Seagate may have had problems too . . .
. . but CMI was IBM's primary vendor for the 20-Meg IBM PC AT hard disk, and their drives failed early and often.
One of the magazines did an informal evaluation of drives for the AT. The CMI failed the "table jiggle" test. On the other hand, they accidently knocked over the table and a Priam drive on it kept on working. They reported this and Priam sold a lot of drives for a while.
One drive maker promised to build an artificial reef off Florida out of CMI drives turned in for theirs (forgot who it was). They ran into trouble with the EPA, but did have some photos taken throwing CMI drives off a fishing boat.
The best hard disk story from back then was Miniscribe. Miniscribe ran into hard financial times, and hired a "turnaround artist" to put the company back on its feet.
Through rough treatment he actually succeeded. Then Miniscribe's board of directors made The Big Mistake(tm). They kept him on. Using his same turnaround methods, he destroyed the company.
Since he fired anyone who gave him news he didn't want to hear, he got only news he wanted to hear. It wasn't true, but the perpetrator got a paycheck for another week.
In the company's last audit (Price Watergate, I believe), management tried to get the auditors to consider a load of hard disks on a ship on it's way from Singapore as "shipped". The auditors wouldn't buy it, which was a good thing because neither the ship nor the drives actually existed.
The final act was to make a large shipment to major distributors - but they didn't have any drives - so thay packed a brick in each box (this was the era of full hight 5" drives). I talked to an Ingram sales lady once who actually saw the boxes being unpacked in the warehouse.
Well, if you're going out . . . you might as well go out a legend . . .
