IBM Deskstar ATA 100 problems: your verdicts, please.....

[Hullboy]

Okay, so I've got two pcs and one monitor. One pc's connected to the monitor, I use VNC to see what's up on the other (but I have the monitor connected to the second one when I boot it up so it posts okay...................

Both pcs are up and running. The one I VNC into has a 100ATA hard drive, it's an IBM Deskstar 60GXP. I'm working on one, the other is just ticking over, when suddenly I hear a high pitched squeek from my IBM deskstar, then when I check the VNC, the screen has frozen up.

I switched the monitor over to see if it was the network card that was a problem, but I still can't do anything, so I decide to hit reset and go for a reboot. On reboot my Asus A7V cannot detect the ATA100 drive (which it always does normally). I hit the power-off, then try again, and it posts and boots up fine.

The question: I've heard some hectic tales about the IBM deskstar 60GXP - so who thinks I should be worried?

Thanks in advance for the input on this..............

 

[Double Trouble]

Welcome, my friend, to the loooooong list of people that have gotten these defective Deskstar drives. Last I heard, there was a class action lawsuit underway against IBM for making and selling these defective drives.

Your drive is toast, make a backup of all your data, and run IBM's DFT (Drive Fitness Test) on the drive. With the code returned by DFT you can RMA the drive and get another one from IBM, but be prepared to wait a long time, they aren't particularly quick about it. :|

I got 2 75GXP drives in a RAID array, and both of them failed within a year -- one after about 4 months, then the other after about 10 months. No more IBM drives for me.......

 

[Athlex]

Hullboy, the squeak you're hearing may be the drive parking the read arm. When shutting down the computer or putting the drive in sleep mode, the arm parks itself off of the disk platters to make it more resistant to damage while being transported. Why it would be doing this at random is beyond me, but it might explain the sound and the freezup if the drive did indeed stop.

tagej, I thought the 60GXPs had these problems ironed out... Not so huh?