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Interesting. I had always avoided Hitachi Deskstars after having heard they were nicknamed "Deathstars" for a reason. Perhaps that was once true, but clearly it
by dnissley 13y ago
Interesting. I had always avoided Hitachi Deskstars after having heard they were nicknamed "Deathstars" for a reason. Perhaps that was once true, but clearly it's not anymore.
- michaelt 13y agoApparently that was 2001 and they were IBM Deskstars at the time [1]. I guess this is why companies sometimes decide to rebrand/rename products. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_GXP-model_failures_in_2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_GXP...
- yen223 13y agoI suspect those infamous disk failures were caused by faulty manufacturing runs, rather than some inherent flaw in the design.
- radiowave 13y agoIIRC, it was specific to the 38GB model, and was traced to a batch of bad electronic components.
- nknighthb 13y agoNo, it was the whole 75GXP set (actually, according to Wikipedia, the 120GXP and 180GXP were also affected to a far lesser extent). The backlash was really nasty, though, because IBM's drives were something a lot of us had come to trust and rely on, the 75GXP was kind of a flagship drive, and IBM's handling of the issue was less than stellar. We felt betrayed. I never have bought another IBM (or Hitachi) drive. The reaction is visceral and intractable.
- radiowave 13y agoAh yes. I think I had the jumper on mine set to limit the drive to 38GB. Luckily, mine was OK.
- justin66 13y agoI bought an IBM Deskstar and went through five returns over the course of a couple of years - across two different generations of drives! (The 75GXP and the 60GXP, I believe) I will say their warranty service was generally not bad... they seemed to get a lot of practice. The interesting thing is that what you say strikes me as almost certainly true, in a narrow way: there were probably some manufacturing runs that were a lot better than others. The proportion of bad runs to good runs is significant.
- BashiBazouk 13y agoI worked in platter sputtering at IBM right out of College during the Death Star period. Basically, IBM had multiple parts manufacturing and sputtering facilities all over the world. The best disks/heads/motors always went in to the SCSI drives and the lesser parts went in to IDE drives. SCSI drives of that period were fairly bullet proof. Desktop IDE drives, not so much. Most of the San Jose and Munich production had higher yields and were mainly for SCSI and laptop drives. So it was less faulty manufacturing runs than the parts came from lesser production facilities, usually Singapore and the Philippines. They ended up closing the sputtering plant in the Philippines as they were never able to get their test yields up high enough...
- wmf 13y agoIf you avoid Hitachi due to that bad batch and Seagate due to their bad batch and WD just because, you're left with nothing.
- hga 13y agoTo my understanding (see my other comment in this subthread for a bit more), neither Seagate nor WD in at least recent times (21st Century?) screwed up even close to that badly.
- hga 13y agoWell, there was a period where a company that failed that badly apparently lost so much business they were forced to sell it or the division. IBM Deathstars (which I missed buying my the most minuscule fractions time, phew) resulting a sale to Hitachi, Maxtor I gather to Seagate.