IBM 60GXP 60GB Hard Drive
Introduction
As Audio, Video, broadband communication are gradually creeping into the mainstream PC market, there’s a huge requirement by end users to get their PC’s in line with the technology developments. Today most of us go for high-end CPU’s, graphics cards, Memory, and mainboards; but one thing some of us tend to overlook is the hard drive. Fact is, no matter how fast your CPU and memory is, if your hard drive is not up to par with the data transfer speeds of the rest of the system, the overall performance of your PC will degrade greatly.
Today we can see that audio and video are becoming more and more predominant in our daily computer usage. Take a modern day game for example, just look at the number of video and audio files that go into making each of those. So there’s no doubt, the more space you have the better it is. On the plus side hard drives are becoming cheaper each day and higher the capacity the better value you get. However when was the last time you heard of getting an IBM 7200RPM drive for just under $190? It’s true folks, IBM’s 60GXP 61GB drive is now offered at $189, and by the looks of it, you can expect the prices to drop even further. Now this is what you call a real BARGAIN!!! We all know how well IBM’s DeskStar 75GXP drives perform, in fact most recon that the IBM’s 75GXP drives are the best performing IDE drives still out in the market. When dealing with any DeskStar series drive one thing is sure, you can expect great performance without any doubt at all. Seagate recently released their latest IDE drive, the barracuda 180GB. Currently this is the only drive with such an incredible storage capacity, however as with most Seagate drives, you’ll have to mortgage your car or house in order to buy one of them. Since this is quite out of the question, lets stick by the word “Value” and take a closer look at IBM’s 60GXP.
Specifications
| Capacity (GB) | 60GB |
| Sector size (bytes) | 512 |
| Recording zones | 18 |
| Data heads (physical) | 6 |
| Data disks | 3 |
| Max. areal density (Gbits/sq. inch) | 15.3 |
| Performance | |
| Data buffer | 2MB |
| Rotational speed (RPM) | 7200 |
| Latency (average ms) | 4.17 |
| Seek time (read typical) | |
| Average (ms) | 8.5 |
| Track-to-track (ms) | 1.2 |
| Full-track (ms) | 15.0 |
| Sustained data rate (MB/sec) | 20.9 to 40.8 |
| Environmental characteristics | |
| Ambient temperature | 5 to 55° C (Operating), -40 to 65° C (Nonoperating) |
| Shock (half sine wave) | 55 G/2 ms (Operating) |
Installation
The Installation procedure went smoothly with no hitches at all. After installing the drive into our Gigabyte 7DXR board, we ran IBM’s boot disk manager. This is not as user friendly as Maxtor’s Max Blast software, nevertheless any body could figure out how to do it. One thing most of you should remember is not to make the partitions you make on the drive too big, since the drive’s performance will drop slightly and windows will not the drive’s full capacity. Initially I partitioned my drive as 8/45/7 GB, however when Windows loaded only 56GB was utilized. So make sure you use your partitions to get optimum performance + storage.
