IBM Hard drive 250 GB

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

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Perfect
Disadvantages: None

...Excellent Hard Drive. I used to have a Maxtor 40Gb hard drive and after getting broadband I realised I needed much more capacity. I decided to go for an Hitachi/IBM Drive because I work in IT industry and I am particularly involved in mainframes and I am aware that Hitachi are extremely rigorous when it comes to releasing new drives, for a new type of drive to be released by Hitachi it has to survive in a mainframe environment. Hitachi has an extremely good reliability rate at mainframe level. Hitachi have used the latest technology to ensure that their drives maintain good reliability like a Head Load/Unload system which means that the drive will not wear itself out when not in operation. In comparison to other 7200rpm drives the Deskstar come out on top in terms of its seek time, which allows faster access to data. It also... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

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

...OK...This is a very large and cheap hard drive. What can I say but IBM have done a superb job with this set of hard drives. The Deskstar 75GXP series all run at 7200rpm via IDE connection, and I think capacities from 20Gb to 65Gb. This 30Gb drive I'm reviewing here is an excellent upgrade. I upgraded from a 6Gb hard drive which had UDMA33 Connection, and a 5200rpm. Performance differences between my old drive and this IBM one is not dramatic but noticeable. For one thing it can make applications run a lot faster, and due to its higher rpm, it can process and save files slightly quicker. What I am amazed about is the quietness of it, there is a noise as you turn it on, but after it has initiated it you cannot hear it spinning, unless your computer has no fans...even the power supply fan which is really quiet drowns out the sound... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful