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I have 3 120gig drives 1 IBM (120gxp) 1 maxtor 1 WD (both with the 8meg caches) my IBM is the only one that makes noise i.e. disk head scraping/skipping. IBM makes good drives and it surprised me that the 120gxp is doing this.
Even though I know all hard companys have their "batches" I still would have liked other peoples opion before I bought the IBM 120gxp. Sorry for the ranting but the drive is just causing alot of of agony for me and if somebody else doesn't have to go through it great!

When HDDs are ranked from top to bottom, the consensus is: Seagate, Maxtor, WDC, IBM.

Slim

I'd buy any other brand before an IBM hard drive. I'd even rank Samsung HDD's higher than IBM.

I think IBM and WDC should be on the same level.

It's possible that I'm still frustrated because of the past experiences with WDC .

integspec wrote:I think IBM and WDC should be on the same level.

It's possible that I'm still frustrated because of the past experiences with WDC .

I, too, have had problems with WD hard drives, but I think that the drives were just damaged in transit or something like that. I've heard that many people have used WD drives successfully.

Also, are IBM's laptop drives as bad as their desktop drives? The IBM drive in my laptop is working just fine.

as i said on another post and then the guy got all bent out of shape.

You couldnt pay me to buy another IBM hd

CDRecorder wrote:

integspec wrote:I think IBM and WDC should be on the same level.

It's possible that I'm still frustrated because of the past experiences with WDC .

I, too, have had problems with WD hard drives, but I think that the drives were just damaged in transit or something like that. I've heard that many people have used WD drives successfully.

Also, are IBM's laptop drives as bad as their desktop drives? The IBM drive in my laptop is working just fine.

I am about to have a WD800JB RMA'ed, bought earlier this year, manufactured in December 2002, less than one year. I will give credit to Western Digital tech support though and their RMA policy, I never had trouble with it.

I wouldn't even trust IBM laptop drives, almost everyone in my group at the office had their hard drive swapped out of their ThinkPad T22, a few even had their swapped out twice in the same year.

Wow, that's pretty bad. I'll have to make sure I keep my files backed up!

It really depends on wich IBM drive style you got. Some have glass platters that like to just shatter if left on continuessly and then getting very hot. I've got a IBM 40 gig, Maxtor 20, WD 80, and a WD 120 SE.
they have all worked fine so far. I did just have a WD 20 die very hard and completely crash the heads, it started clunking and eventualy got so trashed the other drive on the chain wasn't even recognised anymore. Luckily it wsn't a boot drive and was just a extra storage area with mostly outdated stuff on it. It was just over 3 years old so no more warranty but that's a pretty good run I think for something that is thrashed and used that much everyday.
Every manufacturer has had bad batches of drives due to a faulty part sneaking through or a new design just not working as planned.
Then of course there was JTS out of india, I actually had one that was still working quite well till the powr board developed a bad solder joint that can't be repaired. It ran for over 2 years I think and most never made 6 months
The newest IBM/Hitachi drives are sposed to be pretty bad now I've heard though.

I thought IBM sold its hard drive line to Hitachi earlier this year.

IBM drives are getting hard to find in Canada. I've got a 20gb 7200 ATA66 and I'm hapy with it. Damn quiet too.

Spazmogen wrote:I thought IBM sold its hard drive line to Hitachi earlier this year.
.

Yes they did, branded as Hitachi Deskstar GXP's.
IBM's GXP are total crap IMO, the failure rate of those drives are not worth the trouble of putting your valuable data on !
And as someone else mentioned they run extremely hot to the touch !

[quote]And as someone else mentioned they run extremely hot to the touch ![/quote]

Any HD will be hot to the touch if you had it in a $200 eMachine which totally lacks cooling. I guess IBM HDs are just more sensitive to heat. Been using a pair of 30GB GXP75 for close to 2 years now in RAID 0, no prob yet. eh, must be the good cooling I have (80mm fan on each HD). However, the due to bad press on the GXP120s, I've switched to Maxtors, then WDs. Pair of 20GB Maxtor in RAID 0 run great, Maxtor 160GB/8MB runs great as OS HD, and the pair of WD 120GB/8MB are in tip top shape.