IBM hard drive hot-plug cage

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

...Friday all the more inexplicable. It was the end of the day before my computer was due to be taken to bits and rebuilt with faster and quieter components. Myself and a friend (coxy123) had been messing around trying to sort out a niggling problem in his computer as well a fit a new hard drive (I told him IBM’s were reliable and he bought one!). Problem sorted he plugged his computer into mine and copied some files off that he had backed up to my computer when he ran out of space. The first sign of trouble was when one of the files failed to copy with a rather ominous “Device read error”, however as my drives had behaved faultlessly for months I wrote it off as a dodgy file to begin with. However shortly after I had to reboot my computer for some reason (Probably because windows 98 is a bit poo). Instead of watching my computer boot I... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful