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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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You care a lot if you're capturing a lot of lightly compressed video. That requires a fairly quick drive, I have noticed more dropped frames using Vdub on my 5400 rpm drive than my 7200 drive.
Like every new Maxtor, the first one that comes out is the 5400/2MB model. This is for the warez kids and the movie people. Then, in a month or two, sure enough comes the 7200/8MB model for the uber-raid systems sold by Advanced Unibyte and Transtec and the like. Give it a year, and the rest of us will be able to afford it when the 500GB model comes out.
Until then, it's dual 120s or 160s for price reasons.
Personally I'm not worried so much about speed as I am about reliability. I've had to RMA a couple maxtor drives recently, and losing 300gb of data would really, REALLY suck.
I am a filthy pirate.
OK performace might not be that hot but if it can fill a 100Mb ethernet connection then its going to work fine as a small office backup/storage system with RAID 1. Sometimes big and slow is better than fast and small.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
(For those of you frothing at the keyboard to tell me that RAID 1 is the worst configuration, there's nothing else that works with 2 drives and provides full data backup.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Assuming the TiVo BIOS can handle it (or even has to... maybe that's a kernel function), this will easily exceed 400 minutes in "basic" resolution!
And spinning at 5400 is a big plus. It's plenty fast for a Tivo, and will run cooler on less power.
I've noticed this recently, Slashdot submitted posting links to individual servers over at THG, which are obviously going to get hammered. That site has like, 10 load balanced boxes, so really they should take the number of the wwwX.tomshardware.com before they post the link!
Product differentiation. No more, no less.
The same reason that Intel has been locking their multipliers since the p2-233 came out. If you make product X with fixed cost Cx, sell it for Rx, which is Cx+20%, and don't have a higher-spec product, it makes sense to introduce brain-dead product Y, which you build for the same fixed cost (Cy=Cx), but sell for Cy+20% and jack up the Rx to Cx+40 or 50%.
The WD 'special edition' drives are a good example. Several tens of dollars more for $2 worth of semiconductors.
Another good example was the Celeron 300s and 400s, most of which were capable of running at at least 450 mhz, but due to multiplier locking issues, only the 300 (which could be run at 4.5x100) was up to it. Intel sold them dirt cheap in the knowledge that even though they cost the same (or even slightly more) in production than the p2s of the day, they would create an artificial dichotomy and make the outrageous (then) prices of the high-end p2-400s and 450s justifiable without losing any market share (the people who would have bought the p2s if they were sensibly priced instead bought celerons.)
You're doing it wrong.