IBM Tape library drive module 800 GB 1.6 TB

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

...Whether you are thinking of buying this drive (2nd hand, most likely as it's a couple of years old) or own one of IBM's 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models, read on for important information about issues with these drives and fixing them. ** THE DRIVE ** Capacity: 40 GB (38.3 GB as reported in windows) Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM Interface: ATA-100 Average seek time: 8.5 ms It's a fast enough drive. It seems to perform quite a bit better than the 5400 rpm 45 GB Western Digital drive I had, it's quite a bit quieter and this one's not dead ... yet. ** BORROWING NAMES FROM STAR WARS ** The main reason I thought I'd write a review on this drive, is to hopefully help a few others who have this or one of the other 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models (as I've read these are equally affected). It didn't take long for a lot of people... Read review

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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

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Advantages: Simple Setup, great value for money
Disadvantages: Win 2000/XP/Vista only - not for Win 98/ME

...I have previously purchased a Freecom 500 GB external drive drive and have been very happy with it's performance and reliability. So when the drive started to become 80% full it was time to look for some additional storage. I saw the new Freecom 1TB drive on Amazon and given my previous good experiences purchased one straight away. It arrived this morning (Tuesday) having ordered in the previous Friday, and all of this post free. For anyone that hasn't bought a Freecom external hard drive before, you get a very stylish drive unit, power adapter, leads and installation disk. Installing (in my case) took less than 5 minutes, most of the time was spent unpacking the pieces. Simply attached the usb lead, power pack and switched on. Instantly recognised by the Windows XP operating system as the next drive letter. The unit is virtually... Read review

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