towel401's Full Review: IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive
When I built this computer 3 years ago I had one of these, unfortunately it broke after about a year. I will tell you what happened.
First impressions:
Drive was packed in a little transparent plastic box in an anti-static bag, I promptly installed it in my new computer without any bother at all. The drive itself looks pretty nice. Makes a nice sound running & spinning up and down (you have to be a real geek to appreciate the sound :P )
Usage/Performance:
It has copied 100-200MB files in just a few seconds, so I cant complain there. I have no complaints about the performance of this drive. ATA100 is fine since thats all my motherboard supports, and I'm not too bothered about it since it cant transfer the data onto the disk that fast anyway. I have partitioned this drive to run linux and it worked fine. There is no software packaged with this so it must be downloaded from the IBM site.
Special Features:
I must say I was very impressed with the features of this drive, and I miss it because of that. First of all it has some little mechanism to lift the heads up slightly so they wont get bashed off the platters while in transport or anything. Unfortunately I think this mechanism wasnt perfect and it is what caused my hard drive to die.
You can get this software off the IBM site, which makes a bootable floppy. This software can be used for boring stuff such as enabling ATA but also has 2 very nice features I havnt seen on any other drives.
1. You can set the harddrive to partially spin down, you can also choose from a progress bar how much it is to slow down. Normal drives switch off on standby but you can set this one to only spin down partially, to about half its speed so it will be faster to "wake up" out of standby.
2. You can adjust how much noise this thing makes. A progress bar similar to the partial spin down one will let you adjust how much force it uses to move the heads around the drive. If it uses a lot of force the heads will move very fast this will result in lower access times but will also make a little "tick" sound, the harddrive rattling is caused by it moving the heads. So you can set it to gently drag the heads across, resulting in almost no sound at all being made. I tried it once and I couldnt hear it rattle at all. This of course increases the access times.
Its demise:
One day when I started my computer the harddrive would spin up, and make a strange twitching sound about once a second for about 10 seconds, then stop. After a few resets it went away. It was like it was trying to move the heads down but it didnt quite make it or something. Twice I think the drive randomly started making this twitching sound while I was just using the computer. Which is strange because the second time it happend I was playing a game and one of the players was complaing about harddrive problems and then I told him about my harddrive problem which I had experienced months before and it started making the sound again not even 10 seconds after I sent the message.
Shortly after I had the same problems starting up and then files had been corrupted so I brought it back to the shop who didnt want to give me a return at first even though they had seen the problem for themselves as it made the weird sound when they tried it in the shop. When I took it home it made the sound again so I took it back again and got a new 60GB maxtor for 20 euros. If you offered me this harddrive today I would still buy it. Even though its an inferior old fashioned 40GB ATA100 drive. In years to come these will probably be collectors items as they are some of the last IBM harddrives to be made. I havnt used any Hitachi but I hope they have same nice features and have ironed out the problems.
Another strange thing is there were a load of marks in the centre of the drive, which is really strange because that part of the drive wasnt even in contact with metal. Maybe it was possessed by satan :D lol.
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