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ive been reading and hearing a crap load of complaints about ibm's 60GXP models for their harddrives. whats goin on with these things? its either they run beatifully and quiet, or sound like chainsaws. all the talk is of the 60GXP's, but what about the 120GXP's, are those one's screwed up too? please post your experiences with these drives or any links to some reviews of either model.

I read an independent review some time ago (sorry cant find a link) and the guy had some pretty convincing numbers showing that all the failed IBM harddrives were heat related problems. The guy was an IT guy for some major company and they had hundreds of IBM drives. According to him none of the drives failed if they were in a HDD cooler or had a fan blowing directly on them. I have a 75GXP that has never had a problem for over 2 years now and it is very quiet, it also is in a HDD cooler. That being said I have heard of way too many IBM's failing so my next drive will not be an IBM probably a Maxtor.

I had a 60GXP die on me... I know the 75GXP's weren't a very good drive either... Seems like all of IBM's drives as of late have a high failure rate...

The 60GXP's are OK, but the 75's and 120's have problems. I have a 60GXP since last year, and it runs just like day one, but I have a dual fan underneath blowing air on it. I also have a HD temp utility that displays the HD temp in the tray. Mine usually runs at 30°C or less, but summer is just around the corner.

I would never buy a 120GXP, because if you look at the specs, it can run only for 8 hours per day. LOL

Are you serious? Only 8 HOURS?!

Man, well, I have active cooling on my HDD. I thought it wasn't really needed, but I guess it is needed.. (I have a 40gb 60GXP).

Why hasn't our 14GXP in our dell died yet, than? It has gone 4 years. Computers on for almost 24/7..

Originally posted by Sean
Are you serious? Only 8 HOURS?!

Man, well, I have active cooling on my HDD. I thought it wasn't really needed, but I guess it is needed.. (I have a 40gb 60GXP).

Why hasn't our 14GXP in our dell died yet, than? It has gone 4 years. Computers on for almost 24/7..

Hehe, if you don't believe me, LOOK AT THIS THREAD

Thanks.

It looks like IBM will delete this suggested 11 hours/day runtime out of their specs .... saying it's a misinterpreting of the MTBF (main time between failure) time which is in x million hours ....

It is true that the IBM 75GXP had a way above average failure rate ... 60GXP looks a lil better, no hard data yet on 120GXP. Sadly Storagereview lost their HDD reliability database from user entries in a recent backup gone wrong accident.

I suggest you take a look at the Western Digital drives ... if ya have some extra cash you might want to look at the WDxxxxJB drives which feature a beefy 8MB cache and offer performance comparable to regular 10K SCSI drives

i would love one of those western digitals but for me, im tryin to keep my hard drive price stuck at the 100 mark or lower. i was originally thinkin of going with a maxtor 60gb, but then i read stuff about the ibm's working REALLY well if they don't completely blow up in your face, that is. are western digitals loud, cool, and fast?

Just go to newegg get you a maxtor d740x... Best drive as far as i'm concerned. You can get the fluid bearing ones and super quiet and still fast as hell... And i've yet have a maxtor die on me...

what about seagates, those are quite cheap, but are they quiet cool and fast?

I've had 2 75GXP drives go down on me (not like that you sicko's). I did some research and found out the problem is indeed heat related and that IBM drives are just more sensitive to it.

When the drive heats up the platters actually expand. This shouldn't be a problem, all drives do it. Hard drives manufacturers are well aware of this so they design the heads to adjust according to temperature in order to read/write the correct sectors of the drive. Apparently this is where the IBM GXP's break down. They don't accurately adjust to take heat into consideration. Over extended usage this may result in the drive either writing data to the wrong place and not being able to find it or writing it to the correct place and reading it wrong.

You shouldn't have to add extra cooling in order to make your hard drive work reliably. That's just poor design. I think IBM simply failed to fully stress test their products before releasing it. Where I work we have huge environmental chambers where we run our products at full capacity at extreme temperatures for months on end. It might add a little time to the development process but it ensures that we release quality products.

Xevuhtess7

Check out http://www.storagereview.com , they review HDDs and optical drives and their reviews are the best you can find on storagedevices.
Check their reviews section when you want to know more about certain HDDs ... the Leaderboard is a quick reference to see what they consider best IDE or SCSI drive ... the database lets you compare HDDs under many different benchmark results.

thanks for the site