There are many personal computer web sites that have information on this IBM drive problem.
For example:
http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494/1/ A search on google will turn up LOTS.
My replacement drive is working fine, but I put it in a system is not critical. The system that had the drive that went bad got a new Maxtor drive.
I have not lost faith in all of IBM, just their IDE drives. SCSI drives, I believe, are built to a higher standard, thus the 5 year warranty, instead of 3 ... oops ... 1 years for IDE (recently, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate have reduced the length of warranties from 3 years to 1 year. They SAY they are doing this in order to bring their warranty lenght in line with other PC component manufacturers. I KNOW they are doning this to increase profits, regardless of what their spinmeisters say.)
I have had one other drive, a SCSI model fail. This happened back in 1998 or 1999. It was replaced with a "refurbished" version of the same model and has been working fine ever since. As well as these two IBM drives, I have three more IBM drives; two SCSI and one IDE.
I do not have any ill will towards IBM's other products. In fact, in IBM computers, you will often find non-IBM drives. Their laptops have a good reliability reputation.
Paul
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the 1derful1