This is the infamous Deathstar.
The Deskstar 75GXP series was a stunning blow to IBM’s hard drive division. Touting incredible performance for the period, alongside being backed by a historically admirable reliability record, the series was poised to be another market leader. However, it quickly all went wrong…
IBM had utilised glass platters in several enterprise and mobile-grade hard drives, but this series would be the first to bring it to their desktop lineup. Such a change was brought in with an entirely new feature to their lineup: a parking ramp. While this feature had been seen before on hard drives throughout the 90’s (e.g. the Integral Periperals PCMCIA Viper series), the 75GXP was the first to bring it to the mass market in the 3.5″ form factor (alongside the 5,400RPM 40GV partnering series).
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 -------------------------------------
So what’s the deal? Users quickly started to report mass failures, with IBM’s credibility coming into question when all concerns were dismissed by the company. Images of platters with their magnetic surfaces completely stripped away appeared, alongside high temperature reports & spontaneous drive failures which culminated to the poor reliability record this series now triumphs. IBM’s market share quickly dropped (with other external factors contributing to this decision), leading to the sale of the division to Hitachi.
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.
A neat label design which was used for many years by IBM and then Hitachi. Everything is clear and no useful information is obfuscated.
This particular example is in perfect health, with an incredibly low reported power on hour count.
There’s a standard firmware update that must be done on 75GXP’s to supposedly improve their reliability. Whether or not this has any truth is up in the air, but it’s likely that the only result would be prolonging an end-result of eventual failure.
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)
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here:
[to be uploaded at a later date!]