75GXP Connectors

(Ed. note: I’ve seen this as the root cause of IBM hard drive problems elsewhere, so this is not unique. I can
personally testify that I’ve yanked a power pin out of an IBM drive (and I’m not exactly Hercules– Ed)

Actually, I might have a good answer for this, as I have returned two of them already (both 45gigs). Then again, I live by them. I own seven of them and buy/suggest them to all my friends.

Here’s something I found.

I had two 45 gig RAIDed via a Promise card and they kept posting errors and locking up the machine and even giving me bad sectors.

This pissed me off, so I RAIDed some older IBM drives and didn’t have any issues at all.

While RMAing a friend’s HDD, I loaded him one of the 45 gig’s till his came in. Plugged it in, went a way for awhile, came back and the computer was locked up. Rebooted, no drive… Hmmmm.

Disconnected and reconnected cable, no drive. Dis/reconnected power drive, worked for a while, then did it again.

Changed the power supply molex connector. Worked for a day until someone bumped it. Reboot worked OK, but then locked up after a few minutes.

Finally pulled out the drive and went to the other 45 gig I had, worked fine. Ran the zero fill on the 45 gig (or what even IBM calls it fitness test i think), it checked out fine.

I noticed something as I turned the drive: one of the power pins moved a little. The way they make the power connector now opens the back side up so that when you plug in the power and the EIDE cables, it adds undue stress to the back of the drive. Look at it, and you’ll see it even flexes the thin plastic case on it.

One of the pin’s solder joints were broken and the others had cracks. I used to ran a arcade room and had to work on the older video game cabinets, so I knew) that a cracked solder joint just doesn’t pass constant current, and we know if a HDD don’t park properly it’s can result in bad sectors.

I called IBM for a replacement even though I could have fixed the problem in about 30 seconds (29 of which would be waiting for the soldering iron to warm up. :)Þ

When I held the pin in tight, no problems at all with the drive.

My suggestion is to help the plug in plate when adding BOTH EIDE and power connectors as not to add additional stress to the other components on the drive itself.

Email Will