If you're considering getting the 40GB IBM hard drives, ensure that the drives
are NOT Deskstar 60GXP or 75GXP drives. The 60GXP is more commonly
known in the
PC market as the IBM "Deathstar" because of its very high failure rate. The
75GXP wasn't quite as bad but it's failure rate is also abysmal. Any other IBM
drives ought to be alright.
While there were many reports of failed 75GXPs, one should also keep in mind that it was one of the most wildly popular hard drives ever. Even a normal failure rate with a drive that popular would cause a huge number of reported failures in the usual forums.
I have yet to see a report of an actual failure rate for the drive. If the info is out there, I'd like to see it, but as I recall, when the anecdotal reports were giving the 75GXP a bad rep, no one could come up with any actual figures that confirmed that the drive really was failure prone.
Look at it this way. If a normal drive sells 100,000 units, and 1 in 10,000 fails then you'll get 10 failures and some small percentage of those will post their experience somewhere on the net. Say one in ten, so one person reports a failure. No one notices.
If the 75GXP sold 10,000,000 units and 1 in 10,000 failed then 1000 drives fail. Then 100 people report their failure on the net and it gets noticed. Once it is noticed some of the other 900 folks who wouldn't ahve normally posted, think, hey, I've got one of those, and they post that their drive failed too.
Anyway, the 75GXP might have a greater failure rate than other drives. My point is simply that it had a huge number of sales and so one can't rely on the number of anecdotal reports of failure to determine the rate of failure. We need an actual failure *rate* report. It may be out there. I never saw one, but that doesn't mean much.
Jeff Walther
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