IBM 120GXP Revisited 360
Andrew sent us a link to an article about the
IBM 120gxp controversy.
This is about the fact that the drive has been declared unfit for server use,
and to back that up, IBM says you should only use it for 333 hours a month.
This is a good summary of the issues and worth a read.
So what are they good for? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they aren't good for the server market, the 120GXP aren't good for anything- since what regular home user ever needs that much space?
Oh, and BTW, the article also mentions problems with the 75X and 40X drives.
Conclusion- Somebody at IBM QA has screwed up- vote with your $$, folks, and make IBM take notice of this problem- we should not have to replace a HD after only 1 year (or less!) of use!
Because online polls are completely meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, I find this whole debate intriguing. Firstly there is the fact that the 75GXP was a very big seller (performance and value packed into one), so the industry standard failure rates indicate that with normal failure rates there will still be more people with failed drives. Anecdotally I can say that myself, and several other people I know, have had zero problems with our 75GXP, but following standard Slashdot-esque thought processes I should extrapolate that out and say that therefore no one has every had a problem, and therefore the drive is perfect. I have heard stories about people who had to "replace it X times!", but in almost all cases you'll find that they grossly inproperly installed the drive with no venting space on both sides (and this is a case with drives from any manufacturer. I had a Maxtor die and opened the case to find that the OEM had sandwiched it between two other drives).
I saw an interview with one of the plaintiffs against IBM, and I'd swear I saw them subtly shift gears from saying that the 75GXP had a higher failure rate (I would guess that that they can't find numbers to back that up, and no numbers determined by a Slashdot polling are not sufficient to convince anyone but the converted), to saying that instead this is a lawsuit expressing outrage about any failures, and it is really a bellwether against all hard drive makers. Uh huh. Now there's this article that is basically thrown off by standard marketing and reliability metrics: The drive IS made for desktop use, and desktop use is normally about 8 hours a day of infrequent use, versus 100% usage 24 hours a day for some server drives. Perhaps they simply realize that the latter will naturally have a higher failure rate so they built that into the server drive prices, but they don't guarantee that for desktops? The article makes the contention that it is a usage heat issue, but that seems a bit silly as the drive will reach maximum temperature minutes after going to 100% usage (i.e. It's not still creeping upwards after 8 hours).
Re:why not set up a /. poll to help collect data? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides, the poll title would have to be "Rant about your stupid fucking DeskStar HDD that ate your term paper here". The trolls would have a field day.
I've had no trouble with DeskStars myself, as long as they're kept cool and not put in a situation where thier duty cycle exceeds 40% or so. Anything above that means SCSI to me, anyway. Right tool for the job and all that, y'know?
Soko
hard drive superstition (Score:5, Insightful)
While large numbers of readers responded to the questions I posed regarding drive reliability, their emails present very different pictures. Some of you swear by IBM drives and their reliability, while listing many of the Seagate, Maxtor, or WD drives you've seen fail in both a corporate and a consumer setting, while other readers had horror stories of seeing IBM drive after IBM drive bite the dust.
On the general topic of hard drive reliability, I've noticed a similar trend -- every sysadmin to whom I speak seems to have a poorly-founded personal hatred for one hard drive manufacturer. Sure, I admit, having a hard drive fail on you really sucks (esp. if you've been lazy with backups and don't have RAID).
What's weird about this is that people who are otherwise rational will take a single experience with a bad drive and use it to justify an opinion that all drives from that manufacturer are unreliable. It reminds me of D&D players who will, after rolling a d20 four or five times, decide that it "rolls high."
Here's the deal: hard drives fail. Get over it and design your systems such that your important data isn't relying on a single hard drive. In fact, two of my hard drives (a Quantum and an IBM) are slowly failing on me right now. Before that, the last one was a Seagate.
Now, I will admit that there must be some models from some manufacturers which are more prone to failure, just as there are probably some d20s which are prone to "roll high." Perhaps some manufacturers tend to make more reliable drives than others. However, in all the times I have heard someone bitch about a hard drive manufacturer, not once has someone referred to a study that did a statistically sound comparison of drives (I'm not sure that one even exists that compares, over time, all the various models of the manufacturers). It's always "Seagate sucks! A Seagate drive failed on me once, and I had to do a bare-metal recovery."
Of course, in this case, lots of people have reported problems with this drive, so it's a little different. If, sometime in the near future, someone tells me not to buy a cheap-ass OEM IBM IDE drive to use in a critical server, saying "remember the 120GXP?", I'll probably listen to them. However, based on my limited anecdotal evidence, I doubt that will happen
</rant>
Re:Yes, yes, we get the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, maybe you were just trolling, but with your low UID I will give you a chance.
What drive manufacturer do you think is good then? From random reviews I was starting to think that IBM was one of the better ones. I have purchases several Western Digital ones and have had too many of them fail (for me that is). Therefore, I have been looking for a better HD manufactuer. Who makes the most reliable HDs today?
Re:Because online polls are completely meaningless (Score:2, Insightful)
How about this. I'm a CS major at Carnegie Mellon. I have computers and techies (with lots of hard drives) all around me. In *three years* at this college, I've only seen three hard drives fail in computers of people on my floor. They were all this year, and all were IBM GXP drives.
I agree that IBM Deskstars used to have an excellent reputation for quality, quiet running, and performance, but things can change -- a brand name does not reliability make. Sorry, of all the drives IBM has released recently, there are severe reliability problems.
It kind of sucks, given that IBM as a company is a really cool place and helps out Linux quite a bit, but I'd have to say -- don't buyIBM hard drives.
Now, there's another quick fix. For some reason, people are always anal about buying 7200 or even 10000 rpm drives. Why? You have a performance difference *only* when copying very large files from one high-speed drive to another. The hard drive is not the limiting factor when downloading/uploading over the network, not the limiting factor when installing stuff from CD-ROMs or burning, and not the limiting factor for general use. A big RAM cache will speed things up by a factor of slightly over a thousand (with modern RAM/HD speeds), if something can fit in your cache. Even a 10000 rpm drive will give less than twice the raw max transfer rate than a 5400 rpm drive.
I can't figure out why people buy 7200/10000 drives. 5400 drives are cheaper. They're quieter. They're more reliable. And even in an *ideal* situation for a 10000 drive, where you're copying large files at full bore from HD to HD (generally NOT an operation that requires a minimum speed), the best performance increase you can get is less than double your current 5400 rpm performance.
Spend the money you saved on 256 MB of RAM and watch the bigger cache make a *real* speed difference for almost all hard drive work. Or almost any other component of the computer.
7200/10000 drives really, really suck.
Re:don't buy IBM drives (Score:1, Insightful)
A) You get what you pay for. Pay a few more bucks, buy from a big established vendor and you won't have to hassle with drives that have already been returned (same goes true for "new" (refurbished) monitors...pay a bit extra, buy from a reliable retailer).
B) You get what you pay for -- a cheap SCSI drive is not going to be any more reliable than an IDE drive. You get the better reliability when you're paying more.
C) Buy 5400 rpm drives instead of 7200 rpm drives. They're cheaper, quieter, more reliable, cooler, and have a worst-case scenerio of being 30% slower than the 7200 drives. Pop some RAM into your computer to cache your data and you'll be fine.
How to buy hardware: (Score:1, Insightful)
1) Choose device, lets call it X.
2) Search for linux drivers for X. If less than 2 found, go back to 1, choose different device
3) Google: "X sucks" "X fails" "X problems" "X conflict" "X.company sucks" "X.company uses cheap labor" If anything found. go back to 1.
4) Buy device, keep all receipts.
Please explain one thing - overclocking?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Heat and power fluctuations sound like much more likely external issues. Either that or there's simply an internal flaw that didn't show up in testing. Wouldn't be the first time that's occured now would it? I still recall the grease problem seagate had years ago where heads would get mired in the stuff. A quick "twist start" would usually free them up but if you shut them down and allowed them to cool it would stick again. I replaced DOZENS of those damned htings doing field service. when I hit up a Seagate rep at a show about it he officially denied the problem - and then proceeded to tell me off-record just how bad it was. I didn't buy a Seagate drive for awhile afterwards