IBM sold its disk drive unit to Hitachi. So it's more like a hitachi drive sold under the old IBM brand name.
I was with Hitachi in the early 80's when IBM was having horrific problems with their big drives. The closest thing I ever heard as a cause was the gassing off of the epoxy they used to glue several airconditioning ducts in the units. It evidently deposited microscopic particles on the disk surface and caused head crashes.
I got a lot of business for Hitachi out of that issue.
Yes. In the case of the "DeathStars," the problem was that the drive had been spec'd to run 7 hours per day. IBM considered these "consumer-grade" drives. Well, many consumers run their machines 24/7 now... I have 3 doing that.
The heads in the DeskStars run so close to the platter that friction with the air is an issue. If the drive was left on too long, but idle, the air between the head and the platter would gradually heat up. That would case the platter to expand in the vicinity of the head. Cue the scraping noise.
There is a firmware fix for this now. All it does is move the heads every once in a while when the drive is idle. This prevents any one area of the platter from getting warm enough to expand and scrape the head.
Anyone who has an IBM DeskStar drive should get the firmware update. Your drive will fail without it. I lost two of these puppies before I found out it was a known problem with a fix.