IBM Deskstar Drives

I used IBM drives for years - specified them for all our client PCs in fact. Paid a little more but worth it for rock solid drives.

Recently I have had bad experiences at home. 3 of the drives munched themselves with a period of 6 months or so. Slowly but effectively started growing bad sectors and trashing files.

I'm back to Western Digital drives now so the crisis seems to be over but I was wondering if this was an isolated bit of bad luck (2 of 2 PCs at home and 3 of 3 IBM drives) or is there a problem with their 30-40Gb Deskstar series of drives.

2K pro and APC UPS so I doubt it was a power problem of any sort.

 

Newt,

I don't know about your model, but there's a class action suit pending against IBM now due to major problems with the Deskstar 75GXP drives. More info here:

http://www.sheller.com/ibmclassaction.htm

 

Now that is just scary. I ran an IBM utility on my drive a while back that supposedly checked the total condition of my drive (30GB 75GXP). It gave me a message along the lines of 'death is imminent', but I had no other indications of problems so I ignored it.

I guess I will have to make sure I back up my data on a more regular basis now that I know others are having problems.

Hex92

 

Hex92

You might want to run that diagnostic program again, then call IBM with the error code. Last I knew, IBM had an advance replacement warranty on their drives - give them a credit card number and they'll send you a new drive. You've got 30 days to return the old drive after receiving the new one, which is plenty of time to transfer the data from the dying drive to the new one and ship the old one back.

 

Thanks for the info. I will get moving on that right away.

Hex92

 

I have five machines on a home-office network. I have IBMs it two of them. Both IBM Deskstars have gone south in the last three months. One was well over a year old and the other was about 8 months. I shipped the latter just today back to IBM.

 

By the way, they refused me an advance replacement, citing they don't have any replacements in stock.

I wonder what I should infer from that?

 

Though there are a some bad apples in the bunch, IBM probably makes the best IDE hard drives available today. The IBM 60GXP is the fastest IDE hard drive you can buy so I'll keep using them until one fails prematurely.

 

Well I'm in the same boat only my problems were much bigger.
I have bought 6 IBM Deskstar 15gig drives over the last year and all have gone bad. 4 were in a Win2K server in a Mirror+Stripe array. One went bad and I replaced not a problem in a mirror array just swap the drive and keep cooking. But then I had 2 drives die at the same time. Now that was ugly! My supplier replaced all 6 without any problems but that didn't help the 36+ hours it took me to get a domain controller back up.
All the drives appeared to do the same thing, you could hear the read/write heads sweep back and forth like windsheild wipers.