Under Fire, IBM's GXP series of Hard Disk Drive
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| IBM 60GXP vs. Maxtor D740X-6L Behind the Buzzwords | |
| (Review by MS, July 14, 2002) |
Summary
IBM's line of hard disk drives has been in the crossfire for about one year now. We still have some results regarding performance, reliability and, most importantly, some very efficient ways of killing a drive to share. In addition, we have pitted the 60GXP against the Maxtor D740X-6L in both synthetic and application benchmarks using both the IDE interface and the Maxtor ATA133 PCI controller card for either drive. The results are somewhat surprising in that synthetic benchmarks fail to show any hints of the up to 75% performance delta between the four different configurations.
Under Fire, IBM's GXP series of Hard Disk Drive
In November 2000, the unspeakable happened, we received a report about a recall of Gateway computers in Japan that would suffer sudden hard disk drive death after system shutdown. All models affected were equipped with the 75GXP HDDs. IBM representatives that we asked fervently denied any possibility of problems with their drives. Issues with the Japanese version of Microsoft Windows 98SE were cited as the source of the problems, however, there were no known issues with any other version of the OS and none with any IBM drives in general.
As the rumors kept condensing and the first reports of dying IBM 75GXPs surfaced, we finally bypassed IBM PR contacts and called IBM tech support who told us that there was a known problem with Windows98SE, flushing of the cache upon system shutdown and that Microsoft was working on a patch. At the same time, IBM PR contacts still maintained that they had never heard of any issues. This was the beginning of the end, currently any survey on any bulletin board will unearth more negative feedback about IBM Deskstars than any other drives out there. The bad reliability track records were exacerbated by IBM's recommendation not to keep the drives running for more than 8 hours / day, a move that was probably well-meant but completely backfired in the public conception of IBM hard disk drives.
At the same time, the competition in form of WesternDigital, Maxtor and Seagate made a comeback and even though everybody was hit by the concomitant recession as well, these brands are still out there and can be found on shelves that a few months ago would have sported only IBM drives.
Does all of this mean to stay away from IBM drives? Are the Maxtors really so much better and more reliable than the IBM Deskstars or are we looking at the distorted pictures generated by a witch-hunt. We took two of the most common drives in the desktop platform, that is the IBM 60GXP and the Maxtor D740X-6L and pitted them against each other. And who would have known what we were able to dig up.
next page: => Dispelling some Buzzwords =>
