Hard Drives

This exhibit belongs to the Deskstar product line of IBM. Originally announced by IBM in 1994, the hard drive development departure from IBM was bought by Hitachi and continued under the name "Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST)".
This hard drive is from 2001 and belongs to the family of Deskstar 60GXP.
Due to very high error rates, already not functional shipped hard drives and a very short lifetime (sometimes only a few weeks), the Deskstars have been called the "Death Stars" and ended 2006 ranked 18 of the "world's worst technology products of all time". In October 2001, an American user of the Deskstar 75GXP brought in an action against IBM. In 2005, IBM contract into pay 100$ to everyone who owns an inoperative Deskstar 75GXP.

Origins of these problems were poorly processed circuit boards. The contacts of the chips disolved which could cause firmware failures. Moreover, there were relatively frequent head crashes (that means the surface of the platters and the read-write head comes into direct contact).