TiVo Community Forums Archives - IBM 120GXP drives not recommended

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

IBM 120GXP drives not recommended
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: ADent

IBM's spec sheet ( http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds120gxp.pdf ) for the 40, 80, and 120GB versions of the 120GXP hard drives recomend only 333 power on hours per month.

Posted by: Worf

Wow. Those are useless drives!

333 hours is less than 2 weeks of continuous uptime, so I guess the best use of them is for home computers which are turned off nightly.

Businesses can't use it - servers run 24/7... wonder what that rating is for. (And considering other IBM drives don't have that item, either...).

Posted by: NeZorf

Oh Crap. The same 333 Hours is referrenced for the 60GXP drive as well, on page 50.

9.4.4 Life
Expected product life is 5 years under typical desktop PC usage conditions:
- 333 Power-On Hours (POH) per month.
- Seeking/writing/reading operation to be 20% of POH at 40°C or lower environmental temperature.

This puts these IBM drives with a lifespam of less than one year, if taken from their stats. Tivo is runnning 24/7, so ~720Hrs/month
(more than double the spec amount)
Now we have the drive with a lifespan of ~2.31 years by operating all this time.

But there are two other factors from that spec sheet:

The seek/write/read percentage, which I am going to take a wild guess at near 100% at all times. Since this activity is more than triple of the spec sheet, I will give it a modest 50% decrease of life span. Now we are down to ~1.16 years.

And the temp of the drive, which I assume will be much higher than that of whats being reported in the Tivo system info screen because of the 100% load. Since the heat ratio is pretty hard to get a good estimate here, we will decrease a modest amount of 20% of the life span. Now we are left with 0.928 years.

With IBM's recent track record, I would be inclined to add for the IBM HD failure factors in the 75GXP and 60GXP line into the equation, but we will give them the benefit of the doubt that they already factored that into their spec sheet.

So with our fairly modest useage info to guide us, your IBM ***GXP HD will fail in approximately 334.08 days, or ~11 months and 4 days.

This is not good!

Can you IBM HD users please put up your running time numbers with the HD model#??

Posted by: Worf

I've got a 20 GB IBM (can't remember which series) which ahs been up for nearly 2 years straight, and a 75GXP 45GB drive up for nearly a year. (Nearly - there have been blackouts and days where I turn it off).

But the majority of the time has been on.

I have an IBM laptop running close to 4 years, when it's hard drive finally gave out (after running almost continuously for 2-3 years).

Of course, I wonder where those numbers came from, since those essentially make the drives "home" use, rather than "office" or "server".

Posted by: DavidO

I'm an ex Reliability Engineer for a disk drive company. Don't worry, these numbers are used to get OEM business.

Drive suppliers sometimes quoted an MTBF of 500,000 hours etc. Most people don't realize that to get these kind of numbers, HDD manufacturers make some assumptions, such as running at XX deg C, XX% duty cycle, YYY power on hours (POH) per month etc. IBM was one of the first to stop playing the extrememly high MTBF numbers, switching to an annualized failure rate (AFR). This failure rate really does depend on duty cycle and POH. I'll bet 333 POH / month came from 4000 POH / year - just a number to meet some AFR.

Trying to predict when a single drive dies is impossible. More than likely, the manufacturing defects (contamination, debris) will kill a drive as opposed to old age.

Posted by: cubicleman

Upgraded my Sony SVR2000 with an IBM 75gxp in april '01. Started getting failures in december.
Had one IBM 60gb drive of the same series DOA, but the replacement has been in continuous operation in a low-use PC for almost a year.

Posted by: kpollari

I'm on my third IBM XP harddrive in my P.C.. The first (45GB) started having problems after 5 months. The diagnostics reported something like defective device. I returned it under warranty and was given a 60GB in exchange. Good deal I thought. That one started having problems after 2 months. The diagnostics initially said shock damage which I thought was strange. I ran the advanced diagnostics which formatted the drive and it reported that the drive no longer had any problems. I returned it under warranty and am hoping that's the last drive I have to return for a while.

So, I won't ever use an IBM drive in a TiVo. I've been running a 40GB Maxtor and Western Digital drive in my TiVo for a year now with no problems.

Kermit

Posted by: elvisizer

in addition to maxtor and western digital, seagate has a line of drives that are specifically designed for use in devices like a tivo. it's called the 'U' series. 5400 rpm, up to 80GB capacity, 8.9 ms seek times, and something called sound barrier tech. they supposedly idle at 3 bels. hard to find them at stores, though. fry's doesn't carry them here in sacramento, for instance. i ended up using maxtor. </rambling>
elvisizer

Posted by: mydish

DavidO wrote- I'm an ex Reliability Engineer for a disk drive company. Don't worry, these numbers are used to get OEM business.
<snip>
I'll bet 333 POH / month came from 4000 POH / year - just a number to meet some AFR.

Bzzzt, thanks for guessing for us DavidO, but you are incorrect.

IBM currently has a class action lawsuit pending regarding its entire GXP line of drives.

If anyone is interested, the 7200 RPM/Pixie Dust drives are well known to be a major design screwup.

storagereview.com has a good link today (3/18/02) regarding exactly why this 333 hours has come into being.

Basically, I doubt a 7200 RPM drive is really good to have in your Tivo considering the heat it generates. Unless you want to add a fan:(
And, I just bought a WD 120GB too.... Guess I'll have to sell it and wait for the 5400 RPM ones.

Either way, do a search on IBM, sucks, GXP and find the truth. Or, listen to some people's guesses....

Posted by: Worf

That lawsuit wouldn't happen to be referring to the well known *75* GXP class action would it? (Which was basically because the method used to cerify platters (mostly in Hungary) for the high bit density was flawed, similar to the Pentium math bug).

(Don't ask me, my IBM drives have been good to me - I've got a 75GXP running for more than a year (45GB). Don't get me wrong - I'm backing it up monthly :). Onto a Seagate 80GB drive.)

Posted by: feldon23

This is getting ridiculous.

Western Digital has serious quality control problems (confirmed first-hand and from widespread reports) with all their hard drives, Maxtor is starting to have QC problems, and now I read this about IBM and Seagate.

Is there anyone that makes hard drives that actually work for 5 years? 10 years? It's magnetic particles on metal platters. It should have some level of permanance!! And why do hard drives clatter and clack and make these noises? If the motors and heads are so feeble, make them replaceable.

Imagine! Hard drives with new head cartridges. My point is that metal particles sitting on a metal platter should be MORE risiliant than metal particles on plastic (tape) and organic food dye on plastic (CDR). It's totally backwards madness!!

Posted by: ADent

There was an update at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/IBM_75GXP_reports.html (posted 3/12 - near the bottom) where the Travelstar drives not only have the 333hrs/month assumption, but also assume "Seeking/Writing/Reading operation is less than 20% of power on hours. "

There was no such info for the desktop drives, but with lots of people using the laptops for their only machine or using them heavily that you can actually be reading or writing to the disk 66hr/month seems low.

Posted by: DavidO

mydish, no doubt IBM's got trouble. But 333 POH was NOT RECENTLY created to mitigate future liability.

Did a quick search at IBM and the 20/40/60 GB family also had a 333 power on hours. Here's the link. See page 50. Dated 6/25/01. I'm sure that IBM has older doc's with 333 POH (I remember they spec'd this about 3-4 years ago).

http://www-3.ibm.com/storage/hdd/te...D60gxp_sp21.pdf

Posted by: Worf

quote:
Originally posted by feldon23
This is getting ridiculous.

Western Digital has serious quality control problems (confirmed first-hand and from widespread reports) with all their hard drives, Maxtor is starting to have QC problems, and now I read this about IBM and Seagate.

Is there anyone that makes hard drives that actually work for 5 years? 10 years? It's magnetic particles on metal platters. It should have some level of permanance!! And why do hard drives clatter and clack and make these noises? If the motors and heads are so feeble, make them replaceable.

Nope. You know why? Because of the PC boom. It's made parts like hard drives and memory and CPUs into a commodity. While you can't quite buy futures of them (kinda pointless), they're a commodity nonetheless. And one thing with commodities is that quality suffers because everyone is trying to squeeze out the maximum profit out of something where you don't have a lot of pricing room. Yes, that 80GB hard drive costs $150 now, but after you subtract all the costs, etc (marketing, r&d, manufacturing, testing, middlemen, packaging, testing, materials, etc), there's not a whole lot left to make money out of. So they cut back on things like quality controls and do simpler testing which don't exercise the drives properly just to ship it out the door. As for making the drive parts replacable - are you going to buy a 80GB hard drive costing $300 with replacable everything, or one costing $150? (in the end, the extra costs to design it won't sell). Drives are cheap. One of the side effects is that drive lives are shorter. They can engineer better drives, but the benefits don't outweigh the extra costs. Heck, I think one of the first thigns to go was the assurance of the data integrity... lost to the ever-shrinking margins, and the need for more, faster...

As a result, it's often easier to just make a drive backup (I have a Seagate 80GB sitting on my desk - it contains backups of my desktop computers), than to hope for a drive to last longer than it's warranty.

quote:

Imagine! Hard drives with new head cartridges. My point is that metal particles sitting on a metal platter should be MORE risiliant than metal particles on plastic (tape) and organic food dye on plastic (CDR). It's totally backwards madness!!

Actually, removable drive cartridges exist - but the extra moving parts caused reliability to go down way quickly...

As for metal particles residing on a metal platter being resilient, yes, that's true. However, the main difficulty is making a reliable, fast, and high-density way of reading and writing to it.

(BTW, CD's are more resilient because well, magnetic sources are aplenty - a lot of things use magnets or magnetic fields to work, so it's fragility is a bit higher since it's harder to shield against this. CDs are immune to this, and easy to shield from their worst enemy (light).)

Posted by: VoR

Ifno like this makes me very glad for this place and everyones input. Fry's has this drive (the 120GB one) for $169 today...

Posted by: Ladd Morse

So what we're all basically saying is that while everyone here religiously backs up the hard drives in their computer (or at least knows that they're supposed to do so), every single one of us with PVRs at some point in the future is going to lose multiple hours of stored TV programing, preferences, season passes and other setup info because the drives *WILL* fail at some point in time, and there is no easy way to back them up even if we desired to do so.

I realize that TV programming isn't as critical as most computer data, but I suspect a dead 120GB drive full of shows, season passes and preferences is still going to cause more than a little anguish.

Posted by: stevel

Indeed it does cause anguish - I'm in this situation right now (though I don't yet know WHICH of the two disks in my DSR6000 is dying.) Anyone have a lead on a diagnostic tool better than Maxtor's POWERDIAG?

Posted by: RC3105

the seagate U series drives come in UltimateTV's and xboxes.

the seagate U40's and WD 45av's out of utv's have 2 meg of cache and they scoot pretty good, that's what I have in my DTivo

the quantum 40 that came in it only had 416k or ram, and after the 2.5 upgrade and the second tuner activation I could not watch 1 and record 2 without getting lost data and and a scrambled picture on one or both of the shows being recorded

even the 2 channel 30 min buffer did that, if I was taping something I wanted a clean copy of, I had to go to a nosignal channel on the second tuner

got a seagate u series 40 and a WD av series 45 now (both originally out of utv's) in removable sleds

the seagate is my master for season passes and such, and the wd is a backup with a 5 gig var partition for projects and taping things I don't want the kids to be able to watch when I'm not around

I can tape 2, watch 1 on the tv, another on the pc, and upload data to the tivo at a meg a second through the network card and neither drive misses a beat (bash gets pretty slow though :-)

--
Riley