IBM GXP Hard Drive fiasco

[Julio Franco]

The possibility of serious reliability problems with certain of IBM's GXP-series hard drives has been well documented. High failure rates may have forced IBM's decision to sell its hard drive business to Hitachi, and anecdotal evidence has been overwhelming, failures of replacement drives, and struggles to get IBM to honor its warranties. The fiasco led to the filing of a class-action lawsuit against IBM on behalf of GXP failure victims. However, IBM has consistently denied unusually high failure rates on its GXP drives.

 

[werty316]

Denial? Are the people who work at IBM on crack. I had an 75GXP 45.6gig HD and it had a mechcanical failture about a year later. Denial my you know what. Then tell me this IBM, why did you sell your had drive buisness to Hitachi? EH? EH?. I'll never trust anything from you IBM again. Who's with me? :grinthumb

 

[Nic]

Fujitsu had a similar issue and they also bailed out of the desktop hard drive market. I had four Fujitsu drives and three of those failed. Getting a replacement was a pain as profit margins on hard drives are so low that manufacturers can't afford to admit responsibility for issues. Luckily, all the IBM drives since those GXP60/GXP75 series have been pretty reliable. Finding a reliable hard drive these days relies a lot on luck as I've experienced failures from all manufacturers and they are all pretty much equal in terms of reliability these days. Just make sure you buy one with a three year warranty.

 

[vassil3427]

I have to agree there, I had a 100GB WD SE HDD for about a year and it died recently, took almost a month to get a replacement.....Any HDD can fail...They're all flawed mechanical drives...

 

[werty316]

I have a 80gig seagate and it has been running smoothly for over 2 years now. My bro has the same drive but is got corrupted because he was using a crappy 300W generic power supply. He also had a 60gig Maxtor which died twice because of hte same reason. A good quality power supply is one key to a good working hard drive. Less power-off power-ons help too.

 

[dani_17]

Hey, it's not "Driver Failure", its defective design.

Search yahoo with the string "ibm deathstar" and you'll see.

I lost 2 80 gig drives because. Both head crashed. I didn't loose any info because I always backup my data. Any drive can fail, but the case of the GXP line of drives is because there is something wrong in the design.

Of course ibm denies it, what would you expect? Ain't buying nothing from IBM or Hitachi anymore.

 

[Per Hansson]

*cough* perhaps there is a reason you wont find a IBM harddrive in a IBM server *cough*