Re: Western Digital hard drives are garbage

From: Timbertea (timbusenet_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 06/01/05 

Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:53:23 GMT

Zed Pobre wrote:
> Arno Wagner <me@privacy.net> wrote:
>
>>>The Deskstar 75GXP and 60GXP were disasters, but (AFAIK) the recent
>>>models haven't had unusually high failure rates.
>>
>>Some people seem to still make bad experiences with them. Personally
>>I will stay away from IBM/Hitachi until I see a belivable explanation
>>from them what went wrong and why the problem is gine now.
>
>
> What problems have you had with Hitachi drives?
>

The 75GXP series IBM drives used a glass platter instead of the
traditional aluminum with coating, they tried a new material, and over
time it developed stress fractures that were simply not apparent in
early testing. It also had some radical head designs, and there was a
slightly higher rate of failure due to this, a trade off for increased
speed. Rather an issue an immediate recall as many of them would make
it past their "useful" life (translation: warranty period), IBM chose to
do nothing, and it created a PR disaster for them. On top of that, when
you sent one in, you didn't always get one of the same size back, and
sometimes you got another 75GXP which had the same potential as the one
you sent in. Eventually they did issue a recall, but not soon enough to
make anyone happy. The 75GXPs came in a lot of different sizes, and was
a very popular drive in the corporate setting for desktops.

The technology in them was only used on that particular drive model and
is not used in any of the Hitachis period, never was, that problem was
well before IBM sold the division to Hitachi. You wont get this type of
failure, they don't use the same technology and materials now. 

----
The whole reason they tried the glass platters in the first place was to 
fix a problem with distortion of shape in aluminum platters.  If you 
have an electric mixer at home, put some pancake batter in it and spin 
it quickly in either direction by hand without the beaters in it. Notice 
what happens? The batter that was level gets pushed to the sides of the 
container, and the center is now lower than the sides as the material 
has been pushed to the edges.  The same thing happens on a smaller scale 
to aluminum when its spinning at a much faster speed, it literally 
becomes out of shape in places and it wasn't a problem you could just 
add more mass to the platter to fix - more mass just meant it happened 
even faster and was a lot more energy to spin up - less mass was more 
desireable, but that warped quickly at higher speeds and made the 
coatings they were using less reliable. At the time all makers were 
having problems with this distortion (and they still are). Glass seemed 
like a good idea at the time, it didn't compress like the aluminum did, 
so they figured it wouldn't spread out, and in their testing it didn't. 
But what they didn't figure on was that the forces were enough over time 
to make some areas of it brittle, the same centrifigal force was still 
in play, but the energy didn't have a handy outlet as it was working 
against the bonds in the glass constantly.  Accelerated wear teting 
failed to catch it, and the rest is history.
It seemed like the perfect material, easy to work with, able to make it 
thinner, no compression, no expansion, desirable thermal properties, 
ability to bake magnetic coatings into the glass for cheaper manufacture.
IBM isn't alone in having a line of drives that went bad before their 
time. I can remember multiple Seagates that were exceptionally 
craptastic in the 80's and 90's (and did even less than IBM to resolve 
the problem I might add, worse at a time when HD's cost far more than 
they do today). Maxtor had it's high failure period. Western Digital had 
a couple bad models as well.

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