IBM hard drive backplane

Advantages: Consistently fast, reliable, quiet
Disadvantages: none (that I know of)

...This is a great drive, that I bought about a year ago when I built my PC. I was looking for a good all round IDE hard disk - fast, reliable, and well priced. After reading various reviews, I discovered the best hard disk in its class. Was it a Maxtor? WD? Seagate? No - it was made by IBM. >Price< The drives are selling in many places, such as dabs.com. The DeskStar line is extremely well priced, so price/performance ratio is excellent here if you are on a budget. >Performance< I am a musician and I use digital audio/recording applications. These can be very hard-disk intensive, and the Deslstar 120GXP performs brilliantly. I also have a firewire-capable digital camcorder so I use the PC to edit digital video which is also very hard-disk intensive. Again, the drive performs competently. Seek times and transfer rates are top... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

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

...to start 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... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: The world seems to have good drives
Disadvantages: I had TWO dodgy ones

...I just thought I'd add that these drives should be avoided, IBM is being sued as these drives are consistantly bad. See www.theregister.co.uk for more. Here’s a joke for you, what comes in pairs, is square, black, round and makes strange clicking noises. My rather non-functional pair of 30 gigabyte (1024 megabytes if you’re buying, 1000 megabytes if you’re selling) IBM hard drives which are, or rather were, in a RAID array (RAID 101 – join two disks together and get twice the speed and capacity, although that’s a very simple definition) that in itself wasn’t working to well (But that’s another story). But I’m getting ahead of myself, I first got these drives last November (Indeed it was the first thing my writing bought for me), when life became to cramped on my 17gig Fujitsu drive that came with my computer. A brief bit... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful