Originally Posted by vaillaw
I have ThinkPad 600X and I am on my third hard drive. I am about to replace the 600X. I was thinking I would get a T40 but all the trouble with the hard drives has caused me to think seriously about alternatives. Am I over reacting and if not any suggestions for reliable notebooks.

Thanks
Bruce

Well,

I purchased a 80 gig gxp120, which died in 7 weeks of its life,
read all the speculation on the net about ibm not being reliable, and as ive always had ibms i stuck with them and got another GXP120, this time the 120gig model, this lasted a week, to be fair the drive still works but sounds like a jet plane.

that drive has gone back, I am now on drive 3, which is a SEAGATE barracuda,

First things to take note of, the seagate drive was packaged in a clear case, nice touch i thought, better than nothing, (alla ibm)
i like the anti shock device on the bottom of the drive too.

oh and its soooo silent you wouldnt imagine.

no more IBM for me.

Originally Posted by bertokamus
I\'ve been running a 75GXP 75 GB for almost a year now. In the same machine, I have a 120GXP 120 GB drive I bought in January. My machine, which I use as a server, has been physically powered up and running 99.9% of the time for the last 2-3 years, no kidding.

I have to say, I\'m absolutely terrified by everything I\'ve been reading about the 75GXP and 120GXP series, but thankfully both of mine have been performing flawlessly since purchase.

I once read that the greatest trauma a HDD endures is powering up and down... does anyone think that *rarely* cycling my drives has contributed to their performance so far?

IBM exiting the hard drive business is both good and bad news for consumers.

Good because of IBM's recent track record for reliability with their hard drives.

Bad because choices for hard drive manufacturers are getting more and more narrow with time. It was very unfortunate to see Fujitsu exit the hard drive market since I owned four of their hard drives and all of them were completely solid. I still have one now (the rest have been sold due to upgrades) and it is just as good and trustworthy as the day I bought it two years ago.

But as far as IBM is concerned, unless they would have been genuinely interested in improving reliability rates, losing them in the hard drive market is not necessarily a bad thing.

Despite the numerous reports of problems with IBM's hard drives, Maximum PC magazine has said in their most recent issue that the 120GXP is one of their top 2 picks for hard drives. To recommend a brand of hard drive that has been known to be problematic in recent times is shameful in my opinion. I think I speak for most users when I say that a slower more reliable hard drive is more desirable than a flaky and extremely fast drive. Do you really want to take a chance with your data?

Hmmmm.
Less competition in hard drives now, big time.
Fujitsu stated they are getting out of 3.5 inch drive market.
Maxtor buys Quantum.
IBM leaves the market.

Who have we left?
Samsung
Maxtor
Western Digital
Seagate

Hmmm. Bad, bad news.
Next minute you know Microsoft will buy one out and get into hardware in a big, big way.

<ExcessOrder sadly waves goodbye, hums mournful tune>

IBM, you've been good to me! I've still never personally seen a failed IBM drive, and use your stuff exclusively in my home boxen. Thanks for all the years of quality hardware.
EO

MadManOriginal - ...scoop up the IBM factories and IP...
Hitachi is not getting IBM's IP or drive technology patents. Just the plants and other hardware. IBM will continue to do lots of research, which they can probably make more money doing. The article says that they are negotiating, but that's BS. IBM makes a lot of money by licensing those patents to everyone else who makes HDs, and they aren't about to give that up.

If anyone hasn't noticed, IBM is pretty much abandoning manufacturing anything low margin. They are going to do services, research, and servers. The profitable stuff.

That logic just does not work... Yes IBM makes a lot of drives, but what is important is what [iercentag/i] of this number are failures.

Sheesh people, GXP75 was a true wreck, GXP60 have sofar BETTER failure statistics than most other manufacturers on any place i have seen such being kept.
Meanwhile the GXP120 is sofar even better.
The big reason for so many people getting IBM drive failures is simple, VERY simple, IBM is one of the biggest makers of HDDs; people count differently, but even by the most "negative" count IBM HDDs still end up as one of the 3 most made, although mostly they end up as number 1.

#17 MadManOriginal, about GXP120:

http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3465

75GXP 30GB churning along nicely still.... the recent crash I had was actually related to a faulty video card. Whew!

Yeah, too bad an already-good HD company like WD, Seagate or Maxtor couldn't scoop up the IBM factories and IP and actually make the damn things work as well as they should. Oh, well. Glad I got a WD1200JB...I was soooo close to getting a GXP120. No evidence of poor quality yet, but you never know.

I have an i-Series Thinkpad with a TravelStar hard drive. It's actually been a reliable notebook. It's survived two years of law school, plus my first year in practice, with little fuss. It came with Win98, but I took that off and put Win2K on it. It won't play DVDs well anymore since it's got only a Celeron 433 in it. But it's great to surf off line during especially dry depositions :-)

The Swamp

Originally Posted by Dj Easy Dick
Yes my friend you are bold...

I\'m currently running a 30gb 75GXP as my main drive...

But are you also, daring?

It\'s predecessor was RMA\'d.

I\'m waiting for this one to die so I have a [boo/b] reason to upgrade...

(No backups :D )

Originally Posted by KIlroy1231
AG13... I have an IBM Thinkpad (600X) and it has an IBM hard drive in the thing

Anybody have an IBM Stinkpad? If you do, open it up and take a look at the harddrive. It's most likely a Hitachi drive. They're pure shite. I work for IBM, everybody in my department has a laptop. Most of us have had our drives die after a YEAR of service. Mine died two weeks after a coworker's died. We got the laptops on the same day. When I got my replacement, I was shocked at how slow the previous drive had grown over the course of the year of usage. The difference was phenomenal. If you think that Hitachi getting IBM's HD business is a good thing, or might fix the problems, I advise you to think again.

wow, you people have [i]terribl/i] luck with hardware! Only piece I have ever had die an early death on me was my BH6 mobo *sniff* b/c I was running a CuMine Celeron in it through a slot adaptor w/ 2.3 V :) Killed one of the voltage regulator MOSFETS.

/me knocks on wood, er, head...

I am lucky my 30GB IBM 75GXP is still going I guess. I just had a new 40GB WD die start to have CRC error, I RMA'd that and the drive I got as a replacement ran for about 1 day before it would not power up. Using the GXP in the mean time.. sigh..

IMHO quality just sucks. I guess I'll go back to Seagate..

[quote]We can only hope that any quality control issues, whether actual or merely perceived, will be resolved by this partnership.[/quote]

um, I'll go out on a limb and lean to "actual" quality control issues. IBM's plant in Hungary released crap drives for about a month or two... had 2, 75GXPs go down. Both manufactured in Hungary, both in that time frame and both have been replaced by 60GXPS after failing.

IBM was my favorite drive maker back in the day: high performance, reliable drives. Something "Bad" has happened since then.

Let us hope that Hitachi can fix what is very obviously broken.

Regarding RAID and cooling, etc.: I have four 400BBs and my 1200JB in a single drive cage, top to bottom, maybe 3 or 4mm between each drive and the next... Yet they barely break room temp! Get a drive cage with a bit of room around the front and make sure the drive cage makes a sort of 'tube' around the drives. Put a 80 or 92mm fan in the front, and seal off the larger air gaps.

Just this relatively small amount of air will keep those drives cooler, since the air is forced to keep moving constantly.

D'oh!

You'd think that with RAID becoming mainstream, hard drives would be designed with that as a consideration. Those Seagates are supposed to be really nice, too. I've always had good luck with Maxtors. I wonder how good they are in RAID arrays?

The Swamp

ag 5:

you might want to rethink the seagate barracudas in RAID config; I read over at the www.storagereview.com forums that the barracuda IV's don't do too well in RAID (sometimes performing worse than in single-drive mode). Seagate says that it's due to single-drive optimization in the firmware, and some seagate engineers have unofficially said they're working on it...

Originally Posted by dissonance
I\'m thinking about putting a pair of 60GXPs in my main rig, just with RAID 1 and plenty of spacing and cooling. I run 24/7, but I have some automated regular backups, and figure the RAID will save me in case of a catastrophe.... I just really want to ditch this single 20GB Maxtor I\'m running now, heh.

It's just as well, I guess. After having as many problems as IBM did with their 75GXP line, then stonewalling everyone who tried to find out what was going on, it was going to be a long climb out of the ditch, provided they could even climb out at this point. I had two IBM SCSI UltraStars in a RAID 1 die on me within minutes of each other. I have three 60GXPs I ordered last year still in their packing box, still wondering what to do with them. Maybe I'll build a Folding box and stick them in there. That way, if the drives blow up, I won't lose my life's work. I think my next hard drive purchase is going to be those quiet Seagates in a RAID 0. Sigh.

The Swamp

May they rest in peace. At least they won't be making Death er Deskstars anymore.

I have just RMA'ed my IBM SCSI 36 GB hard drive.

taps please

you mean it wasn't repackaged asian hardware all along!!?? :)

JQ