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IBM Hard Drives

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matrixzen

Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2003
Location
CA
Yesterday I was told that my mother's computer was making clicking sounds. When I went over to examine it, the clicking was comming from the hard drive. I already know this clicking doom song for hard drives. I just turned off the computer and figured I'd fix it later since I had alot of things to do. This started to make me wonder. Are IBM hard drives really the best at some say? Where I work, my co-admin said he used an IBM before in his computer and it died on him. My other friend, who told me IBM was good, used an IBM for a few years. He later upgraded to a WD 120GB because the drive died on him. After seeing all these IBM drives fail, it made me wonder whether or not they're anygood. From now on I'm going with Western Digital or Maxtor because I've never had problems with them.

Now do you have any comments about it or experiences with IBM drives that were bad or good?
 
I wouldn't trust that poll at all.....

Lets see, Quantum, Fujitsu, and Samsung are no longer around.....well Samsung is but not like they used to be. Its odd that Hitachi didnt get a bad rating since there drives are nothing more then IBM drives.

Lets see, Iv had two WD die on me, Iv had two Seagate's die on me, I have a old 1.2GB samsung that has some issues. MY 30GB IBM drive just had a IDE pin brake off. I'v only owned one Maxtor drive, a 15GB 5400rpm drive still running flawless to this day.

I dont think there is one HD brand that is worse then the others.....
 
To understand that poll I think you have to understand the context... IBM got a TON of BAD publicity over some of their Deathstar series of hard drives which were basically defective. I don't know if all of their drives are really bad, or if it was mainly just the deskstar which was bad.... But a lot of people think all of their hard drives suck just because they know about the deathstar problems.

Atleast thats what I think. Dunno how accurate that is.
 
I have a 1 gig IBM still running smoothwall in a P2 400 system. So I did not vote IBM but the only drive that has failed on me is a seagate. I use WD mostly.
 
DragonFire said:
There was a problem with some of there Deskstar drives but it was only certain models with certain capacities. I think it was some 20, 30, and 60GB drives that had the problem.

Exactly, my 40gb is still working great. But I RMA'd my 60gb long time ago.
 
I.M.O.G. said:
To understand that poll I think you have to understand the context... IBM got a TON of BAD publicity over some of their Deathstar series of hard drives which were basically defective. I don't know if all of their drives are really bad, or if it was mainly just the deskstar which was bad.... But a lot of people think all of their hard drives suck just because they know about the deathstar problems.

Atleast thats what I think. Dunno how accurate that is.
I RMA'ed my Deathstar no less three times, and got the click of death every time, until I finally gave up. It was a 30.7 gigger. Maybe all 30.7's were bad, but they should've figured something out by the third RMA, shouldn't they...? My dad's old laptop was an IBM, and although his hard drive never died, it began to click a lot after a year of usage and corrupted some data. I also got a 10 GB IBM from a friend, after it lost all of its data. I've been using it for nearly a year now, very warily. As far as I'm concerned, nearly all IBM hard drives have some serious issues, and now that I'm hearing that these are popping up in the new Hitachi drives as well, I'll be avoiding them for quite a while now.
 
I don't have any direct experience with IBM DeskStar IDE HDD's (as I bought into the hype and avoided purchasing IBM desktop hard disks because of the DeathStar incidents).

However, IBM's UltraStar 7200-15000 RPM SCSI drives have faithfully served in my server cluster here at home (2 sets of 3x UltraStar 18.2 GB), my dual XP2400 system (6x UltraStar 18.2GB & 1x WD 9.1 GB 10K) and countless other SCSI servers I've built for file server, e-mail server & database server duty. I've had a few die from normal wear & tear, but none developed the "click of death" or just decided to stop working.

Hopefully Hitachi will continue to produce UltraStars of the utmost quality that I've come to expect from IBM's SCSI division. :)
 
It was the 60 gxp and 75 gxp series harddrives by IBM which had the problem. I have had drives die on me from every manufacturer I have tried. The best advice I can give is to backup your data and backup often you never know when that drive will not boot and will be unrecoverable. As for your moms drive you should have backed up the data the second you found out about the problem just in case it wont boot and can not be accessed.
 
It's all good. All our important data is stored on the server which has several data copies on multiple hard disks.
 
Well it was the IBM 75GXP (and 60GXP too maybe?) series that had serious problems - stay away from those. Also with IBM's 120GXP series they said that you should only run it something like 333 hours per month as a recommendation so they had some somewhat bad publicity for that too (but running it more than that supposedly won't void your warranty or anything.) I actually have a friend that has had a 120GXP for a while (at least a year, maybe two) and runs his PC 24/7 pretty much all the time and hasn't had problems.
 
scottmso said:
Well it was the IBM 75GXP (and 60GXP too maybe?) series that had serious problems - stay away from those. Also with IBM's 120GXP series they said that you should only run it something like 333 hours per month as a recommendation so they had some somewhat bad publicity for that too (but running it more than that supposedly won't void your warranty or anything.) I actually have a friend that has had a 120GXP for a while (at least a year, maybe two) and runs his PC 24/7 pretty much all the time and hasn't had problems.


You should only run it like 333 hours per month? what a joke.
 
One of my friends has had a working 60gb IBM deskstar for about two years. I was surprised, because all the IBM drives I have used have died within 6-12 months. Also, I have only had one other drive die on me: it was an 8gb Seagate from an old emachine computer, so I don't blame Seagate - in fact Seagate is my favorite drive manufacturer.
 
Here at work we have gone through at least 10-12 20 gig IBM drives all failing. I myself have an 80gig, and it has worked great for 3 years so far. Although I am planning on just getting a nice SATA drive sometime soon (from a different manufacturer) to replace it and turn it into a backup drive (an oxymoron I know).
 
I had one of those Deskstar's a 45gig and I RMA'd it 4 times before they finally gave me a different drive.
 
My 2 IBM desktars 120GXP are still huming along... after more than 2 years. (and they have had a bit of abuse and overclock).
 
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