<< you gotta hit ibm's "sounds of disaster" section on their site.
you can listen to different sounds that a drive makes when it crashes. see if your drive sounds like any of them.
what fun! >>
Yes I've listened to those before. Pretty cool, but I pity the ppl who had the hard drives that failed that way
I noticed your hot deal forums mistaken post about WTB a 120GXP when I did a search for IBM there, so I thought I'd post my thoughts on the issue here.
IBM officially reccomends a 333 hours power on usage per month (about 11 hours per day). Whats even WORSE is that they say they have a 5 year lifetime at that rate!! This is LESS than 20,000 hours of life for that hard drive! Most hard drives from other manufactures have a minimum of 100,000-200,000 hours MTBF, and in fact some high end scsi drives have over 1,000,000 hours MTBF. If you run the hdd 24/7, that's basically saying you will get around 2 years of life out of it, or 27 months. Now THAT is seriously sucky for a hard drive. I also found out recently when I checked the specs on the 60GXP series, that they have the same thing there. The 75GXP drives dont seem to say anything like that about the lifetime. It only lists something about how many times you it should be able to power up or something like that.
Note that the specs on lifetime and usage are around page 50, the page and paragraph (9.4.4 if I remember correctly) are also listed in the table of contents.
Official link to the 120gxp IBM specs page 50, section 6.6.3:
http://www-3.ibm.com/storage/hdd/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/89A712F4E70A87C487256AFF00595B6B/$file/D120GXP_sp30.pdf
This link is the last link on the following page, its the specs vs 3.0
http://www-3.ibm.com/storage/hdd/tech/techlib.nsf/products/Deskstar_120GXP
Previous link before edit, only goes to the one summary page
http://www-3.ibm.com/storage/hdd/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/E0B26749E1A7728C87256B290055ECA5/$file/D120GXP_ds.pdf
60GXP specs page 50, section 9.4.4:
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/prodspec/d60gxp_sp.pdf
Edited to update the links, and to put the following exact quote from the official specs, and the comments following it.
<< 6.6.3 Life
Expected product life is 5 years under typical desktop PC usage conditions:
333 Power-On Hours (POH) per month.
Seeking/writing/reading operations to be 20% of POH at 40 degrees C or lower enviromental temperature" >>
The first time I saw this, just the POH hours jumped out at me. Today I was looking at it again, it says only 20% of the POH lifetime is the drive actively being used. 20% of less than 20,000 hours is less than 4,000 hours expected life of drive when its being USED! This is less than 6 months in a server enviroment with 24/7 drive usage!!
http://www.storagereview.com
recently posted a rebuttel from IBM PR, in part it says "The 333 power-on spec is not an indication of a maximum number of power-on hours or limitation of the Deskstar 120GXP." This is pretty close to a lie, apparently the PR ppl at IBM don't read the official specs on the drive, it IS a lifetime rating of the drives, it says so in the docs. It says expected lifetime of 5 years under 333 POH. The math comes out to under 20,000 hour POH lifetime for the drive. Another quote from IBM on that page "IBM stands by the 3-year warranty for the 120GXP. Power-on hours will not be a determining factor in negating the warranty." What they dont tell you, is that the drive pretty much has to fail to be considered for replacement. If its just making weird clicking noises, they often will not replace it. I've replaced a drive before for making funky noises (I think it was a maxtor or WD) but apparently IBM doesn't do this normally. Still more reasons to steer clear, I will be reccomending to all my friends that they also steer clear.
Latest update, anandtech forums down for about an hour due to the 5th! IBM drive failing! Post from the webmaster here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=748415
Yet another update found this out on www.hardocp.com , IBM's RMA page for hardrives warn that if you accidently put in a serial for another product, you just voided that products warranty!! I mean I can understand the harddrive RMA page rejecting non hard drive RMAs from there, but voiding the warranty? What if I have several serials numbers written down for my computer parts and I accidently put in a non hard drive one? Jeez.
http://www.storage.ibm.com/warranty/jsp/arma31.jsp?ibmer=0
<< This page can only be used for HDD/Microdrive products. Please note "Any RMA created via this page for Non - HDD/Microdrive products will be rejected and your warranty voided". >>
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