IBM 120GXP drive online time recommendations

[Guru]

Q: Would you recommend this drive in a server role?
A: No, the drive is intended to be on for no more than about 8 hours a day. If it were only used during that period and then shut down for the day, then it would be fine, but it definitely should NOT be used in a 24/7 role for those customers concerned with reliability.

http://www.storagereview.com/

[Kosh Naranek]

YEEEESSSSSSS no more overtime !!!

[ayoub_ibrahim]

Originally posted by Kosh Naranek
YEEEESSSSSSS no more overtime !!!

LOL

[KvHagedorn]

Well.. so much for hoping they have learned from their mistakes.

: This spec is new with the 120GXP series, not other manufactures have used this specification. Was this spec introduced as a marketing strategy or a technical issue?

A: It's definitely a technical issue.

Unbelievable. Why would anyone buy one of these?

"Yeah our drive suck, so don't leave them on for more than 8hrs/day or they'll die"

That's sad.. really really sad.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Most will agree that this new 8hr/day limitation has more to do with legal issue's than hardare limitations.

[Greebe]

I have to agree with EDB on this one... if IBM could force users provide adequite case ventilation and or proper spacing between them, the drives wouldn't suffer most of the failure rates they have been experiencing. I'm not saying that they didn't have a design problem tho.

[isochar]

I'm not sure how you guys can justify it. IBM is the only manufacturer stating such a claim!

What would you do if Hyundai said that their cars can only be driven for 1 1/2 hours a day, so that they can avoid the legal implications of everyone complaining that they have lemons. (Assuming you own one)

This type of statement just shows IBM is cowering behind their lawyers instead of designing drives that can tolerate the same conditions every other manufacturers' drives must operate in.

[Wombat]

Thanks IBM. Now I only have to decide between buying a Maxtor or a Western Digital.

If they need a legal disclaimer, than they could have specified operating environments, like they already do (operational temperature and humidity, anyone?). This is just them admitting they make shitty drives now.

[GT98]

Originally posted by Wombat
Thanks IBM. Now I only have to decide between buying a Maxtor or a Western Digital.

Hmm I thought that Western Digital and IBM shared something like 80% of there parts between their hard drives.

People might bitch at the failure rate that WD drives have, but at least I can get a cross shipment of a new drive with in 3-4 days of reporting it to them. Try that with IBM!

Scott

[Greebe]

It's more (stupid) legalese than anything... typically once one makes such a claim (and they do hesitate at that) others will follow

[dZeus]

Originally posted by GT98


Hmm I thought that Western Digital and IBM shared something like 80% of there parts between their hard drives.

People might bitch at the failure rate that WD drives have, but at least I can get a cross shipment of a new drive with in 3-4 days of reporting it to them. Try that with IBM!

Scott

they had a cross-license agreement when IBM introduced the DTLA family drives, but I think it has ended some time ago now.

[orangejulius]

http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=1797&sid=539caaa6ecc46e34413fd8dbe3ee0918

[Dr Mordrid]

One more reason to avoid IBM drives at all costs;

IBM will not cross-ship defective drives and Maxtor/Quantum will.

Dr. Mordrid

[SteveC]

About time I looked into this IBM MTBF fiasco.

I thought it’d be a good idea to look at some old drives from IBM – as I doubt they’ve gone and altered the old documentation, and on page 89 of http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/suppo...s/dfhs_spf.pdf (A SCSI Drive from 1994), IBM say their drives have a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours which sounds good. However, on the page before that, they say the maximum power on hours is nominally 30,000 hours. So this business with the deskstar drives isn’t new – they’re always said their drives can only be used for at most 16 hours a day.

I saw on HardOCP, an article with links pointing to Western Digital’s site where they say ‘500,000 MTBF over 5 years’ but they don’t go into detail like IBM do on the break down of these hours. Also, looking in a Maxtor datasheet they say ‘Maxtor does not differentiate between various usage profiles (e.g., power-on hours, power saving modes, non-operating periods or operating temperatures within the published specification.)’ So, they can get round any claims. I also noticed that they say the drive has a start/stop cycles of 50,000 which sounds good compared to IBM’s 30,000, but Maxtor say ‘This indicates the minimum cycles for reliable start/stop function at a ³ 60% confidence level.’ Which sounds pretty poor to me.

Picking a random Fujitsu drive is interesting too. http://hdd.fujitsu.com/global/drive/...t/catalog.html is the spec sheet for a popular Fujitsu drive of a couple of years ago or so and although it has a MTBF of ‘More than 500,000 POH’, which sounds good, but it only has a Component life of ‘20,000 POH’, which doesn’t.

I’m sticking up for IBM

[Dr Mordrid]

That all sounds well and good absent any history of problems contemporaneous to the change in their specs (and they did change).

Unfortunately absense of problems is anything but what IBM users are now experiencing.

And I'm saying this as a user with four IBM 75GXP's in my main systems RAID that has not had a problem....yet. A very paranoid user at this point.

Dr. Mordrid