IBM Deskstar 75GXP Ultra ATA 100 Hard Drive

IBM has long been known as a leader and an innovator in new technologies that help boost the performance and capacity of modern storage devices. While IBM offers many solutions for different data storage needs, most of our readers are familiar with their Deskstar and Ultrastar hard disk drives, for the desktop and server markets. IBM makes no exception in the Deskstar family, when it comes to their philosophy of providing innovation and quality in their products, as evidenced by the introduction of the Deskstar 75 GXP and the 40 GV disk drive lines. While these two model lines incorporate similar features, which I will go over shortly, the 75 GXP line is aimed at the performance user, while the 40 GV line is aimed more at the cost conscience user.

Both of these drives offer some of the highest data densities available today, with the 40 GV having densities of 20 GB per platter, it is able to provide 40 GB’s of storage with just two platters. The 75 GXP has densities of 15.3 GB per platter, and is able to achieve 75 GB’s of storage using 5 platters. While at first glance it may seem that the 40 GV would offer superior performance due to its higher platter densities, those higher densities are offset by it’s lower spindle speed.

The 40 GV drives operate at 5400 RPM and has a 512 KB cache, while the 75 GXP drives offer 7200 RPM spindle speeds, along with a larger 2 MB cache, allowing for better overall performance. The reason the 40 GV drives are able to offer higher platter densities is that as spindle speeds are increased, it becomes harder to reliably read tightly packed data off of the platters. So while the 75 GXP is limited to lower data densities due to its 7200-RM spindle speed, the net effect is that it still offers superior performance because of the increased speed. These factors combine to allow the 75 GXP to provide sustained data transfers of 37 MB/s, versus the 32 MB/s, the 40 GV is able to achieve. The 75 GXP also has an improved average seek time of only 8.5 ms, compared to the 9.5 ms of the 40 GV, allowing for slightly faster access time.