About SMART and a Doofy IBM Deskstar...

[Steve Reinis]

Bought this super quiet, super fast, seemingly super nice IBM 20 gig
Deskstar back in 2001 when it was the hot thing and it's been pretty good.
But recently it's started to become flaky. The model number is a mile long,
but I believe it's IC35L020AVER07-0. Out of the blue one day it wasn't
detected in the BIOS and I noticed that it was just sitting there grinding
away - "ZZZT - ZZZT - ZZZT (pause for about a second) ZZZT - ZZZT -ZZZT" and
would do that until I powered off. Other times it would be identified in
the BIOS, but would show up as oddball ASCII charcters. Then, it would boot
fine on other occasions and all data was intact (About 14 gigs of data on a
single partition). Finally it decided that it wasn't going to do anything -
No matter how I tried, it just sat there grinding. I had most of my data
backed up, but not all of it - damn! Ah well.

So I downloaded and ran the fitness tests. Came up with "Defective Drive."
Like I didn't know that! lol I ran the "Clean Drive" option that
presumably low-level formats the drive. Drive seemed great afterwards. But
a few days later it started getting flaky again in the same manner. Went
through the same motions with the Drive Fitness application and that brought
it back to life. But again... few days later...

The drive is still under warranty (I believe it has a three year warrantee)
and so I'm going to RMA it and see if IBM (or Hitachi, whomever it is now)
will honor the warranty.

My motherboard is an Asus P3B-F that support SMART monitoring and I have
that enabled. Also, the SMART tests in the IBM fitness application simply
say "Good" for results even when the drive is acting up. What good is
SMART!? Does it just monitor electronics, or doe sit detect media problems
as well?

This is my first IBM Deskstar and while it has been a good performer, I
thought surely for the price it would last longer than two years. I've got
some older drives still going strong! I'm kind of leary of buying a new IBM
drive now and not sure if I want to trust the replacment from IBM (If I get
one).

How do ya'all feel about IBM Deskstar drives? Was this just an unlucky
failure?

Thanks,
-Steve

 

[S.Heenan]

Bought this super quiet, super fast, seemingly super nice IBM 20 gig
Deskstar back in 2001 when it was the hot thing and it's been pretty
good. But recently it's started to become flaky. The model number is

How do ya'all feel about IBM Deskstar drives? Was this just an
unlucky failure?

Thanks,
-Steve

The 60/75GXP series had plenty of problems. According to some, the 120GXP
series isn't much better.

 

[Steve Reinis]

Hmm... I downloaded the ID tool and it shows my drive as needing a firmware
update. The firmware update says that it improves drive stability as well
as updates for SMART...

Since it seems that this drive runs fine for a random amount of time and
then out of the blue shows up with random bad sectors, I wonder if this
firmware patch will fix that and make it reliable again... Everytime it
acts up, I can run the IBM Fitness Tests and "Clean Disk" procedure and the
drive is like new again for a random amount of time.

Thanks for that link - I'll give it a shot.

 

[Steve Reinis]

OH - I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that experienced that!

Downloaded the 150kb drive ID application - Said I needed a firmware
upgrade. Downloaded the Firmware upgrade and went through the motions and
it said that I didn't need an update. So, I got the same results... And I
was pissed since I'm on dial-up and downloading that 2.5 MB firmware update
took me twenty minutes.

I tried poking through the files and see if I could force it to update
without it loading the DFT software first, bu tno such luck.


Typical IBM nonsense. lol

-Steve