Digital BW, The Print

The latest I've heard about a class action lawsuit against IBM for their
hard drives does, in fact, involve their deskstar hard drives--specifically,
the 75GXP. My best recollection is that it was a problem with the fragility
of their glass platters, but I couldn't swear to that. Here's an article:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,67608,00.asp

If you google on [ibm deskstar class action], you'll come up with loads of
links on the subject.

Nevertheless, I am, for no good reason, a moderately consistent buyer of IBM
drives. I guess I started buying them because they, at one point, were the
leaders in data density. I've had one go bad (a 10K RPM SCSI drive), and
getting the warranty replacement was trivially easy, and remarkably speedy.
The present generation of 7.2K RPM drives, the 60GXP, is not, to my
knowledge, subject to the reliability problems that are reputed to plague
the 75GXP. The 60GXP also has a higher data density (20 GB/platter, rather
than 15GB/platter) and so should be faster, and probably generate less heat
(fewer moving objects).

For what it's worth, I own a 60GB 60GXP and am about to order another to use
in a striped configuration. If I were starting from scratch, I'd probably
simply buy the least expensive 20 GB/platter, 7200 RPM, ATA 100 drive I
could find. I'm generally skeptical of the idea that, in computer
components, you can reliably correlate brand name & reliability.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: John Vitollo [mailto:jvlist@...]
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 11:03 AM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Digital BW] Re: SCSI or IDE for new Photoshop machine (OT)


Mark mentioned:
> I think there might even have been a
> class-action suit related to them.


The IBM class action suit is only for certain laptop drives. Their desktop
drives are solid. IBMs are the only drives I'll recommend to my clients.
Avoid Western Digital as they have a high rate of failure.

Best,

John V.



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