB seems to have some really bad sectors... I was able to recover most of the data off the drive though... I blame this incident on myself and not IBM (since it failed right after I dickered around with it).
Also, I should note that my RAID 5 of the 180GBs gets VERY heavy use.
I wonder if drive temp has anything to do with these problems? My 180GBs and 120GB are right next to two case fans, they stay really cool...
Cheers,
Dave
moo
I don't know about the desktop drives, but my employer uses the Travelstar 20 and 40 Gb laptop drives. Our manufacturer in Korea used them because they were manufactured there and there was no import duty on them.
I should say "used to use" them. About 30% of those drives died by the time our customers received the product they were installed into (voicemail systems - 24/7/365 uptime required). Now our customers are pissed and threatening to sue us.
We ordered our manufacturer to switch back to Toshiba (which is what we used previously). They work.
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
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.
". . . 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.
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' :)
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.
simply tell 10 of your friends
;-)
I dont have 10 friends, you insensitive clod !
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
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.
So anyway, you can chalk me up as a Russian Roulett success story. No complaints here.
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