Re: Western Digital hard drives are garbage

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Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 22:59:16 GMT

Timbertea wrote:
>
... snip ...
>
> 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.

A nice exposition of the causes and thought processes behind them.
I would conclude that one is generally better off, in reliability
terms, by getting slower drives. That should make 5400 RPM quite
desirable. As far as I am concerned speeds remain more than
adequate.

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• Previous message: Scott Alfter: "Re: Western Digital hard drives are garbage"
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