RE: IBM DTLA IDE Made In Hungary

[Torrey Hoffman]

Without doing statistical failure analysis, it's hard to say
if the seemingly large numbers of failing IBM drives are due to
real hardware problems, or just because there are a lot of those
drives out there.

Perhaps some sysadmins at large companies who manage hundreds of 
computers can comment on failure rates?

Nonetheless... I've had two IBM DLTA's fail on me in the last year,
and no non-IBM failures. I have about 12 drives, mostly Maxtor and
IBM in the various machines I use, so my sample set is perhaps
somewhat meaningful.  

I just had a 40 GB 5400 RPM IBM drive die on me.  It was less than 
a year old, made in Thailand, and had seen little use.  BIOS'es on 
two different computers didn't even see the drive, it's was like 
there was nothing on the wire.  I revived it and rescued my data by 
putting it in a freezer for an hour and plugging it in ice-cold.  

It was still working when I finished pulling data off it, but I 
don't really trust it now...

And last year I had an HP drive (actually made by IBM Storage 
Products Hungary) die in the classic way - bad sectors, seek errors,
etc. That was a 7200RPM 15 GB disk.  OTOH, the 40 GB IBM I replaced 
it with has been fine...

still, I will use Maxtor for my new RAID, I've never had one of 
those fail.  Yet.  

Torrey Hoffman