Well, anyway, let’s return to our today’s testing participants and IBM Deskstar 180GXP HDD family.

Since recently, the youngest (single-platter) Deskstar models are designed in a different case, which worsens the positioning speed, exceeding the difference between 8.5ms and 8.8ms claimed by the specs. Moreover, according to our experience, there are HDDs among Vancouver solutions, which features get worse with the time. Their read graph is either ugly from the very beginning, or turns ugly during the tests, and the obtained results never correspond to what we saw by models with a straighter graph. Moreover, younger models perform worse with small data blocks (less than 16KB), which is even harder to explain. I have no idea how they managed to do it with the same electronics.

Keeping these two facts in mind, it is not at all surprising that 60GB model always loses to its larger fellows that is why I wouldn’t recommend it. However, Vancouver2 aka Deskstar 180GXP turns completely different starting from 80GB storage capacity, showing much nicer results. Nevertheless, in NTFS their performance is not any better than that of the previous generation solutions, Deskstar 120GXP, and only larger buffer balances the scale towards newer model.

180GB model was almost always slower than the 120GB one, which also doesn’t make it an attractive purchase. So far the only reasonable explanation of its behavior is not quite correct implementation of LBA48 support. Recalling similar situation with Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDD, while its SerialATA relatives, didn’t have a problem like that, we can even start suspecting the Promise Ultra 133/TX2 controller.

I hope that after these detailed explanations it will be much easier for you to make your choice.

P.S.: There is one more piece of this puzzle, which we haven’t yet checked. The average access time of IC35L060AVV2 during writing is as high as that of the other HDDs of the same family, despite much worse average access time during reading. I feel quite suspicious about it. I wish I could disable lazy writing and see if there is any trick there as well. 

Table of contents: From Dawn till Sunset Swan Song Tag ‘n Seek Detective Story Begins Testbed, Testing Participants and Testing Methods Performance in Intel IOMeter: Access Time and Linear Speed Performance in Intel IOMeter: Workload-Emulating Patterns Performance in WinBench99 Performance in FC-Test Conclusion

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