What may be considered one of the rarest drives I own, a fully working 75GXP in 2022. The infamous Deathstar.
This one is the unholy cocktail of potential failure and unreliability. For starters, it’s a 75GXP. I could end it there, but this is also a Hungarian model, which anecdotally seem a touch more unreliable compared to drives made in Thailand (by IBM) and the Philippines (by NEC). There’s not much data for this point, but for my own drives, this has been a fairly consistent point of conflict. Take this with a massive pinch of salt.
Finally, this is the largest capacity you could purchase back in 2001 for the 75GXP, sporting a whopping 5 platters. That’s right, a massive 15.36GB per platter in terms of density. So much could go wrong with this drive, but somehow, this one keeps on ticking. I also haven’t updated the firmware yet, whoops.
Drive Attributes ------------------------------------- IBM Deskstar 75GXP DTLA-307075 ------------------------------------- Capacity 76.8GB Mfc Date 2001-06 Interface PATA Platters 5 Heads 10 RPM 7200 Protocol Ultra-ATA/100 -------------------------------------
The top of this drive is personally one of my favourite designs of all time. IBM made some of the best looking drives in the late-90’s and early 2000’s in my opinion.
I found this particular drive in an original Xbox, hillariously. It seems, just under a decade ago, I stuck this poor guy into one as an upgrade to the original Seagate U5 Series 10GB drive it had. I have no idea what I was thinking at the time, but here we are. All in all, I hadn’t turned this drive on since I installed it. The first thing that gave it away was the glorious IBM seek-test eminating from the console when I powered it up! It was immediately recognisable, but I had no idea it was from the unholy 75GXP line until I opened it up.
A neat label design which was used for many years by IBM and then Hitachi. Everything is clear and no useful information is obfuscated. Bask in the glory of this slightly terrifying drive.
A well designed bottom, with plenty of shielding. The PCB already looks great from here!
Here we can see a few IC’s, but two of them stick out the most. Firstly, the IBM branded IC (IBM36 AMSRC04) and the Mitsubishi-made IC (90G2803). Not much can be found online about these IC’s, so their exact circuitry is difficult to indentify, but it can be ascertained to be related to the main controller IC and directive logic. The buffer RAM chip is produced by Hyundai (who would, later in 2001, become known as Hynix Semiconductors, now SK Hynix), in this case. A nice looking PCB all in all!
After many hours of using this drive, alongside several scans, filling the drive up, formats etc… this drive continues to work perfectly fine. There are no reallocated sectors to be seen. The drive continues to work perfectly, but I still won’t be holding my breath when it comes to trusting this thing in the long term. For now, this 75GXP works perfectly, somehow.
There’s a standard firmware update that must be done on 75GXP’s to supposedly improve their reliability, but I have yet to do this. I’ll certainly be doing it very soon though.
Firmware changelog:
- While S.M.A.R.T. offline scans run in the background, a read error could
cause a potential failure. This is corrected with current microcode. - (A5AA/A6AA) will detect and prevent application specific usage patterns
that cause excessive dwell times in particular areas. - Improves vibration robustness for hard drives mounted on rails in OEM systems.
You can find everything related to updating the firmware on these drives here:
IBM Firmware Update – Usage Instructions (pdf)
IBM DTLA Firmware Update (.zip archive, Windows .exe installation)
IBM DTLA Firmware Update (.zip archive, Linux .img installation)
Here’s a few extra files, for the curious:
IBM Deskstar 40GV & 75GXP Product Manual (pdf)
IBM Deskstar 40GV & 75GXP Drive Specifications (pdf)
This is truly an infamous line of drives, so I’m happy to have one in such great shape. The spin-up and initialisation sequence are one of my favourites, so hopefully it’ll keep on going strong for a while.
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here: