IBM Enhanced Disk Drive Module 750 GB

Advantages: Speed, capacity, made by IBM!
Disadvantages: sometimes noisy

...IBM is a name that most people associate with Servers, or with desktop PC systems, but they are also one of the worlds biggest hard drive manufacurers. The Latest series of drives to roll off Big Blue's production line is the Deskstar 75GXP. Available in 15, 30, 45, 60, and 75 gigabytes capacity, these drives all share in common a 7200rpm spindle speed, 2mb cache, and UDMA100 transfer speeds. These features all make for a drive that rivals a much more expensive SCSI drive in performance, but for a fraciton of the cost. I have 2 of the 75GXP 30gb drives in my AMD Athlon system as we speak, and they're set up in a RAID array. The upshot of all the jargon is that the 2 drives act as one big drive, and effectively double the already impressive performance! Even using just a single drive, they are the perfect companion for the latest high... Read review

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Advantages: Quite a fast drive.
Disadvantages: One of the "Deathstar" drives.

...complaining about their IBM drives dying. I even had a friend with a 60 GB model whose drive died after only a year. Possibly I'm lucky my drive hasn't died yet, but also there could be a reason for it.... These models of drive, marketed by IBM as "Deskstar", soon earnt the nickname "Deathstar" on many a website. With seemingly many people's replacement drives also dying and people generally getting very annoyed that IBM had turned out rather a dodgy lot of hard disks. A year ago IBM released a firmware update that's supposed to fix the cause of the failures, which was to do with the way the hard drive head idled. The firmware fix simply moves the head around every now and again to prevent the problem (now my hard drive might have survived because it's accessing the disk so often). I'm sure a lot of people don't know there was a firmware update... Read review

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Advantages: Big, fast, fairly quiet. + CHEAP
Disadvantages: IDE?

...of the hard drive. You can, however, hear some sound when you are doing intense hard disk activity, such as saving a huge file, or defragging. The Deskstar 75GXP 30.7Gb has UDMA100, though I only have UDMA66, it will still be useful when I upgrade my motherboard. It's access time is 8.5ms which is pretty good now. There are new IBM technoligies which minimise problems, including SMART capabilities. You can download certain programs from the IBM website which you can run in the background and can monitor for errors in your hard drive. Due to its huge capacity I do recommend partitioning your hard drive, you can use IBM's supplied software or DOS's fdisk. I tried the IBM software, but I found it difficult to make it recognise it as a FAT32 file system, so I used Fdisk instead. Setting it up is quite easy. Partitioning just splits your hard drive... Read review

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