Fastest IDE Hard Drive Ever: IBM Deskstar 75GXP — THG.RU

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IBM Deskstar 75GXP» —>

IBM DTLA-307030

I received a lot of emails from our readers complaining about the missing IBM and Maxtor drives in the recent hard drive reviews at Tom’s Hardware Guide. Generally we don’t leave out certain products intentionally. If some drives were missing so far, it’s simply because they were unavailable to us for different reasons.

First of all I want to apologize that you had to wait until now for us to review IBM hard drives. I’m also expecting to receive the latest Maxtor drives rather soon.

IBM’s Deskstar Family

Finally, we received a 30 GByte model of IBM’s latest IDE Deskstar series, the 75GXP. The series is called DTLA and follows a tradition which goes back 11 drive generations. IBM launched their Deskstar family with two 540 MByte drives (one IDE, one SCSI) several years ago. Those drives ran at 4500 rpm and came with 96 KBytes cache.

All IBM drives are well known for their excellent reputation regarding performance and reliability.

Technical Specifications

Jumper Location and Setup Information can be found on the IBM Website.

Ultra ATA-100

The latest interface standard is gradually entering the IDE arena, enabling bandwidths of up to 100 MBytes/s. Some of you may wonder where’s the need for such a fast IDE drive interface, as there is not one drive with a physical data transfer rate that is getting even close to the 66 MB/s of UltraATA/66.

It’s important to realize that the IDE interface has to live with quite a large overhead, cutting off some hefty 25% of the theoretical bandwith. That leaves a real bandwith of 25 MBytes/s for UltraATA/33 and approximately 50 MBytes/s for UltraATA/66. Today, high performance drives deliver up to 35 MBytes/s. Of course you should attach those drives at least to an ATA/66 controller if you want to take full advantage of its performance. The next hard drive generation will likely reach the UltraATA/66 barrier, thus requiring the faster interface to provide top performance.

Besides the naked transfer speed, all hard drives have their own cache memory to store data according to certain algorithms in order to speed up the overall performance. While synthetic hard disk benchmarks might not benefit a whole lot of those caches, real-world applications run considerably faster on a hard drive with more cache memory. Naturally, the cache has to be noticably faster than the physical drive media. The commonly used choice is of course one or several DRAM chips, which prodive a much higher bandwidth than the hard drive itself. As long as the interface is faster than the drive, those cache memories will have a particularly positive impact on performance.

For more information on UltraATA and UltraATA/100, please refer to the following links:

• UltraATA Whitepaper
• UltraATA/66 Whitepaper
• UltraATA/100 Whitepaper

Test Setup

Regular readers of Tom’s Hardware Guide may wonder why I changed the motherboard from the IWill W100 (Intel 810 chipset) to the Asus CUSL2 (Intel 815 chipset). The most important reason is of course the DTLA drive, which comes with an ATA/100 interface. Asus’ CUSL2 motherboard uses the I/O Controller Hub 2 (ICH2), featuring an UltraATA/100 controller. In order to get full software support, I also upgraded the IDE drivers from version 5.01 to 6.0.

Thanks to the fact that there is no need to run any graphics benchmark in order to test hard drives, the performance difference between the 810 platform and the now used 815 motherboard is almost zero. BAPCo’s SYSmark 2000 did not show a difference in two of three runs — enough proof for our purpose. Also the ZD Content Creation Winstone confirms equal performance.

Data Transfer Performance

Within the first two gigabytes, the DTLA drive is able to provide a read data transfer rate of over 35 Mbytes/s. At 50% of the drive capacity, it is still approximately 28 Mbytes/s. It is interesting to see that the write performance is significantly less. The drive seems to be using either a slowing write verification system, or it does not use a write cache.

Basically, you find the same results in Ziff Davis’ WinBench 99 Disc Inspection Test. As you can see, the DTLA drive is able to outperform its competitors clearly.

Disk Access Time

Both in Windows 98 and Windows 2000 IBM’s new Deskstar needs less time than other models to access data.

Please note that the access time can be slightly longer with the higher capacity disk drives.

Disk WinBench 99

Both the Business and the Highend Disk WinBench show better results for the DTLA. All models except the Seagate ST320430A come with 2 MByte cache. Still, the IBM drive seems to be technically more advanced than the competitors, as it is clearly faster once more.

Content Creation Winstone 2000

ZD’s Content Creation Winstone does not reveal more performance advantages for the IBM drive. However, this benchmark is not particularly made for hard drive benchmarking. The Deskstar 75GXP still scoring better than the others underlines its excellent performance, as the hard drive has only little influence on the result.

Temperature and Noise

We measured a temperature of only 44 Degrees centigrade, which is an excellent result for a 7200 rpm drive. Only the Western Digital 205BA is running a tad cooler.

Again, the higher capacity DTLA drives (45, 60, 75 GBytes) come with 3, 4 or 5 disks inside. Due to the higher friction inside the drive you should consider that a drive becomes hotter the more disks it consists of. Generally, a brand new drive that offers the same or even a higher capacity with only one or two magnetic discs is a better choice than its predecessor with three or four.

Last but not least the noise level is very acceptable as well. In normal operation, you usually won’t hear the DTLA drive. The 60 and 75 GB models will certainly be louder, as the higher amount of rotating disks creates more noise. Also the disk access noises will be louder with the high capacity drives, just because there are more heads working inside the drive.

The Competition

At this time, there is no hard drive, which could reach the outstanding result of the IBM DTLA series. Maxtor is releasing their 80 GByte drive right now, which will most likely be the largest model until Q1-2001. Unfortunately, this drive will only be available at 5400 rpm, which will most likely result in inferior overall performance.

Western Digital is concentrating on the low-end market, selling 45 GByte drives for less than $200. In the last years, WD has not been supplying any high-performance IDE drives. However, they are also offering Firewire as an interface for hard drive solutions.

Quantum and Fujitsu of course have decent hard disks, but none of the two is able to supply drives at capacities above 60 GBytes.

The bad side of IBM’s new and fast IDE hard drives is their comparably high price. While the 15, 30 and 45 GByte models are still reasonably priced, the models with 60 and 75 GBytes cost $300 and 540$.

Conclusion

The result is pretty clear: IBM’s Deskstar 75GXP line offers the fastest IDE hard drives available right now. The DTLA-307030 is able to beat all formerly tested hard drives in each and every benchmark. This performance comes a slightly higher price point than hard drives from other manufacturers, but we all know that top-notch performance doesn’t come for free.

Larger models of the Deskstar 75GXP series will likely make some more noise and run hotter due to their larger amount of disks, but temperature shouldn’t be a big problem anymore. Thanks to a sticker directly over the jumpers, the drive installation should easily be done within seconds.

I did not mention vibration in this article with any word because I didn’t think of this until I touched the drive by accident. Compared to my Seagate Barracuda ATA, the IBM drive runs absolutely quiet. I almost thought it wasn’t even running. 🙂