I know it was rumored that the problematic drives came from the Hungarian plant... was this ever confirmed?

Just don't get it, I have 2 of these drives running in Raid 0 without a hitch for years now. Go figure.

Jeebus... we've known that the failure rate was true, but the internal mess is...wow.

I wonder what www.storagereview.com 's database shows...

I have a 30GB 75GXP drive, and it occasionally generate "click of death" noise". After I've update the firmware, and zero-fill the drive, it works perfectly ever since.

Guys, so the problem CAN be fixed with firmware update follow by a zero-fill (provided if the drive's condition isn't too bad).

I have one 60GB 120GXP and 2 x Hitach 160GB 7K250. These ones have worked perfectly, and the performance is awesome.

So this problem only existed on 75GXP and 60GXP drives, not for the later families (120GXP, 180GXP, ......)

One of my friend had a WD 120GB die on him (after 1/2 yr of usage), he RMA it and the next one die soon after.....

I bought three of them -- five (two of them warranty replacements) have died, the most recent one coming last week. I don't bother with RMA anymore.

I have three 20 gig 60 GXP's in my closet now. One is dead and two were set up in a RAID-0 config before I got nervous and replaced them with a Seagate. The living 2 drives are collecting dust. Maybe I will put them in a folding box and/or some other non-critical application.

The Deskstars were great drives, very fast and quiet, but/for some deadly flaw that still has never been disclosed. I've had 3 Ultrastars go bad on me, and 2 IBM notebook hard drives die. At this point, I'd be curious to know what caused all of these dead drives.

Mine were made in Thailand and they both failed, now one of the two replacements has also failed. My friend had 4 replacements in a row fail. The hassle he went through should be compensated by FAR more than the original cost of his drive.

My 100 gig has been running strong for 2 years now. Can I still get money from IBM?

or better yet a free Thinkpad?

#11
Hey Brew' as far as I know, it was only confirmed by my personal experience. The drives that failed for us were all made in Hungary. The smaller IBM's we have still working were made in Thailand.

edit: didn't these drives feature the "ceramic" platters? or was that something else, I recall?

i had a 40 gig ibm gxp drive while i was in college & didn't have money to replace it when it started the click of death.

i just kept using that peice of crap until i couldn't take the bi-monthly data loss anymore.

I have some of the 45gig 75GXPs and they gave trouble until I upgraded the firmware. Over a year since the update and no problems with any of them. http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&q=DTLA&uid=psg1MIGR-4...

I've got a pair of 40GB 60GXP drives that have never given me any trouble. I had a 45GB 75GXP drive that died. IBM cheerfully replaced it under warranty with a new 60GB GXP that continues to work reliably. I have no complaints about that level of service.

Anyone have any comments on the reliability (or lack thereof) of the rebranded IBM drives that Hitachi is selling now?

Still running 30GB model GXP for years on the other computer. No spectacular crashes yet... in fact it recovered back every time when there was a problem.

I have one 60 gig Deathstar left....can't run an OS on it at all because it constantly develops bad sectors. using it to store non critical data.

Maybe i can do something with the 4 dead ibm drives. One of which was a replacement, that ibm had sent to me. Horrible, horrible what ibm has done. I have personally watch friends lose gigs of personal data, telling them their hard drive died was like telling them a love one had pass away. Crys of, "isnt there anything you can do to save it?" still haunts me. I might sound a little sarcastic, which is true, but every thing is 100% true.

At work, Dell voluntarily replaced all of the GXP's we had in our systems (10/50) with similar maxtor's/WD's. They didn't even question it when I called about the first one that died after less than a year.

A few years ago when I built my desktop system I decided to buy a 3Ware RAID card and install a 4-drive RAID 10 array "just because I could".

I made the mistake of using IBM 75GXP drives which were at the time, rather well-thought of. Who can go wrong buying IBM? Then I started hearing unpleasant click-clacking noises from my drives.

I've lost track exactly but I don't think I have any of the original drives anymore. I warrantied two of them before the deadline ran out and then I had to buy a few more replacements off of Ebay. RAID wants identical drives so it's not like I could easily have switched to a different brand during this process. Not without replacing everything from scratch all at once.

I like IBM for their Linux support but it will be a long time before I buy IBM again, if ever. I can understand why people go on and on about their problems with the line. I'm STILL frustrated.

I had one of those babies die on me. Luckily I managed to revive it and back up all the data on it.

#2 where are you from?

#3 and #4, are you sure you have the drives that are made in Hungary? I finally pulled the last 75 GB drive out of a machine here at work (we have nine machines) and I wouldn't trust it anymore, esp. with an OS on it. For non-important stuff (movies, music) I might be okay, but I can't even really give this last one away with a good conscience (it does still work). We do have some non-Hungary made drives still in operation that I feel alot better about.

my .02

I am sending Yet Another GXP out for RMA tomorrow. Woo!

I had 2 60GXPs die on me within 1 week of each other after about a year of use. I was reinstalling Win2k every day to "fix" problems.

Wonderful that IBM chose to sell products that were known to be faulty.

This makes me angry.

meh ...!!

I don´t care...we can not get so inexpensive drives as you ...north american..we still use 20 GB and 40 GB drives at most...

bleh !

holy $#!#!! That thread just never wants to die!