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Maxtor's 300 GB Monster Reviewed
bustersnyvel writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a nice article about Maxtor's new 300 GB DiamondMax harddisk. " The question is - will the drive perform despite having only 2mb of cache, and running at 5400 rpm?
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The following link seems to work better ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031008/index .html
I love you all. DiamondMax's Plus 300 GB Monster Created: October 8, 2003 By: Patrick Schmid Achim Roos Opinions differ wildly in the hard-drive business. While Seagate supplies hard drives with 160 GB of capacity in the ATA area, Hitachi and Western Digital already have 250 GB disks. They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space. If you're one of those people for whom "big" isn't big enough, this is the one for you. However, criticism of manufacturers with smaller maximum capacities is inappropriate since the focus of many of these vendors' attention lies elsewhere. As one of the quietest drives spinning at 7,200 rpm, a Barracuda ATA 7200.7 is designed most of all along ergonomic lines and to deliver a good price/performance ratio. Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital join the running for highest performance at regular intervals. The result is larger, faster and correspondingly expensive hard drives. With the 4A300J0, Maxtor is traveling a different route: its aim is to provide as much storage capacity as possible at an acceptable price. The recipe it has chosen consists of 5,400 rpm instead of the favored - because it's quicker - 7,200 rpm and only 2 MB in place of the 8 MB cache usual in top models. Since SATA still costs more, it uses an UltraATA/133 interface. This is ample for the coming months, as transfer rates on the fastest ATA disks are still below 70 MB/s max. We took a closer look at how the 300 GB monster shapes up against the established major-leaguers from Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital. Technical Data Capacity 300 GB Geometry 4 Platter, 80 GB pro Platter Rotation speed 5,400 Cache 2 MB Access time 12.6 ms Interface UltraATA/133 Warranty 1 Year The technical details leave no room for criticism. This largest DiamondMax is based on platters of approx. 80 GB. Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction. With four platters, Maxtor is aiming pretty high. Several years ago, IBM put up to five platters per drive in its DTLA series. That offers the advantage of being able to construct very large drives. However, the increased friction causes more heat loss so that hard drives with four platters require cooling sooner than models with only one or two. Large SCSI drives are usually based on multi-platter configurations. An UltraATA/133 controller was also included in delivery of the retail kit. Although it's labeled as a Maxtor, it in fact originates from Promise. The Maxtor website, meanwhile, contains the information that this controller is not standard in the retail kit but has to be purchased extra. The DiamondMax Plus is scarcely audible, produces only minimal vibrations and at 39C stays comfortably cool. Active cooling can be safely dispensed with; for permanent operation, however, we still recommend it. In this context, the short guarantee period of one year should be noted. You should consider this very carefully if you're planning to operate the product continuously. We would have liked to have seen a longer guarantee period for a drive of this caliber. est Setup Test System Processor Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz 256 KB L2-Cache (Willamette) Motherboard Intel D845EBT, Intel 845E chipset RAM 256 MB DDR/PC2100, CL2, Infineon Controller i845E UltraDMA/100 controller (ICH4) Silicon Image Sil3112, Serial ATA Display Adapter NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 Network Card 3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit Operating System Windows XP Pro 5.10.2600 Service Pack 1 Benchmarks and Tests Office Applications ZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk Winmark 2.0 c't h2benchw High-End Applications ZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 2.0 Performance Measurements HD Tach 2.61, c't h2benchw I/O performance Intel I/O meter Drivers and Settings Graphics Driver NVIDIA reference driver 29.42 Drivers Intel Application Accelerator 2.3 DirectX Version 9.0 Resolution 1024x768, 16-bit, 85 Hz refresh Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spin
I have 2 maxtor drives. Here are the results of my benchmarks done on them (Both are secondary drives at the time of the benchmarking)
200GB 7200 RPM 8MB cache
34.8 Mbps read 34.6Mbps Write
160GB 5400 RPM 2MB cache
24.9MBps read 23.8MBps Write
The 160 GB drives performance should be simaler to what you get with the 300GB drive. Not as fast as the 7200 8MB cashe's but still fast enough for mostly whatever you need.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
250GB for $149.99 (after rebate) = less than $0.60/GB. (And 8MB buffer/7200RPM at that...)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
It's not so much the amount of storage space that makes spinning disk backups appealing over tapes, as much as the backup speed. A RAID of IDE disks can shrink the backup window to hours what might have taken nearly a 24 hour block to complete. Spinning disk backups biggest hurdles thus far seem to be corporate perception of IDE drives and their *current* lack of portability over tapes. Off-site replication fixes the latter.
Um, you're not quite up to speed on tape, are you?
Modern tape systems can easily hold anywhere from 110 GB up to 440 GB per cartridge. So one tape, which is far less likely to fail than this crappy IDE disk, will hold far more bits. Plus, the read times on tape are much better than a 5400 RPM IDE disk (for instance, SDLT 320 tapes can read/write 115 GB per hour, compare this to a paltry 4 GB per hour on this beast, according to the article).
The catch, of course, is that a SDLT320 drive costs about $10,000, and each cartridge costs around $100. So for the home user who doesn't want to have to take out a second mortgage just to store the entire Warner Music catalog, with space left over for the Library of Congress, this new disk makes sense.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"However, growth in magnetic memory is not primarily a matter of Moore's law, but includes advances in mechanical and electromagnetic systems."
--
Power to the Peaceful
Stop posting stories about single drive failures, they are irrelevant, instead go to Storage Review and check out the reliability database. With the exception of the Deathstars and some problem models from other manufacturers most IDE drives have decent failure rates that generally seem to jibe with the manufacturers MTBF. And if you really care add all your current drives and all future purchases to the reliability survey and go back when they die or go out of service. I have a total of 10 Maxtor's in the reliability database from my personal systems and none of them are dead, still statistically irrelevant but it does help add to the data pool. I also had a batch of ~100 Hitachi laptop HDD's where nearly every one died within a year, now THAT was an obviously bad batch and not statistically insignificant, but most people aren't reporting those kinds of results.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You must like drives with one-year warranties.
Current Warranty Policies, all Manufacturers, Desktop drives
Hitachi
Deskstar: 1 year
Deskstar w/8MB cache: 3 years
Travelstar: 3 years
Maxtor
Diamondmax+ > 100GB: 3 years
Maxline (5400rpm, 250GB+): 3 years
Everything else: 1 year
Seagate
All retail drives: 1 year
All OEM drive (IDE or SATA): 1 year
160GB SATA Barracuda V: 3 years
Samsung
All drives: 3 years
WD
All OEM and retail drives: 1 year
OEM *SE (8MB cache): 3 years (i.e. the ones at the store have a 1 year warranty)
Raptor (OEM or retail): 5 years
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I've never noticed any issues with 5400rpm drives for editing DV, and I do it for a hobby. Remember that because of the serial nature of video streams, most of it will be stored linearly on the drive anyways so not too much concern for fragmentation. HD is different, it requires a substantially higher speed drive to do anything.
Personally, I never use DVD for backing up DV material - it's just a finalisation point I use for authoring DVDs, so MPEG2. MPEG4 isn't very editable, I've tried to place the streams into Vegas Video, Premiere and MSP, but it's rediculously slow and painful in getting anything done because of the high CPU demand. All my DV material for backup is done directly to DV tapes. The hassle of rendering to something else is too much.
Anyways, 1 hour of MPEG2 on DVD is very high quality, but realtime MPEG2 editing costs... The alternative is to use MJPEG, very editable, although I haven't experimented too much with it either.