History: IBM 75GXP, the hard disk to get out of the hard disk business
In March 2000, IBM introduced new hard disks. The 40GV and 75GXP became notorious for their high failure rates.
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In spring 2000, IBM expanded its DTLA hard disk series with two model series, the Deskstar 40GV and 75GXP. For the first time, the company used glass disks as the carrier material instead of the usual aluminum alloy disks (platters).
The 40GV was the first to use disks with a capacity of 20 GB; if there had been sufficient demand, IBM could have built a 100 GB drive from it. The bigger problem child, however, was the 75GXP.
IBM built a total of six models with different capacities, on the one hand the multiple of the platter capacity with 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75 GByte as well as an additional model with 20 GByte – that used one and a half disks and thus also three read/write heads. However, shortly after the introduction of the 75GXP, the disk was given a new name: IBM Deathstar. Of course, this did not come from the manufacturer, but from the users, who were confronted with many failures.
Click of Death
The reasons for the high failure rates were complex. There were reports of head crashes due to vibrations and problems with the ramp on which the read/write head was placed for the idle state. When idle, lubricant is said to have been deposited on the head, which was thrown around the next time it was accessed. This in turn is said to have led to damaged data sectors.
The magnetic layer is also said to have become detached from the glass disks, which in some cases caused the glass disks to reappear. IBM also cited compatibility problems with various IDE controllers, while users tended to cite design errors and faulty firmware. Cooling did not help.
Many failures were announced by a clicking sound, sometimes also a buzzing noise. The clicking sound gave rise to the term "click of death". In 2006, the PC magazine PC World named "the worst tech products of all time"; the Deskstar came in 18th place.
IBM provided a firmware update and a test program, but none of this helped much. In 2001, IBM suffered a drop in sales in the hard disk drive business. IBM did not state the extent of this decline in its annual report. However, there had been no previous decline in HDD sales. As the company also saw the end of the PC era approaching and wanted to focus more on mobile end devices, it sold its hard disk drive division to Hitachi for 2.05 billion US dollars in 2002.
Initially, IBM still held a 30 percent stake in the joint venture Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, better known as HGST. At the end of 2005, HGST was to become fully owned by Hitachi, bringing an end to IBM's almost 50-year history of developing and manufacturing hard disk drives.
HGST was then taken over by Western Digital in 2012, with parts of the 3.5-inch drive production going to competitor Toshiba due to antitrust regulations. Today, the HGST name has disappeared from Western Digital's product range and the last three remaining hard disk drive manufacturers are Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.
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