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Excelstor Europa J360 60GB Review
Contributed by Louie Dulay
Friday, 20 June 2003
Last Updated Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Excelstor, a relative newcomer to the hard drive segment, has released their 60GB drive. Louie takes it for a spin in his
latest review.
The hard drive market here in the Philippines is very different from the ones abroad. Here, the competition exists
between Seagate and Maxtor. The numerous threads in PinoyPC are a testament to the huge foothold that these
manufacturers have established here. A year ago, I was able to attend a product showcase by Asiantech where they
showed their new line of hard drives from Excelstor.
Who is Excelstor? To put it bluntly, they're a hard drive manufacturer in China that focuses in the mainstream market with
a factory and are currently partnered with IBM. They share technology with IBM and have rights to develop their own
hard drives. Also, they are the ones manufacturing the 120GXP Deskstars currently being sold under the IBM banner.
The Drive
Today, we take a look at Excelstor's Europa 60GB 7200 rpm drive. For most people, 60GB would be more than enough
space for the OS, apps and games. You can even fill it up with a huge amount of "entertainment" videos (if you know
what I mean). Anyway, the Europa makes use of a 60GB platter, which means it's just one platter. It has a 2MB cache
just like the other drives in its class and has an average seek time of 8.5ms. Also, it uses ATA100 to interface with the
IDE controller.
You can see IBM's handiwork just by looking at the drive. From the IBM chips on the controller board to the pin layout at
the rear and the jumper diagrams, you'd recognize this as an IBM drive. The drive reminds me of my old Deskstar
75GXP, which unfortunately died twice.
IBM chips underneath
Even the top resembles the Deskstar
Installing the drive was easy enough and was painlessly done; just connect the cables and you're good to go. The drive's
windup kind of scared me because of the squeaking noise (hey I don't want a dead drive in my hands) it makes but I got
used to it quickly. During operation, the drive is silent - though I doubt if it can beat the Seagate Barracuda in that
respect. I played around with the drive; I moved files through the network and played a bit with the newly installed OS
and games (hehe). I had no problems all throughout. The drive did get hot during operation, but not as hot as my
Deskstar was before.
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The Benchmark
Unfortunately, I had no other 60GB platter drive to compare the Europa with so I just fired up my 40GB Seagate
Barracuda IV and ran Sandra's File System benchmark. The test system I used was my personal computer consisting of
an Athlon XP 1500+, Shuttle AK35GTR KT266A motherboard, 512MB PC2100 DDR-SDRAM running on Windows XP
SP1 and the latest VIA 4-in-1 driver.
The Europa trounces all over the Barracuda in the test. The seek time is at par as well. This just proves that the Europa,
like its Deskstar brothers are no performance slouches. In benchmarks in other websites, the Europa keeps up with the
newer Barracuda V, which is interesting to note.
The Verdict
The Europa proves itself as a fast and dependable drive. Its pricing puts it together with the current favorites from Maxtor
and Seagate. Performance-wise, it's a great deal. I've even tested these drives in a RAID setup and they ran flawlessly.
Excelstor has proven that they can keep up in the short sprint, but what about the long haul? Even with the newer
technology and rigorous testing (they literally bake their drives in ovens), Excelstor hasn't made a reputation here locally.
Also, the IBM name may be a turn-off for those who had their Deskstars (aptly dubbed Deathstars) die the click of death.
So what's the final word? The Europa is a step towards the right direction. This drive surely will not win over the market
but in time, it may. Just as long as Excelstor can live down the specter of the mortality rate on previous IBM drives, they
can be poised to take a chunk away from the local hard drive scene.
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