IBM hard drive mounting kit

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: Large and fast removable storage.
Disadvantages: Can get a bit warm during operation.

...to unplug the drive each time I simply wanted to turn it off, just because there wasn't a switch on the back! "Whisper quiet operation" - it is pretty quiet and certainly a lot quieter than the average PC, so you never really notice noise from it. A stand is included so you can mount the drive on its side to take up less space. I don't know if this is common for external drives, but this drive can be set to power down after a period of inactivity like an internal hard disk. (The default is 60 mins, but can be changed). **Getting Hot Hot Hot... well, quite warm anyhow:** The drive enclosure is made from a pretty solid piece of aluminium which I'm sure must help to dissipate the heat created by the hard drive, but still it can get quite warm to the touch. I've personally mounted a cpu fan+heatsink on the drive enclosure (connected... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful