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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.
The following link seems to work better ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031008/index .html
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.
A drive that big is hardly useful by itself; it's better off in a RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 configuration. Having 300GB of data on a single hard disk only guarantees that when the disk crashes and FUBARs all of your non-backed-up data, you'll wish you'd gotten 2 of the monsters. Drives this big are just too vulnerable when used singly without RAID or a sound backup plan.
I'm all for innovation, but seriously, who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?
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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've been watching HDD sizes for a while, and they seem to be narrowly beating Moore's law (15-16 months instead of 18.) So if we say we have 300GB today, with 100GB commonplace then I would say we will hit 1TB in about 27 months, with regular drives taking just over fourty months.
Conclusion: Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer
Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spinning flagships from Western Digital and Maxtor, its overall performance is respectable for a 5,400 rpm drive. Above all, the excellent data transfer rates are certainly welcome.
Only the longer seek times resulting from the low turn rate and the lower I/O performance mean this disk makes little sense for demanding users running it under permanent load or as a system drive. That said, the hard drive is not designed to do this. After all, anyone able to cough up the princely sum of around $411 will no doubt have their own operating system hard drive that also spins quicker. A 7,200 rpm 80 GB hard drive with 8 MB of cache will currently set you back little more than $106.
In view of its large storage capacity, the guarantee of just one year is dubious, since even in two years, 300 GB should still be big enough to save it from the scrap heap. Even if guarantees of several years are reserved for the top 7,200 rpm models, a two-year warranty would at least reduce the vendor's risk of having to honor a guarantee of two years. Ultimately, equipment purchases should not only be a question of numbers, but should involve a fair degree of trust, too.
However, it is curretly part of a promotion, which means that if you go for the kit now, the card will be included.
Looking at the article:
/dev/null with an ATA interface!
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.
300GB of write space... not read/write space. This drive is nothing but a subset of
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.
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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...)
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(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.)
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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.
If I want speed, I get more RAM, but with hard drives I want reliability and I suspect that higher speeds bring less reliability. Does anyone have a link to an analysis of the reliability-speed tradeoff?
At last! I will never run out of space with this HD :)
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.
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
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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.
Today maxtor announced that they have perfected perpendicular recording to allow for 175GB per platter.
Whos up for 700GB drives?
Now whether you'd want to do this, and how you'd index the data in a useful manner are more difficult questions. As are backing the data up. But you could do this now if you wanted to. Food for thought.