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High-End, High-Capacity SATA-150 Roundup

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the do-they-still-make-that-awful-noise dept.

Maxtorn writes This review is published to cover a "300GB Maxtor drive, but provides a roundup covering a few high end, high capacity drives from Maxtor, Seagate, and Hitachi. Synthetic / real world performance, thermal results, and noise output are all covered on drives ranging from 200-500GB in capacity and with 8-16MB of cache memory. A solid reference for those shopping for a new drive."

5 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. A look at the review summary by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful
    A look at the evaluation (from my humble pointy head):

    Pros:

    • Fastest SATA-150 drive tested to date
    No issue with speed, it's good.

    • Several capacities available, with 300GB being the highest
    Not unexpected from and industry leader.

    • Quiet operation
    Weighty consideration for the home or office, a brace of noisy drives is unwelcome while trying to watch video or listen to music on the computer.

    • Supports Native Command Queuing
    Fine.

    • Excellent value, only 48 cents per GB
    Really this is a minor concern, unless you're building a storage rack and only care bang/buck. If I want cool and quiet, I'll pay extra for it.

    • 16 MB of cache memory provides a nice performance boost
    The bottleneck isn't likely to be your cache it's your MB and OS, but always nice to have more cache.

    Cons:

    • Runs a bit warmer than other drives
    Might warrant an extra fan if running a brace or more, potentially negating and quiet running. I've got an old Quantum drive you could fry an egg on and the heat effectively is killing the bearing lubricant.

    • Three year warranty is good, but not the best
    Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:A look at the review summary by SSpade · · Score: 4, Insightful
      • Three year warranty is good, but not the best
      Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.

      Drives will die, eventually. Design decisions can affect the shape of the death curve, and how much you spend in QA can affect the number that will die within the first $X months.

      A warranty provides a (strong) financial incentive for the manufacturer to make sure that very, very few die in that first few years. With a one year warranty there's no incentive to push the death curve out much beyond 18 months.

      That doesn't mean that a short warrantied drive will die quickly, but it's likely that a drive with a longer warranty has had more attention paid to expected lifespan.

  2. Clueless presentation by spworley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After you click through the first two ad-cluttered pages, you start to see some results. They're presented in a single bar graph with dark shaded gradients.
    The graph uses the same X axis to compare three totally different quantities: CPU percentage, access time in milliseconds, and bandwidth in MB/sec. As a bonus, note that smaller values for CPU % and access time are good, but larger values of bandwidth are good.
    Edward Tufte, where are you?

  3. I just gotta say by bogie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And I know nobody is impressed by hard drive space anymore, but 300GB for only $139 truly does boggle the mind. We're at the $500 = one Terabyte point. That's nuts.

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
  4. Re:Buy Seagate! by calibanDNS · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Offtopic, but I've never gotten why everyone is so down on Maxtor drives. Maybe it's just me, but Maxtors have been the most reliable drives in my experience. I just got my first two Seagate drives about 3 months ago, so I can't claim to make a good judgement about them yet, but they're doing better than I would expect out of a Western Digital. In the past decade I've had at least 5 WD drives fail on me. Someone once told me that I had to be abusing the case that 3 of these WDs failed in, but in that same case I had a 540MB Maxtor drive that was running fine (and seeing more use than the WDs). Actually, that 540MB Maxtor is STILL running just fine to this day (over 10 years after I got it). I'll be buying Maxtor (and probably Seagate) drives for the forseeable future and I've sworn off WD.