Whoever said that size doesn't matter clearly wasn't talking about a hard drive. There is almost nothing as frustrating (at least where computers are concerned) as running out of hard drive space and having to decide which files to delete. Enter IBM, which has brought out a new series of three IDE hard drives in 60GB, 120GB and 180GB capacities; the latter is where the 180GXP name is derived.

Each drive has 60GB per platter and two heads per platter. You can see that the three sizes comprise one, two or three platter as appropriate, however there are also some strange OEM capacities of 40GB and 80GB listed, which implies that platters will be used that have unused sectors.

The Deskstar 180GXP drives replace the previous 120GXP series with 40GB per platter (40GB, 80GB and 120GB), and the two series share a number of characteristics, which is no bad thing as the 120GXP was a fine hard drive. Basically you can think of the 180GXP as a revision of the 120GXP.

Spin speed is 7,200rpm, with a fluid dynamic bearing motor to keep the noise down to 31dB, and the drive has an ATA100 interface. The average latency is 4.17ms, average read seek time is 8.5ms, typical seek time is 8.8ms, track to track time is 1.1ms. The numbers are a little hard to digest but they confirm that the performance of the Deskstar 180GXP won't have changed much from the 120GXP.

Besides the 50 percent greater capacity, there are two new features in the 180GXP. The first is a move from a 2MB data cache on the 120GXP to 8MB on the 180GXP, which is an idea also used by Western Digital. The other is the introduction of a new technology; TCQ or Tagged Command Queuing. IBM claims that TCQ performs a data pre-fetching role to speed up data transfer, although we found little evidence of the benefit of TCQ in action.

We ran SysMark 2002 on a PC with a Deskstar 120GXP drive, then a 120GXP Raid 0 array and then the 180GXP. A SysMark score is based on the time taken to run a series of applications, so the hard drive has an influence as the applications open and close, which reflects real world usage. The 120GXP scored 180, the 120GXP Raid 0 got 198 and the 180GXP scored 182. So the 180GXP shows an improvement over its predecessor, but only slightly.

The Deskstar 180GXP series is a selection of good, fast IDE hard drives that offer excellent value for money, particularly if you avoid the 180GB version. If you're looking for a large, fast and very quiet hard drive then the 180GXP range could be just what you're after.