IBM hard drives

[Tremo]

I like the Deskstars and Ultrastars. They're fast and quiet. But I hear there's one model to be avoided because of reliability issues. Which one? I'm looking for a pair of 40 gig drives for use in a RAID 0 array. How about the new model that uses glass platters (120GXP family or some such)?

What about the Maxtors?

Thanks.

[Toejam31]

Avoid the 75GXP series. That one was so bad, there's a class action lawsuit in the works.

That tends to make me a little nervous, because I'm running two of them in my main system, and one has already been replaced.

The IBM drives have had glass substrate platters since March of 2000, starting with the 75GXP series.

The newest IBM drives are so new I really can't attest to their reliability yet. But since the problems with the older drives seemed to be solved with the 60GXP series, perhaps the latest drives from the company are similarly okay.

I'm very fond of the new Maxtor drives, especially the D740X series. (I prefer the ones with the liquid bearing motors, but they are hard to locate ... a very popular item.) They seem to be very fast and relatively quiet. I've installed quite a few over the past three or four months, and I have not yet been forced to send one back, which I think is relatively unusual when you buy in bulk. I suppose that I am overdue to get a bad one soon!

Toejam31

My Rig: Toejam31's Tantalizing Tantric Toy (http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847)

[Phrost.E]

Hi chaps.

Lucky me. I got 2 GXP75s (2 x 30.7GB) running RAID. About a month ago it was looking like one of the drives was screwed when my array went T.U. due to a slightly loose power connector. After the failure, formatting the drives would progress so far and then halt with a horrible grating sound. NOT HEALTHY! Fortunately my trusty P90 laptop was on hand so I could download IBM's Drive Fitness Test. The diagnostics immediately found problems with the disk surface, and to my surprise gave me the option to repair the problem as opposed to just giving me a fault code.

I think the util actually did something other than just marking bad sectors, because when I reinitialised the RAID array the capacity was exactly the same as before (without the bad sectors and horrible noise). I assume there was some sort of low-level formatting going on as ALL data was nuked including partition tables etc.

Anyway, it worked and one month later all is still going well. However, I'm sure that once-upon-a-time IBM had a world-class reputation for building excellent hard disks. What went wrong?

[Kurylo]

Yeah, those 75GXP were really made by the a$$h01e$.
Note that I use 60GXP and it is very fast (7200RPM), actually one of the fastest between IDE HDDs and durable.