IBM DeskStar 75GXP Hard Drive Failures? 695
Sean Kelly asks: "Like a lot of other people, I went out and bought myself a nice 60GB IBM DeskStar 75GXP (ATA100, 7200rpm) hard drive to put in my sparkling new computer. Boy was that a mistake! A few months after I got the drive, it failed with horrific grinding and clicking noises, plus random data loss. So I RMA'd the first one and got a 'SERVICEABLE USED PART' replacement from IBM, which died of the same death after another few months. Not getting the hint, I RMA'd that one. Last week, I got the refab. drive back from IBM and it has already died, in less than a week! This time I did some site searching and found many people are having problems with this drive. Sites such as The Inquirer, Hexus, Tech Report, Hardware One,
Sysopt, and even this PCWorld have dedicated articles, forums and user reviews to these failing and defective drives. From what I can understand, IBM is not publicly acknowledging that they screwed up here. How many other people out there have had their 75GXP (or 60GXP) drives fail? What size were they? What part number? What did IBM do about it? It is my opinion that IBM should do something about this, since I've seen an unnaturally high number of complaints about this drive now that I started looking for customer feedback. Also, here is a letter I sent to IBM explaining my frustration with them. It has more information in it."
Re:I am sorry to hear about your data loss, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Vibrating drives good for relaxation... (Score:3, Funny)
I still have some unique and important data on it (the drive, not the chair), so I am concerned that this unorthodox use of the drive may lead to problems. I may even start doing backups.
Hmmm (Score:1, Funny)
The obvious thing for IBM to do is to raise price of the unit and relable the packaging
High Security Write Only Drive
Disclosure ... a movie (Score:4, Funny)
Basically Demi is a cost-cutting slut in a suit.
Let's hope [this time] someone got some good sex out of all these bad hard drives...
Western Digital 80gig (Score:2, Funny)
This was a major hassle for me, since I was building a new computer, and couldn't pinpoint the random problems on one part for some time. Add in to that some bad RAM(how much bad RAM does everyone end up with?), a video card getting fried in a storm, and an Asus Geforce2 Deluxe that SAYS it works under Windows2000, but the primary feature of the card(the digital VCR) doesn't, and the store refused to give me a refund.
Nothing funner than building a new computer, eh boys?
A nice family-run place nearby figured out the RAM and video card were bad for me. I returned the video card for a replacement and bought new RAM. Then the hard drive got RMA'd back to Western Digital with a replacement coming in a timely manner, with their nifty ability to get the new hard drive BEFORE sending back the old one(so I could copy my data over).
To get my comp working I also had to upgrade drivers, flash bioses, install AGP patches for the motherboard, and install several hundred megs of patches to Windows 2000, all of which caused various problems while I was trying to trouble-shoot which and whether my hardware was broken.
It should be easy to see if hardware is broken--everything else works, so the thing that doesn't is broken. right? Nowadays nothing works right, even when its working at its best. It's near impossible to tell if your hardware is bum, or if you just have some unlucky combination of hardware and software and need to wait patiently for a patch to come out and make things work correctly.
Computer parts are becoming incredibly unreliable. Putting together this latest 1ghz machine was more hell than every other machine i've built put together. What can we as consumers do to stop this? Why is there no pressure on companies to put out reliable products that work out of the box?
Re:No problems here (Score:3, Funny)
Here are some quotes from what I found at storagereview.com:
"I bought 2 of these drives and have had 2 disc failures, hey at least they're consistent!"
"7 defective 75 gxp's out of 6 in 9 months , draw your own conclusion..."
Re:No problems here (Score:3, Funny)
7 out of a total of 6 dead?? And the conclusion I am supposed to draw is that one of them failed so badly in a giant ball of flame that it is like it died twice???     ;)
On the other hand, my 75GXP 75GB seems to be fine.
I can't get at it right now to see if it was made in Hungary or it is the suspect part number dtla307075.
Re:Is It Manufactured In Hungary? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You're doing a couple things wrong. (Score:3, Funny)
If he's still talking to Tech Support, he's not only wasting his time, he's showing what a mark he is. The guys in TechSupp may feel bad for him and may even go out of their way to try and help him, but that's not how things normally happen, because the TechSupp guys are too busy with the excessive workload from all the other first- and second-time callers who need help.
He's far beyond the "let's work together" stage. I'll be rational, calm and acquiescent at first, too. But he's on drive three. His data would be more secure walking through a Palestinian alley at 2am wearing a yarmulke, waving an Israeli flag and yelling that Muhammed had a thing for farm animals with cloven hooves.
It's slowly dawning on me (those Flamebait mods may have helped) that perhaps not everyone read what I wrote as intended. I thought it was pretty clear.
woof.
Re:How unfortunate. (Score:4, Funny)
The exact threshold for this can probably be determined mathematically. IBM has clearly exceeded it. ATT certainly has... even their broadband sales people are clueless about the services they are offering.
These days, I expect aggravation, not satisfaction, from any big company. More and more of them are proving unable to answer even the simplest questions. Companies that surprise me with good service (most recently, Speakeasy) quickly earn my loyalty.
As a side rant, the bigger a company is the worse their web sites get. The biggest, most expensive sites seem to be utterly useless for anything but driving you mad, with irrelevant search results and incomplete specifications. (ATT@Home comes to mind again.)
I look forward to the day when my small company has grown up, and we can just exist without needing to really care about the quality of what we are doing. It must be a wonderful position to be in.