Ultra ATA 66 Hard Drive Roundup - March 2000

The IBM Deskstar 25GP is a 25 GB hard drive that features a 2 MB buffer, 9 ms average seek times, and utilizes the Ultra ATA/66 interface. Unlike the IBM Deskstar 34GXP drive, which is also reviewed here, the 25GP only rotates at 5400-RPM, which lowers it performance significantly and negates any value of using the Ultra ATA/66 interface. As the benchmarks show, only the drives with higher rotational speeds will even come close to needing that amount of bandwidth.

As a result of the lower rotational speed, the IBM Deskstar 25GP was one of the poorer performers in this roundup. With the exception of Business Winstone, the 25GP scored at or near the bottom of all of the tests. This just shows how important higher rotation speeds are when it comes to a drive’s performance. The only test in which the 25GP had even a mediocre showing was in Business Winstone 99. This was likely due to the fact that the 25GP also utilizes a 2 MB cache, like that of the 34 GXP, rather than the 512 KB cache of the other drives. Business Winstone 99 also simulates the common business applications one would use, and as a whole, they typically do not require vast transfers of data. So while this shows that a larger cache does have a slight benefit in certain applications, the main factor to consider when analyzing hard drive performance is still going to be rotational speed.

Again, due to its rotational speed being only 5400 RPM versus the 7200 RPM that is more and more commonly being found on modern IDE hard drives, unless you need the absolute most storage space for your dollar, and performance takes a back seat, we wouldn’t recommend the 25GP especially considering other drives with higher capacities can be found for less money.  If you are after the IBM name, with street prices between the Deskstar 25GP and the higher performing drives only being about $40 in difference, you would be better off going with the one of the other models that offer a extra 2-3 GB’s of storage and a lot more performance for the money.

The IBM Deskstar 25 GP was otherwise an overall solid drive, much like its Deskstar brethren. It ran quietly, with operational and disk access noises barely perceptible, and its temperature never got much above ambient. The 25GP comes with IBM’s standard 3-year warranty and can be found for around $190.00.