BloodNOil

Commonly referred to as the DeathStar, The DeskStar is to hard drives what
Hyundai is to cars.

Don't buy them.

If you already have one, upgrade the firmware before it's too late.
The firmware can be found at:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/tik...page=DeathStar

Why are they called DeathStars, you ask? The answer is simple. They DIE.
One of them ate my operating systems. Both of them. Twice.

I've been playing "Setup" continuously for about 7 hours, with periodic breaks
to play "Core Dump".

IBM does some things very well. Hard drives, however, are not their strong point.

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It's like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain!!

CheebaMonkey

I installed an IBM drive in one of my friend's PCs. It was well over a year ago, so I'm guessing it wasn't this drive series.

I thought that IBM made good drives. I guess not.

I like how they compared the size of the old drive to the new one. The old drive was huge!

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BloodNOil

Flash that mother. DeskStar is the ONLY ATA hard drive that IBM makes.

BloodNOil

Correction: DeskStar and UltraStar are the only ATA hard drives that IBM
makes. The difference is that UltraStars are for servers.

Anyways, my DeathStar seems to like the new firmware. Not a scratch since
the 5th time i've installed Windows in 48 hours.

edit: this hard drive is 3 years old so I don't think you're safe from it, cheebamonkey.

teetdogs1

ok so I work with IBM deskstars everyday there is nothing wrong with the line its self there are just bad drives out there maxtor makes bad drives too so does hitachi and every other brand in the world. not tryin to sound like a know it all but you cant just group all deskstars as bad just cause you had a bad one man. If you want to talk about an IBM F**K up look at the netvista pc's made before 2003. all the capasitors on the motherboard leak acid out of them. now thats a big f**k up not a few drives going bad.

BloodNOil

I see that i made some overgeneralizations about the drives in my initial post.

I was angry at losing my operating systems and almost all of my computer
science project as a result of the hard drive's failure.

BUT that does not change the fact that the basic technology behind the
DeskStar is prone to heat-related problems (The heads or platters can heat up
and consequently data is written to the wrong area of the drive)

Older DeskStars shipped with firmware that failed to cool the heads properly
and in some cases threw the drive into a loop on trying to re-read a bad sector.

IBM/Hitachi's firmware patch does, in fact, fix the problem. The latest
firmware moves the heads around so that they don't heat up, but end users
aren't aware that the patch exists. At least I wasn't until the drive failed.

-Documentation-
Existence of patch: http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview...psg1MIGR-44195

Existence of systematic problem: Note IBM/Hitachi's policy on providing firmware patches:
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/hddfaqs.htm#19

Third party confirmation of systematic problem:
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD0yMDk=

teetdogs1

Its cool that I didn't offend you by my remarks and it is true that deskstars do have a problem but there is a fix at least.