The Competition
At this time, there is no hard drive, which could reach the outstanding result of the IBM DTLA series. Maxtor is releasing their 80 GByte drive right now, which will most likely be the largest model until Q1-2001. Unfortunately, this drive will only be available at 5400 rpm, which will most likely result in inferior overall performance.
Western Digital is concentrating on the low-end market, selling 45 GByte drives for less than $200. In the last years, WD has not been supplying any high-performance IDE drives. However, they are also offering Firewire as an interface for hard drive solutions .
Quantum and Fujitsu of course have decent hard disks, but none of the two is able to supply drives at capacities above 60 GBytes.
The bad side of IBM's new and fast IDE hard drives is their comparably high price. While the 15, 30 and 45 GByte models are still reasonably priced, the models with 60 and 75 GBytes cost $300 and 540$.
Conclusion
The result is pretty clear: IBM's Deskstar 75GXP line offers the fastest IDE hard drives available right now. The DTLA-307030 is able to beat all formerly tested hard drives in each and every benchmark. This performance comes a slightly higher price point than hard drives from other manufacturers, but we all know that top-notch performance doesn't come for free.
Larger models of the Deskstar 75GXP series will likely make some more noise and run hotter due to their larger amount of disks, but temperature shouldn't be a big problem anymore. Thanks to a sticker directly over the jumpers, the drive installation should easily be done within seconds.
I did not mention vibration in this article with any word because I didn't think of this until I touched the drive by accident. Compared to my Seagate Barracuda ATA, the IBM drive runs absolutely quiet. I almost thought it wasn't even running. :-)
