IBM 60GB Deskstar $99.00 @ Accesmicro.

[Pothead]

Let me put my 69 cents in....

I also got on the IBM 40gig 75 GXP Drive from Amazon last year. All has been going well until a month ago...this is when I had made my rig dead silent!

I had an antec psu and 2 panaflos, one exhaust and one intake...i changed the panaflos to enermax, one attached to the mobo, the other to the psu, modded the psu and put in a panaflo, changed the heatsink to a Zalman 3000 copper. I'm using an Antec sx1030. My system was dead silent but it took a week and my IBM drive is now making loud annoying noises...It was fine for over a year now I am sending it back for another one...

 

[laugh]

75gxp and 120gxp have some problems. i do not have experience with them, but i read elsewhere.

 

[clarkmo]

<< IBM?s response: >>




Use of the drive 24x7 will not affect or void the warranty. IBM stands by our three-year warranty for the 120GXP. The drive can and has been used successfully in 24x7 operations. Users should not be concerned about running the drive in 24x7 environments beyond concerns typically associated with any drive usage, such as operating temperature, vibration, duty cycle, etc.

 

[Vette73]

Sorry but I can't take that chance on losing my data because IBM says its OK.

I am runnign a 740 Maxtor drive I got from Newegg. Best Harddrive for performance and reliability

 

[RandomCoil]

Below is an attempt at an objective description of my experience with IBM 75GXP drives. I also have a dual Athlon system with dual 60GB 60GXP drives purchased in November that has shown no problems.

We bought four systems with 75GXP drives from a local vendor in April 2001, all in Inwin S500 cases with 300 watt powersupplies. The harddrive was mounted in the lowest 3.5" position with airspace above and below.

The systems ran 24x7. "HD Failure" is defined as IBM's Drive Fitness Test returning an error code during the advanced test when run from boot disk. In the case of the Dual P3 system, some files appear to have been corrupted due to drive failure.

Dual P3 1GHz, 40GB 75GXP, front/back case fans: HD failed in early February
Athlon 900 Mhz 30GB 75GXP, front/back case fan: HD failed in November
Athlon 1.2 GHz, 30GB 75GXP, front/back case fans: HD failed in October
Duron 700 Mhz 20GB 75GXP, front case fan: HD still functioning

The broken 75GXPs were replaced by IBM, but only the Athlon 900 currently uses a replacement drive sent by IBM. The other systems have drives from other manufacturers

Under the same environment we also have an Athlon 700 (slot A, to help date it), a P2 400, and dual P3 650 (slot 1). All three were bought new. The systems have a mix of 7200rpm Maxtor and Seagate drives in either Inwin S500 or Enlight 7237 cases with varying numbers of cae fans. The drives in these systems have never been upgraded or replaced and show no signs of failure <knock>

 

[IHYLN]

Just to let you guys know, I have 4 45gb 75GXP drives running without a hitch in two servers (two in each, one on top of each other) and it works fine.

 

[Trader05]

Yeah, um is this a 75gxp? Nope 60gxp. We all know that a lot of the 75gxp has problems.

 

[Red Dawn]

I had an IBM 40 gig 60 GXP Deathstar in my secondary rig until last week when it died unexpectedly without any warning or noise. I had it for about a month and a half. All my data was backed up as I had read about the Deathstars crapping out at an alarming rate about a week earlier.

 

[WindBoy2000]

I had this HD for about 3 months, and i hear the grinding already, I should have learned from those
noisy ibm 75gxps I already have, what a dupid fool i am. get the seagate barracuda ATA IV's
quietest damn things out there..................

.................
......................
..........................

 

[hansmuff]

I would like to throw in some comments here.

1) The 75GXP has problems, we all know that. Nobody denies that. IBM replaces many RMAs with 60GXPs.

2) The 60GXPs and 120GXPs have not yet shown unusually high failure rates. Individual experiences may be that here and there a drive died, even shortly after purchase, but in NO way can you forecast a whole line's reliability by a few examples. If you disagree, show some REAL data not a "my drive died and my friends' drive died both IBM, they are crap!!" kinda thing that proves nothing but your ignorance.

3) Due to high benchmark numbers and fairly low prices, a lot of people buy the 60GXP and 120GXP drives. Chances are higher to hear about defects when a certain drive is bought by more people that other drives.

4) To the poster above who says "Maxtor bought Quantum, another low quality..." blah blah, what do you have to back up your statement ? A HD died on you or something ? Can happen with any brand. Quantum used to make excellent drives and I am happy to see their technology in Maxtor drives. These blanket statements are dumb and uneducated.

5) The 8 hour power-on time per day was totally blown out of proportion everywhere. Evidently (see storagereview.com) IBM fully warrants 24x7 run drives, and IBM officially states that the drives are recommended for any usage pattern like 24x7 or >8 hours. How this could get so out of hand, I can't figure out.

6) Hard drives die. They all will die after a certain service life, and some die sooner. Those things are mechanical, and very sophisticated. Many die because they are shipped wrong or thrown around too much during shipping (notice how many technologies in newer HDs concentrate on this issue), or just plain handled wrong by the user. People don't make backup's and that's their own stupid fault. If you had a backup and your drive died a month after purchase, well RMA it and put the backup back, and off you go. Don't go blame some brand because "they are crap" which you can't really prove anyway.

I'm done ranting, thanks for reading.

 

[CKDragon]

<< Yeah, um is this a 75gxp? Nope 60gxp. We all know that a lot of the 75gxp has problems. >>



60gxps have a good many problems as well, but they do seem to have fewer. I'll go back to the More Platters = Quicker Death theory and say that the reason there are fewer death stories among the 60gxp is because people need fewer platters (20GB/platter as opposed to 15GB/platter) to achieve the same amount of hard drive space.

CK

 

[BornStar]

I don't know about everyone else here, but I don't want to have the spend the money on two hard drives that contain the same data. I'd like to be able to stick my data on it and not have to worry about the fact that this brand has an unusually high failure rate. Yeah, maybe they're fast, but if I lose my data because of it, that performance didn't really do me that much good. Why not buy a drive that's about the same price but more reputable and be done with it?

edit: can't type

 

[clarkmo]

<< Many die because they are shipped wrong or thrown around too much during shipping (notice how many technologies in newer HDs concentrate on this issue), or just plain handled wrong by the user. >>


I like this. Anybody who bought an IBM drive in retail packaging,i.e. ,pre-cut and fitted foam or shell casing, please raise your hand.
Anybody?
No?
Well, than can anybody tell me there failure rate on oem drives from different mfrs.? You know packed in anti-static bags and foam peanuts?
Aahh, maybe you're on to something.

 

[yesman88]

I've got 3 IBM ide drives running in two machines for 9 months, 2 of the drives die in front of me WITHIN LAST 2 WEEKS!!! I RMAed the first one 2 wks ago and yesterday I sent in the second one. I backed up my data on D drive so my data are ok but I'll need to reinstall WinXP again on BOTH machines.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM IBM if you need a reliable drive, go get WD or MAXTOR! Maxtor did have a bad reputation a while ago but seems ok since there DiamondMax drive came out. Fujitsu has a low return rate also but I think they don't make hard drives anymore. I know because I work at a computer store as a RMA service crew. The IBM return rate are like crazy these days...

 

[hansmuff]

<< I don't know about everyone else here, but I don't want to have the spend the money on two hard drives that contain the same data. I'd like to be able to stick my data on it and not have to worry about the fact that this brand has an unusually high failure rate. Yeah, maybe they're fast, but if I lose my data because of it, that performance didn't really do me that much good. Why not buy a drive that's about the same price but more reputable and be done with it?

edit: can't type >>



Because the "reputation" can't be easily determined by looking at a few posts on message boards. You'd need reliability data from the manufacturer (who gets the RMAs) to really make valid statements and pick a reputation. This data can't be obtained by any end user or even vendor as far as I know, so there we are in the dark. And again, if you comdemn a whole brand because of 1 bad product line, you're making a mistake. I am very sure that every HD manufacturer under the sun has had a bad line here and there, that's what RMA is for.

I have a little advice though and that is to just buy one large and slow drive for backups. The 40Gig 5400RPM drives can be had for cheap, and usually that's plenty to back up the really, truely important stuff. Further, you can use tools that make an image of your source drive and compress it, and then put it on your backup drive, to make even more use of the backup space. It all requires some planning of how to partition and set up things, but a cheap backup solution like this is fairly effective I think.

 

[RandomCoil]

Hi Hansmuff, ok if I have a reply-rant?

1) How different is a 75GXP from a 60GXP or a 120GXP? IBM has not said what causes the 75GXP drives to fail. The 60 and 120GXP drives incorporate components that have likely only evolved a little from the 75GXP drives. IBM has not said "this broke, we fixed it" they simply release new models with higher densities. The consumer will not know if the GXP line has been fixed until 12 months from now when the drives have had some time to... err.. mature.

2) I haven't observed a higher rate of failure with the newer GXP drives either, but they're not old enough to know. However, if you wanted a reliable car, would you buy a 2003 Honda or a Kia? There's probably not much data on the 2003 models yet; all you can do is go with the manufacturer's previous models.

3) More drives, more reported problems. Can't argue with that, but I don't know if the "number of drives sold" data supports it. I'm guessing the lawyers involved in the class action lawsuit have a better idea.

4) I'm not touching this one.

5) Yeah, you're probably right about the 8 hour thing being blown out of proportion. Kind of weird that the other manufacturers don't suggest that limitation (correct if wrong). My guess was that they expected the drives to last about a year running 24x7 so they just dived that number of hours by their warranty (3 years) so they would only have to replace half of them.

6) I, personally, wouldn't blame IBM for any data loss. I do keep backups, and I recognize that HDs do fail. IBM has stood by their warranty promptly replacing the drives that have failed. Their Drive Fitness Software is easy to use and appears to be quite good at finding problems. The RMA process is web-based and painless. That said, I do think 75GXP was a shoddy product and until IBM explains why and what they've fixed, or at least goes a couple of years without such an apparent problem, I would not recommend that others by IBM GXP drives. The performance difference between modern IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, and WD drives is trivial, as is the cost, and there's no reason to take the risk with IBM.

From a broader perspective, I think buying products very similar to ones involved in class action lawsuit is probably a bad idea, especially when an obvious alternative is available.

Oh yeah, sorry for "thread crapping" uwannawhat. No offense is intended.

That's it; feel free to flame

 

[hansmuff]

<< I've got 3 IBM ide drives running in two machines for 9 months, 2 of the drives die in front of me WITHIN LAST 2 WEEKS!!! I RMAed the first one 2 wks ago and yesterday I sent in the second one. I backed up my data on D drive so my data are ok but I'll need to reinstall WinXP again on BOTH machines.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM IBM if you need a reliable drive, go get WD or MAXTOR! Maxtor did have a bad reputation a while ago but seems ok since there DiamondMax drive came out. Fujitsu has a low return rate also but I think they don't make hard drives anymore. I know because I work at a computer store as a RMA service crew. The IBM return rate are like crazy these days... >>



While I certainly do not doubt the correctness of your statement, or your knowledge from working at a computer store, I would like to point something out to you concerning RMA. What you do not see is the whole RMA stats picture of a HD line. You could extrapolate your statistics, but IMO that's insufficient. What about all those places that buy HDs in lots for machines and whatnot, what about their failure rates ? Just looking at basic statistical concepts, I am inclined to say that a computer store's data is not sufficient.

I am thinking about something else. How cool would it be if there was a tool that read the S.M.A.R.T. data off your hard drives, encrypt it, put a key on it, and send it to a server. That server would store this as statistics and offer various selection criteria to determine the average number of drive problems on a large installed base ? The SMART data does contain some fields that show sector relocation statistics, power-up cycles, power-on hours, and all those kind of things. I think that would be neat, and if enough people run the tool, you could get input from thousands of users. The encryption of the data would circumvent tampering with it before it goes to the server. Ah, just a thought.

 

[RandomCoil]

<< TextAnd again, if you comdemn a whole brand because of 1 bad product line, you're making a mistake >>



Absolutely. I hereby only condemn IBM's GXP product line. I have no opinion on other IBM products, such as the AS400 servers.... other than I'd like to have one, I think. They don't use Deskstars usually, right?

I wonder who's going to be the first to start compaining about this thread going OT. Oh well.

 

[uwannawhat]

<< I wonder who's going to be the first to start compaining about this thread going OT. Oh well. >>



How about me~! (since I'm the one who started it)

Boy, you guys really tear away once you get started. I don't know much about the drive other than it's not as good as deal as I had thought.

Oh well, lots of interesting info/opinions here though.

Just glad I didn't get flamed like I did in one of my other threads that turned out to be cold as well.

 

[yesman88]

<< While I certainly do not doubt the correctness of your statement, or your knowledge from working at a computer store, I would like to point something out to you concerning RMA. What you do not see is the whole RMA stats picture of a HD line. You could extrapolate your statistics, but IMO that's insufficient. What about all those places that buy HDs in lots for machines and whatnot, what about their failure rates ? Just looking at basic statistical concepts, I am inclined to say that a computer store's data is not sufficient. >>



Well hamswuff, yes I only work for a small computer shop which sells custom build PCs and parts. But as a RMA guy I have a chance to talk to the RMA department of our vendors. My location is inside the Sillicon Valley and our vendors are well known in this field so the word from them is very valuable. It's my job to talk to different verdors like everyday and they told me the IBM drives DOES HAVE A VERY HIGH RETURN RATE THESE DAYS. They distibute many many HDs to different companies so I have to listen to their conclusion.

By looking at your previous thread sounds like you work for IBM or something. We are looking at the real life performance here not the soft data. Personally I like products from IBM that's why I bought 3 drives from them. But right now I wouldn't use these drives as my primary O/S drive because I can't afford losing data and losing time to reinstall my OS. I use WinXP because it's stable but if my drives are not then what's the point?

 

[Vette73]

Sorry but to all the people saying IBM is OK, then why are there tons of people talking about how there drives have failed but very few talk bad about Maxtor or others.

I have 2 old Maxtors a 8gig and 15 gig. Both out of warrenty and never had a problem, even to today.

Thats why when I built my new Athlon XP computer it was a easy answer to what hard drive to get, The new 740 Maxtor. Single platter, ata133, fast and safe. Got it and my Shuttle AK35GTR from Newegg.com

 

[Red Dawn]

hansmuff


<< would like to throw in some comments here.

1) The 75GXP has problems, we all know that. Nobody denies that. IBM replaces many RMAs with 60GXPs.
rant...rant...rant...
rant...rant...rant...
rant... I'm done ranting, thanks for reading.
>>



That and $.35 will get you a cup of coffee and not much else. It was a nice rant and if you worked for IBM they'd probably give you a promotion to their marketing division. Meantime, unless you can prove that you are more credible than tech's here and elsewhere who are reporting that they are seeing an alarming rate of failures regarding both the 60 and the 75 GXP drive, I think you better hold off calling them ignorant because from where I stand, it would be ignorant to disregard their reports and go out and spend your money on a product that just may be flawed. Hey if the reports turn out to be overeaction then fine, but it's always smart to play it safe and until IBM releases informatioin that can be verified showing that the 60 GXP isn't failing at a higher rate than the other drives it would be foolish for anyone to buy a 60, 75 or a 120 GXP series IDE Hard Drive from Big Blue.

 

[Fritzo]

<< ibm drives are terrible, breaks down in less then 6 months
maxtor bought quantum, another terrible hd quality. i'd stay away from both >>



Maxtor has been coming out with some good stuff for the last 2 years. They currently have one of the quietest drives on the market, and their reliability is a LOT better. They have a new "No questions asked" return policy, where if you run a diagnostic and it returns an error code, you get a new drive.

As for Quantum, they made one crappy product 4 years ago (the Bigfoot), and thier reputation never recovered. I have a 240 Fireball that's going on 8 years old that I use for portable storage, and it's still going strong!

 

[Devistater]

I have a long post here regarding the whole issue with FACTS and links to ibm's official specs for the drives:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=738373&STARTPAGE=2
Short version, in IBM's official specs, they say 333 hours a month (thats 11 hours a day approx) will get you a lifetime of 5 years. Do the math, that's 20,000 hours lifetime of the drive they say. And they say POWER ON HOURS and lifetime of drive. Run the drive 24/7 thats barely 2 years. And, they say 20% of that is when the drive is seeking/reading/writing. Thats under 4000 hours with the drive activly being used. In a server enviroment with the drive being used 24/7 that equates to under 6 months. Read the OFFICIAL specs from IBM about the drives, I have links to the 120gxp and the 60gxp.

 

[TranceNation]

<<
I am thinking about something else. How cool would it be if there was a tool that read the S.M.A.R.T. data off your hard drives, encrypt it, put a key on it, and send it to a server. That server would store this as statistics and offer various selection criteria to determine the average number of drive problems on a large installed base ? The SMART data does contain some fields that show sector relocation statistics, power-up cycles, power-on hours, and all those kind of things. I think that would be neat, and if enough people run the tool, you could get input from thousands of users. The encryption of the data would circumvent tampering with it before it goes to the server. Ah, just a thought. >>




while your at it, why not modify that tool to record keystrokes, store it to a file and send it along so we can get the user's passwords/credit card numbers.