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Thoughts on the IBM 13G Deskstar?

Posted by Cliff on from the request-for-comments dept.

darkangel asks: "My hdd finally died today. I'd been having all sorts of trouble with it for quite some time. It was a Seagate 4.3 gig EIDE. So I'm going to get a new one, hopefully one that is more reliable. My first choice is a 13gig IBM Deskstar. Does anyone have one of these? How reliable are they? Any comments would really be appreciated. Please email me! "

5 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Why not go for a 27 gig Maxtor cheap by heroine · · Score: 2

    Well knowing that the most you can expect out of a hard drive is 18 months of continuous operation and that hard drives go obsolete after 6 months, you're better off getting a 27 gig Maxtor for $200, wearing it into the ground, and next year getting a 50 gig Maxtor at twice the speed for $100, wearing it in the ground, and then if getting a 100 gig for $50. Today's hard drives all get the same performance: 15megs/sec no matter what the bus interface is. Next year's hard drives will get 30megs/sec.

  2. My experience... by tzanger · · Score: 2

    I've had all kinds of drives. Seagate, Maxtor, IBM, WD, Fujitsu, Quantum...

    They're all pretty decent for a desktop drive. Personally I reccommend Seagate for SCSI (got a pair of their 10000 RPM drives in RAID1 and they scream) or WD.

    I've had a few WD's die on me (probably past their MTBF) but WD has been nothing but the best in customer service. One died on me a day after warranty and they extended the warranty on a dead drive 2 weeks so I could get it shipped to them for replacement. In my home computer I've got 3 WDs now and an HP writer. Kinda full there :-)

    One thing I've noticed about the recent trend in HUGE CHEAP drives... Where's the backup strategy? Some friends of mine recently bought the 27G (I think) Maxtors... 27G is nice, don't get me wrong, but the home user isn't exactly the type of user to buy a backup strategy capable of handling that much data... when it *does* go south, they're gonna be plenty pissed.

    I hope you haven't forgotten a backup strategy.

    Andrew

  3. Straight from a data recovery tech: by Bald+Wookie · · Score: 2

    Earlier this year, I talked with a data recovery tech about what kinds of drives he likes the best. Surprisingly he didnt see a big difference between major manufacturers. Overall he had four pieces of advice:

    1. Stay away from drives made in Turkey. He noticed that on average Turkish made drives had higher rates of failure.

    2. Dont trust a drive for longer than 18 months for critical data. Sure, I still have 6 year old drives spinning merrily away. However he said that the bathtub shaped failure curve starts ramping up at that point. Supposedly all of the tech at the shop swap out their old drives every 18 months.

    3. Get SCSI if you can afford it. The construction tends to be a bit better on the higher end drives.

    4. Use a UPS. Apparently sudden power failures can cause the head to tap the platters because they lose the lift provided by the rapidly rotating surface. Not good for the tapped sector, and can lead to catastrophe.

    In terms of brands, he said that IBM was making some pretty nice drives. On the other hand, he has seen so many failures from every brand on the market that he believes that all hardware sucks. I guess its like determining which flavor of Windows is the best. After you work on each of them for a while, NT seems better than the others but it still annoys the hell out of you.

    Personally, I like IBM drives and would go for it. Ive done tech support for hundreds of boxen and havent had too many problems with IBM drives. Of course YMMV.

    -BW

  4. OEM view of IBM drive reliability by dublin · · Score: 2

    I used to work for Dell's laptop line of business.

    Laptop drive reliability is a big deal, and by far the most expensive problem to deal with in the field. The opinion of Dell's engineers on this topic was that IBM is in a class by themselves. (This would be the TravelStar 2.5" series rather than the more ordinary destop DeskStar 3.5" drives.)

    The peripherals team spent a lot of effort to qualify even one vendor (Fujitsu) that was able to get their drive durability and reliability up in the same neighborhood as IBM's. Even then, the opinion of those doing the testing was that although the Fujitsus (after having them make many modifications) were acceptable, they still were'nt as good as the IBMs.

    This datapoint is about a year and a half old now, but many of the technologies are the same in both series of drives, and in fact, we may one day see new technology in laptop drives first because that market is less cost-sensitive.

    (FWIW, although hard disks died routinely in laptops a few years ago, the disk is now one of the most rugged components of the machine, sometimes able to take more abuse (G's) than the screen or PWB. Operating G's are higher now than non-operating G's were a few years ago.)

    --
    "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last ./ post
  5. check out... by leiz · · Score: 2

    www.storagereview.com - I consider the website the best site for hard drive performance info and reviews, so far they have reviewed 81 hard drives. They also provide info about the latest hard drive, a forum for people with question, and look into hard drive technologies such as the effect of buffer size on hard drive performance. (and like any good website) Storage Review is frequently updated...

    As for my personal experiences, my IBM 10.1 GB hard drive was dying and experience random shutdowns. I was able to pull my data off and restore from backups. IBM tech support was really helpful and I got a replacement within two weeks (it's a 14.4 GB) *grin*


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    There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.