IBM is a world-renowned leader and innovator in computer storage devices. Ever since just a few years ago when the Deskstar 5 and 8 reigned supreme IBM has been able to stay very competitive with the likes of Maxtor, Seagate, Quantum and Western Digital. By consistently boosting speed and storage capacity of their desktop hard drives IBM keeps their competitors on their feet.

The latest addition to the Deskstar series, the 75GXP has been a huge success sporting 7200RPM spindle speed, and Ultra ATA/100 transfer rates. The 75GXP also features a low 8.5ms average seek time, capacities of up to 75 Gigabytes and a 2MB cache. IBM does this all on 15GB platters.

The Drive

The 75GXP is by far one of the most advanced IDE HDDs on the market today. IBM incorporates a number of new disk technologies, which helped them to increase overall data densities. Utilizing fifth generation giant magneto resistive heads, a glass medium, and a nice fifth generation preamplifier, IBM was able to put no less than 15.3GBs per platter.

Of course it wouldn't be any fun having a huge HDD without a nice performance gain to go along with it now would it? An overall average access time of 12.7ms (4.17ms latency, and 8.5ms average seek time) combine with a 7200RPM spindle speed helps bring the 75GXP up to par with Maxtor and Western Digital's offerings. Finally the 75GXP is one of the first drives to support ATA/100 transfer rate, though most drives will fall short of their specified maximum transfer rate. Owners of one of the many mainboards that supports RAID configurations will be right at home with this drive as combining two ATA/100 drives on the same IDE channel can improve performance greatly.

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