IBM 60GXP 60GB Hard Drive

IBM’s DeskStar 60GXP series comes in three capacities of 20, 40 and 60GB. The drive incorporates 20GB/platter, giving the 60GB drive a total of 3 platters. In the early days most high capacity drives came with a large amount of data platters. Rather than increasing the platter size manufactures could only resort to increasing the number of platters in the drive, which results in poor performance.

With an average access time of 8.5ms the DeskStar 60GXP certainly falls into the high-end drive category. Furthermore the incorporation of a 2MB 100MHz SDRAM cache buffer, 7200RPM spindle speed, and ATA/100 interface, makes it one of the fastest IDE drives in the market. In fact Maxtors DiamondMax plus 60GB drive is 0.2ms slower than the IBM.

If you’re a avid overclockers, then remember to get a good hard drive cooler such as the IStorm II (available at Coolerguys.com). After a few minutes of continuous use, the drive heats up to around 48°C – 52°C. Therefore use a good hard drive cooler in order to dissipate this heat away from the casing.

So lets see how well this drive performs.