From: Jeff Walther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:43:44 -0600 At 16:36 -0600 12/18/2003, Drew Beckett wrote:
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
Nicely put Jeff, I of course would like to add my 2 cents worth ;-)
This question came up before. The failure rate of these drives will likely never be known. When a company the size of IBM is sued in a class action suit for defective products facts seem to disappear fast. When i reported to the group sometime back that IBM was no longer on my small list of approved drives. Because of the defective drives. i was attacked (not that anyone should care what I think). Proof was demanded as to where I had gotten my info. When i did my google search it was enlightening as to why I was disbelieved. Amazingly google which lists everything had nothing to say on the subject! News reports i read no longer showed up anywhere. Well lucky for me Mike at xlr8yourmac.com still had the news reports and other info on the subject on his fine site. So i was able to post quotes which seemed to get me off the nut list as least for a while ;-) Then of course list members started having their personal problems with the drives.
IBM's first response was to say these drives were never meant to run 24/7.In fact they kept selling them and labeled them in small print as only being meant to run 8 hours a day. In the end public outrage forced them to honor the 3 year warranty no matter if they were ran 24 hours a day. They also sold the hard drive devision to Hitachi and soon the IBM name will no longer appear on hard drives. Any drives with the IBM name on them are old stock. The price was right and I bought a Hitachi hard drive last week. Still has the Deskstar name but not IBM. Time will tell how well it lasts.
Currently a google search was more informative on the subject. IBM has refused to admit the failure rate as being more then 2 % of drives sold. Saying that it was well within industry standards. While other hard drive companies are quoted as saying rates should always be well under 1 %. Jeff is of course correct the company sold countless numbers of these drives so small percentages add up quickly.
More telling are quotes from Dealers selling finished PC's at retail. Dealers are quoted as saying the failure rate was more like 50-60 percent based on returns to retails stores. They were forced to switch to other brands of drives to protect their business.
The drives were it turns out new technology that used glass plates rather then metal plates as in the past. The glass plates were coated with thin metal which for what ever reason flaked off the glass causing failure. IBM quickly went back to the metal plates keeping everyone in the dark about these changes pretending to have no idea why the drives had failed. There maybe companies currently using glass plates but you can bet the process has been improved .
Sorry if I bored you with too much info on something you had no interest in.
Will S
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