Mwave IBM 120G 8MB 180GXP $112 No Rebates + Shipping

[Slacktron]

Until IBM publishes some reason why four out of four of my 75GXP drives failed within the first year, I won't touch another IBM hard disk.

Each RMA was (eventually) replaced by a "remanufactured" drive, and those lasted anywhere from 1 week to four months. Every one of those failed too. (Compare to Maxtor, who pre-shipped a brand new drive at no cost.)

This isn't bad luck, poor installation, or any other mea culpa.. those drives are fatally flawed. I hope IBM takes a real beating for not fessing up or standing behind their product. Seriously, if IBM Deathstars were FAR, I'd leave them on the rack.

 

[Bojangles139]

http://www.storagereview.com/

go their for a review of the GXP180's. you get near WD Cavier WD2000JB performance with Seagate noise. seems they fixed the problems.

brandon

 

[S13SilviaK]

Originally posted by: LuNoTiCK
The deal is good, the problem is IBM won't own up to it and won't admit that their hard drives were having problems. They would blame it on everything else. They should have done recalls on the 75gxp.


And another thing. When you send it to them they make you pay shipping. They make you ship it to them first, they take several weeks to get it to you. They expect you to ship it in this foam and all this even though the hard drive is broken and they ship it back in some crap material. They also send back refurbished parts. Those are all reasons why I wouldn't buy IBM.

You are so full of s*** I just had IBM send me a replacement for my 40GB drive, I called them up, they put a charge hold on my credit card, sent me a new drive in 2 days, I sent them my drive back in the box NO CHARGE. This is the same routine with all of the HD man. that I've dealt with, this includes: WD, IBM and Maxtor.

 

[Squalish2357]

Originally posted by: Bojangles139
http://www.storagereview.com/

go their for a review of the GXP180's. you get near WD Cavier WD2000JB performance with Seagate noise. seems they fixed the problems.

brandon

The "problems" are empirical in nature. Either a review drive fails or it doesn't. That doesn't show the percentage of drives that will fail. That is the reason that the 75GXP got good reviews for a long time before people started comparing experiences. A few 500 post "My 75GXP died, DAMNIT!!" threads later, IBM's HDD department's reputation was irrecoverably damaged.

 

[johto]

just a note, IBM replaced my failed 75GXP with a 60GXP. I would buy this if i needed a drive, I think IBM has turned around (besides, they did sell the business to someone else [I thought it was Fujitsu]) and they gave me perfect RMA service for the one I had a problem with.

<edit>
Oh yeah, not to mention the 75GXP was OEM and they could have denied a RMA altogether.
</edit>

 

[mikeg]

Ok People enough with the IBM HD Bashing. I can tell you that every HD maker has had some type of problem or another. Anyway all HDs will fail given enough time its just how they take care of you if it does. Well thats my 2 cents

 

[MarkieMark]

always loved IBM products

 

[dpopiz]

wow that's a crazy deal! and yes, I agree, stop with the IBM bashing. their drives now are rock solid and the 180GXP is IMO the best ide hd on the market right now because it's almost the fastest ide hd in existence, while still being very quiet with AAM turned on.

 

[MontyBurns]

blanket statements about a brand of hard drive are just silly. read the reviews on this specific drive and base your decision on that.

 

[Pocatello]

Too bad I don't have Frys here

 

[rugby]

I too was an owner of a 75gxp that had to be replaced 4 times under warranty. Each time they sent me a refurb drive that lasted another 1-2 months. This last time the drive died was when they were transitioning their support dept to Hitachi so I had to wait until they had finished transferring all their systems. The day it came online I requested an RMA and they sent me a 60gb brand new Hitachi HD to replace my 45gb IBM drive. It's even faster than the 75gxp was.

I won't voluntarily touch another IBM ata drive for a long time, but won't write them off forever.

 

[Parasitic]

Nice deal, and I like IBM drives. And people: the high failure rate only occured in higher-capacity ones in their 75GXP and 60GXP series. The smaller drives with less disks were not prone to heat failures. My opinion is that when you purchase a high-density, high-capacity drive you need to understand and be ready for a higher risk of drive failures in the future.

That said, I am having trouble filling up even 20GB, so I'm going to have to pass on this.

 

[virtuamike]

Originally posted by: Parasitic
Nice deal, and I like IBM drives. And people: the high failure rate only occured in higher-capacity ones in their 75GXP and 60GXP series. The smaller drives with less disks were not prone to heat failures. My opinion is that when you purchase a high-density, high-capacity drive you need to understand and be ready for a higher risk of drive failures in the future.

That said, I am having trouble filling up even 20GB, so I'm going to have to pass on this.

So if I really need a 200GB drive I should expect it to fail? Sure buddy.

 

[Pakman117]

One last comment about IBM. Not sure if you guys are suscribed to Maximum PC, but they recently had some comments about the 180GXP drives. I quote:

In response to someones email about how Maximum PC favored the 180GXP...

"Actually the real fiasco was IBM's 75GXP..."

"When we reviewed the 120GXP in our May 2002 issue, we thought long and hard about how much IBM's el stinko 75GXP should factor into the 120 GXP's score. We ultimately decided that it would be unfair to put the sins of the father on the son. The same holds true for our coverage of the 180GXP in last month's issue: We can't indict a piece of hardware or a crime it hasn't yet committed..."

"Last month, IBM's Deskstar 180GXP set a new standard for IDE hard drives, and this month we were determined to see if the Deskstar could keep pace with the Seagate Cheetah 15.3K, the undisputed king of SCSI drives. Both drives boast an 8MB cache, but the IBM spins at 7,200rpm while the Cheetah hits 15,000rpm..."

The Results:

"With 166 points in the SYSmark2002's office segment, the Deskstar was only 5 points off the Cheetah's mark of 171."

from the February Issue:

"There?s a new king of the hill: Top benchmark scores in nearly every performance category make the 180GXP Deskstar our desktop titan. And, in a move that had us cheering, IBM swapped some of the GXP?s brain cells with those of a SCSI drive, giving its new IDE drive command-queuing and improved server performance. This 180GB drive won?t lick a top-of-the-line, 15,000rpm SCSI screamer, but IBM?s revolutionary ?Tag and Seek? technology makes this the ultimate IDE drive for server apps?a bonus considering that the 180GXP is the best desktop drive around."

I'm not trying to be an IBM zealot, just stating the facts that others have neglected to research. I personally have a 60gig 60GXP IBM drive, and its been running great. It was a little noisy at first, but then I found an acoustic utility that IBM provides. This gem allows the user to select the noise level, from max performance at the cost of max noise to least performance with least noise. Pretty neat.

 

[Samus]

i've had 75gxp's and 1 60gxp die on me. i've had luck with the 120gxp's and i presume the 180's will be substantially better since they lack the heels of the elder's: gmr heads and the glass platters with the strange magnetic coating hitachi deemed ibm's engineers crazy for using. i heard the coating comes off at a high temperature and causes the heads to fail (where the click comes from)

 

[her209]

They are crap but they are the only ones with descent seek times and can handle the beating I give them.

 

[PeterPan2002]

The 180GXP is the newest drive, it has 8 mb cache

Instead of fighting about IBM hard drive, has anyone actually bought it yet?
Is it 180GXP?

 

[ReiAyanami]

IBM HDs are garbage, i had a DOA microdrive, made in thailand and i google searched it and lots of others had problems of those made their. u'd expect quality but like HP, they'll sell u the cheapest garbage they can make.

 

[zuffy]

FWIW, I have 2 of these 120GB in a RAID 1 acting as a Ghost server at work. It is on 24/7 for the last year with no problems. Also, I have these 120GB in my workstation, several co-workers' PCs, and in my home PC without any problems in the last year.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: S13SilviaK

Originally posted by: LuNoTiCK
The deal is good, the problem is IBM won't own up to it and won't admit that their hard drives were having problems. They would blame it on everything else. They should have done recalls on the 75gxp.

And another thing. When you send it to them they make you pay shipping. They make you ship it to them first, they take several weeks to get it to you. They expect you to ship it in this foam and all this even though the hard drive is broken and they ship it back in some crap material. They also send back refurbished parts. Those are all reasons why I wouldn't buy IBM.

You are so full of s*** I just had IBM send me a replacement for my 40GB drive, I called them up, they put a charge hold on my credit card, sent me a new drive in 2 days, I sent them my drive back in the box NO CHARGE. This is the same routine with all of the HD man. that I've dealt with, this includes: WD, IBM and Maxtor.

Then you were very lucky. I've been hanging out at storagereview.com, and many, many people reported complains that IBM was 100% unwilling to cross-ship or ship an advance replacement RMA, like every other HD company normally does. What happened to you was not the norm, although perhaps things will get better with Hitachi at the helm.

 

[tuan121]

im waiting on the WD RAPTOR!

 

[zuffy]

Is IBM selling only their IDE HDD business or the whole HDD business to Hitachi? What about their storage in term of enterprise? That doesn't make sense selling your storage business to one of your competitor.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Pakman117

"There?s a new king of the hill: Top benchmark scores in nearly every performance category make the 180GXP Deskstar our desktop titan. And, in a move that had us cheering, IBM swapped some of the GXP?s brain cells with those of a SCSI drive, giving its new IDE drive command-queuing and improved server performance. This 180GB drive won?t lick a top-of-the-line, 15,000rpm SCSI screamer, but IBM?s revolutionary ?Tag and Seek? technology makes this the ultimate IDE drive for server apps?a bonus considering that the 180GXP is the best desktop drive around."

For the record, the term "Tag and Seek" may be new (marketing-speak), but support for ATA tagged command queueing has existed in nearly all of IBM's newer ATA HDs, including the 75GXP, and possibly as far back as the 14GXP.

I am an owner of one of the ill-fated 30GB 75GXPs, as well as a 14GB 14GXP. Both have given me some problems, and the 30GB has acted quite strangely on more than one occasion. I haven't RMA'ed it yet because: 1) I want to recieve a different model if/when I send it back, 2) I wanted to wait until Hitachi took over - this has now happened as of jan/feb of this year, 3) I'm quite afraid of getting back a drive in far worse shape than mine is in currently. It still mostly works, but I don't trust it for critical data.

I was originally a nay-sayer in the beginning, when all of the problem reports with this drive came rolling in. I didn't think my drive was suceptible, I thought it was something that these other people had done wrong in maintaining their drives. Until, about a year and half later, mine started acting funny. Eventually, I came to the conclusion, it's not a question of if, just a question of when. Also, no, these drives don't like heat, it makes them malfunction, but that is not the main cause of failure. My drive was made in Romania, I believe, not in the Hungary plant that was later closed down by IBM, most likely due to QC issues. That may be one reason why it's still "hanging on".

 

[salsa086]

can anyone confirm if this drive has an 8mb cache?

 

[salsa086]

the western digital raptor is only going to be released in 36gb variants for the near future