On 2/1/02 3:41 AM, "Ronald C.F. Antony" <rcfa+logicaudio@...> wrote: >> Go to www.macsolutions.com and get the 60Gig firewire hard drive its an >> Oxford911 box made by MacAlly w/ an IBM 60GXP 7200 Rpm 60gig drive and >> its >> like $250 US. Great buy, very quiet, and very reliable. Excellent >> performance. > > Quiet, yes. But reliable? I thought the 60GXP line is the one that has > IBM dealing with a class-action lawsuit about. > I think that was their first series of fluid-bearing IDE drives > (hence so quiet), but if some sites are right, they may not be > as reliable as desired. > Reports are conflicting as to whether or not the newer lines of > fluid-bearing drives are affected by these problems, too, or not. > In any case IBM recommends e.g. only 333h/month power-on time > on their 120GB drives. As far as I'm concerned, a reliable drive > should be able to run 24*7 like all my equipment does. > I have yet to figure out if IBM is more honest in their disclosures, > or if their drives are truly only suitable for 9-5 desktop work, > where the system goes to sleep or is shut down at the end of > the business day.... I did some major research on this because I rid myself of an entire scsi system and wanted to be sure it was being replaced by something of quality. The IBM drives that were the cause of the lawsuit were the 75GXP's. What had happened was that IBM for some reason or another released a drive that had something like a 85 percent failure rate. People flipped out. Those were originally the much praised 75 gig drives. These particular drives (I believe the 40's and the 75's) were quiet and fast, although none of them worked. In all reality there were a few batches of the 75 gig drives that happened to have worked real well however, IBM was forced to pull them all from the shelves in order to avoid more lawsuits. The 75GXP Line was replaced by the newer60GXP line. The big difference was that the faulty drives supposedly had a much lower access time than the 60GXP but IBM needed to replenish distributor stock immediately, it was easier for them to release something that theoretically had lesser performance but they at least knew that it would work. In either case, out of all of the drives the IBM 60GXP has been excellent (only the 60Gig version, don't get another size, this is the one that has the best performance speedwise. This drive outperforms the rest of em all. Better than on the Seagate Barracudda.