Top Tech Blunders: 10 Products that Massively Failed

Posted 05/20/2009 at 8:45am | by Norman Chan

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We love the excitement of being on the cutting edge, but have to also acknowledge the risks of being early adopters of hardware. In fact, there have been numerous occasions where tech enthusiasts have put their faith into the seemingly fastest or the more innovative pieces of technology, only to be burned months or years later when that tech is revealed to have to a serious design flaw or falls victim to sudden obsolescence. In this roundup, we spotlight some of the most memorable PC parts and computing gadgets that showed huge promise but just didn’t deliver in the end. Whether it was high defect rates, underperformance, or bad launch timing, these products were poised to be market leaders if not for their spectacular failure.

Kenwood TrueX CD-Rom Drives

Back in 1999, a company called Zen research collaborated with Kenwood to develop a revolutionary optical drive technology called TrueX. Instead of using a single laser to illuminate and read digital data off of a CD, TrueX proposed a multi-beam approach to illuminating and detecting multiple tracks of data on a CD at the same time using a diffracted laser beam. A normal red laser diode is sent through a diffraction grating that splits the beam into seven parts, each theoretically illuminating a separate data track. The trick that allowed TrueX drives to actually process these parallel beams was a multi-beam detector array to "pick up" the seven beams. In practice, this allowed Kenwood's TrueX series optical drives to achieve launch speeds of 40X (40 times the one-speed rate of 150kb/s) and even reach 72X while only spinning at the rate of 10X drives. 6-8MB/s reads were revolutionary at a time when DVD technology was still in its infancy, and the Kenwood drives were must-have components for enthusiast builders. 

How it Failed

Unfortunately for Kenwood (and for many people who bought the TrueX drives) the mainstream 40X model suffered a high failure rate and actually failed to deliver on the hyped up speed promises of this new technology. In fact, Kenwood had to eventually settle a class-action suit filed by disgrunted 40X CD-ROM owners who complained about lackluster speeds, poor media compatibility, and even failing hardware. A design defect was discovered in the 40X models that caused the drives to completely fail to read discs. The drives eventually disappeared into obscurity when other manufacterers opted not to license Zen's laser-splitting idea, even though the company had plans to bring its technology to DVD drives. Both Zen Research and Kenwood's TrueX series disappeared soon after the debacle. 

Hitachi 75GXP "Deathstar"

Anyone building a computer at the turn of the millennium must have remembered the supreme fail of IBM's Deskstar 75GXP. At the time of its release in 2001, the 75GXP was the fastest ATA/100 hard drive on the market, boasting a platter density of 15.3 GB/platter, 2MB cache, and fast spin speeds of 7200RPM -- still the standard RPM for most consumer hard drives eight years later. Its performance under optimal conditions reflected these impressive specs. The 75GXP bested its rivals from Maxtor and Western Digital in all speed tests, breaking IDE drive records. Its price also reflected its performance; depending on capacity, these drives sold for north of $200, which would easily get you a spacious 1.5TB drive today. 

How it Failed

It's too bad then, that adopters of this read/write marvel were caught off guard by the incredibly high failure rates of the 75GXPs. Examining closer at the hardware in the 75GXP revealed that the drives suffered from two distinct problems. The magnetic read/write heads used in these drives were prone to failure, disrupting the way the head interacted with the disk platters. Data corruption from faulty heads led to the infamous "click of death" scenario where users could actually hear the scratchy death rattle coming from a drive as it was about to fail. Additionally, the 75GXPs were also equipped with firmware that led to the failure of the NV-RAM chip on the controller board. Worse yet, the symptoms of a failed NV-RAM chip were similar to that of the "click of death," which led to many users mis-diagnosing their drive failures and hindering data recovery efforts. A class action lawsuit was filed against IBM for manufacturing defects that led to drive crashes, which IBM never claimed responsibility for even after settling the case in 2005.

Diamond 56k Shotgun Modem

The turn of the century was marked by many significant technological advances that changed the way we used personal computers, not the least of which was the growing adoption of broadband connectivity in consumer households. But as broadband penetration was in its infancy, the 56K dial-up modem was how the vast majority of users connected to the internet. In 1998, Diamond announced a technology called Shotgun that would promise to double the speed of your internet by bonding two dial-up connections with either two modems or one of their special SupraSonic II dual-port modem cards.

Bonding, as it turned out, as a protocol that had been around for years in ISDN lines (actually an acronym for Bandwidth on Demand Interoperability Group) that would let modems pick up extra data from a second connection as bandwidth was needed. Effectively, this meant that you could get double the speed of 56K (up to 112Kbits/sec) through just regular phone lines -- almost the speed of ISDN and early ADSL lines! Additionally, since this was just a software protocol, it could be applied to basically any modem. Users could theortically bond any combination of 28-56K modems for added speed.

How it Failed

Shotgun modems failed for the same reason we aren't using 56K modems today: broadband killed dial-up. Diamond's shotgun modems came out right before DSL and Cable connections became a practical option due to expanded service areas and competitive pricing. Additionally, Shotgun required that users pay for two phone lines and two dial-up accounts (or a special higher-priced single account), and only worked with a few ISPs. 

Diamond actually continues to sell dial-up modems. As for bonding technology, the idea lives on in Network Load Balancing, otherwise known as dual-WAN routing. Dual-WAN routers will balance traffic from two WAN sources (like two cable lines) to give you the combined speed of two separate connections. Network redundancy is another perk of running two WAN lines, though the service is primarily used by businesses.