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IBM 120 gxp reply

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Showlow

Registered
Joined
Mar 6, 2002
Location
Tucson, AZ
I wrote IBM about the 333 hour monthly limitation on the 120gxp series.
Not sure how to interpret their answer since their claim on the website under the heading "Reliability" states: "Recommended power-on hours (monthly): 333

"Our "power-on hour" specification (333) represents typical desktop PC
usage. It is not an indication of the maximum number of power-on hours. The
drive can and has been used successfully in 24x7 operations.
If you would like to return the drives please return to your point of
purchase. IBM will be happy to replace a defective drive with like
product."
 
IBM were trying to cover their legal um... posteriors with the original 333h/mo statement after the fiasco with the 60gxp drive failures. Now they realized they only sat the same posteriors on a hot grill instead with this statement (since it impies risk of drive failure if the limit is exceeded) and are trying to back out of it. I don't trust them.
 
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I doubt that the heat is the matter here. Hard drive failures are typically mechanical in nature.
 
Actually, heat plays a major role in the life of a HD for one big reason....

When you have ANY kind of magnetic material, whether it's your plain old horseshoe magnet..( remember those? heh heh ) to magnetic media..( such as HD's, floppy disks..etc etc etc... ) if that magnetic material were to be subjected to a certain amount of heat, that material would lose it's magnetic properties, heat destroys magnetism.

Now looking at it in view of a HD...the platters are coated with a magnetic surface, when the heads pass over this surface, they either are reading the VERY weak magnetic fields or they write to them, changing the magnetic field, within the magnetic structure on the platters is also the "servo codes" They are read by the heads and fed back to the actuator control circuit to guide the heads to the correct track. Given how weak the actual magnetic data suface is, heat can indeed destroy the data on the drives...as well as these "servo codes" which will render the drive useless.

So heat can play a BIG role in determining the life of a HD, and I'm sure we all felt the case of our drives before, and some get rather warm, now think about how much hotter the inside is.



:EDIT: Storagereview.com has a good reference to how HD's work, you can check it out here
 
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I remember my first IBM HD on an old, OLD PC-XT Model 370. That thing was huge, probably big enough to take up 2, maybe 3 5.25 drivebays. Very loud too, probably more noisy than my current computer and it's 9 fans running full-tilt. Those were the days...;)
 
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