High-End, High-Capacity SATA-150 Roundup

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."

Comments

SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Limburgher]

The review isn't clear, but does this drive have both interfaces, or is it available in two flavours?

Now I like a drive I can use in more than way. I can use this on my current ATA aetup, and if I upgrade motherboards, I can just switch cables and move on.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Limburgher]

Answered my own question with the data sheet on Maxtor's site. It's two flavours, not a drive with two connectors.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[AKAImBatman]

Just an interesting FYI, the Western Digital SATA drives have only one connector for data (SATA), but for some reason have two connectors for power! The first is the new SATA power connector, while the second is an old fashioned hard drive/cdrom power connector. Because of this, I didn't realize that SATA had a new power cable when I built my new computer, and I initially had the drives plugged into the old-fashioned drive connectors.

The entire time I was wondering what those new-fangled connectors coming out of the power supply were for. Especially since there were so many of them! If anyone else makes the same mistake I did, then it shouldn't hurt anything. However, you might be a bit confused when others speak of "SATA power connectors". ;-)

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It's two flavours, not a drive with two connectors.

I think the drive probably tastes the same, regardless of connector, though the SATA drive might taste better because the connector doesn't try poking holes in the toungue.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[stinerman]

An internal drive can be hot-swapped if it is put in a special craddle with a handle and a lock.

Oh no, I do recall once doing some work on one of my older computers, and I did remove my CD-RW drive with the power on. It sparked, the system shut down, and my drive was dead, but i definitely "hot swapped" it. :-)

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Doc Ruby]

How about a RAID of 80GB drives, each with 1GB of cache? That's like $100:80GB drive, $1.25:GB, with a minimum 12.5% cache hit rate. And I bet the combined cost of manufacturing/selling would be lower than the separate components, so more profitable than the rock-bottom prices they're getting for low-cache drives. RAIDs also consume extra drives for redundancy. It's really surprising that Hitachi isn't selling a SAN storage box, with RAID, cache, and even transfer to removable Flash cards, all within the box, for reliability, performance and convenience.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Doc Ruby]

I put my tongue on several platters of some old 500MB drives (5.25", full-height, RLL, 1991) I was salvaging at a scrapper. The Maxtors tasted different from the Seagates. But the Seagates were East Bay realtors, while the Maxtors were South Bay bankers. Maybe just the data tastes different.

A look at the review summary

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:A look at the review summary

[SSpade]

• 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.

Re:A look at the review summary

[ackthpt]

Seagate drives carry a 5 year warranty. I'm willing to bet those drives are better assembled than the 1-year warranty crap that's currently being shipped out.

Oh, could be...

Could also be a betting game.

How many drives, if they had a 10 year warrantee do you think would actually make it back on a warrantee return

• Within 1 year
• 2 years
• 3 years
• ...
• 10 years

Could be Seagate knows and just tossed that out there. I mean, geez who's still buying 40 GB drives and those were only a couple years ago, right? People upgrade their systems on average every 18 months, no? (and I include businesses in on that figure)

5 years? That's an eternity and probably a very, very safe bet.

Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see. I bet drive manufactures (or anyone who makes anything warranteed) has a pretty good idea on the liability expense they can expect to incur.

Buy Seagate!

[wpmegee]

I always try to buy seagate, ~$10 price difference, and the 5-year warranty is priceless. You only get a 3-year warranty on most other drives, or 1 year if you buy retail Western Digital.

And if you see Maxtor, run like the wind!

Re:Buy Seagate!

[calibanDNS]

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.

Clueless presentation

[spworley]

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?

Re:Clueless presentation

[Evro]

Slashdot used to be a great place to find obscure cool info, benefiting from millions of people browsing different sites and filtering it so the coolest stuff bubbled to the top. Now it seems to be THE place for new sites to send their articles, as a link from Slashdot = guaranteed ad views. So we get newbie sites trying anything and everything to get their site mentioned on Slashdot, which explains many of the current problems with Slashdot, and the tech news industry in general.

I just gotta say

[bogie]

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.

Ways to use that extra space:

[ShaniaTwain]

Get several of these!

-make a personal backup of archive.org
-Store digital photos of every square inch of your neighborhood.
-ASCII pr0n. lots and lots of ASCII pr0n.

"300 GB ought to be enough for anybody"

Re:Ways to use that extra space:

[TheRaven64]

300GB is less than 30 hours of DV footage. I was amazed how quickly I filled up the 320GB drive I use for video editing. The 80GB drive in my laptop, however, seems more than large enough for everything else.

Roundup?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Did the editors or the submitter even read the article? The article is just a review of the Maxtor 300GB drive. It's hardly a comparison of several models and manufacturers.

Perhaps usernames should be less obvious...

[DigitalReverend]

I find it humorous when a person is obvious who they work for or who they are supporters of. Just look at the opening line.

Maxtorn writes...

Nice username and he submits a story about Maxtor drives. Perhaps we'll get stories from Seagated, AppleJack or Solarister next.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Silver Sloth]

The only thing I could see using this for might be for archiving or storing mass music/ video, but even then, is it really the best media for doing so?

In my case exactly so. One of my PCs is my MP3 server and *.avi cache. I find myself juggling files of ~1Gb on a regular basis every time I download another *.avi. I'd just love to upgrade my 80Gb to 300Gb and now I can afford to.

In my experience the amount of data we store is directly proportional to the size of the available storage media. When all you could get was 1.4Mb floppies and 20Mb hard drives everything fitted in just nicely. Now we have 80Gb hard drives and 512Mb Memory sticks and everythign fits in just nicely. Next year we'll have.......

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Neoprofin]

Were you suggesting tape drives? CDs? DVDs?

For the cost and ease of management (ie no time spent transfering things peicemeal to other mediums) huge hard drives are the best solution I've seen so far. There's always the possibility of data corruption from leaving your precious 300GB harddrive running nonstop in a poorly ventilated case with your up and down pipes going fullblast with bittorrents but it's not like you stand to lose much except your computers time.

I guess some people have legitimate archiving operations, and they stand to lose a lot of work from corruptions, but if you keep the heat low and the workload managable (and of course maintain backups) everything should be fine.

Of course I miss a lot of tech development if I leave the house for a few days.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[TheRaven64]

DV footage is big. 10GB/hour roughly. If the home user has a video camera, then they can fill a 300GB drive with 30-hours of footage. I have an external 300GB drive I use for video editing, and it is full - I could probably free up some space deleting the raw DV footage of things I've edited, but I never know when I might want some of it again. Once BluRay becomes common, I will probably start using BD-R for that kind of thing, but right now hard disks are the easiest way of storing it.

Western Digital

[fredistheking]

WD now has 3 year minimum warranty and 5 year for enterprise drives:

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressReleas e.asp?release={264FE90B-5808-489E-9DEC-05106E24AD7 9}

Re:Well... I'm not impressed by 16MB of cache.

[TheRaven64]

I don't really see the advantage of a large cache on the disk. I would much rather have the cache on a 2GB/s connection to the CPU than a 150MB/s one. Bung an extra few hundred MBs of main memory, and you are likely to see more of an improvement than adding a small amount of RAM to the disk - particularly since the main RAM can be used for other things when you are not using it as cache.

Fluff

[fredistheking]

Where is WD? This 'review' seems like fanboy fluff to me. The access time on the Maxtor is the worst of all the drives compared and no where is this mentioned in the conclusion.

For real hard drive reviews try storagereview.com.

just a little biased . . .

[jonesy16]

". . . but for that money you get 1.5 times the storage capacity (300GB vs 200GB), double the cache memory (16MB vs 8MB), and the performance edge proven by the tests run in this review [over seagate]. Sounds like a good deal to me!"

Let's see, after actually reading the article, the Maxtor drive didn't beat the Seagate 2007.8 drive in ANY of the real-world tests and a 5 year warranty through Seagate is the best warranty I've ever seen. They've never rejected replacement from me on any drive, SCSI or IDE. If it were my money, I know where I'd spend it. Decide for yourself I guess.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[forkazoo]

I think it is an excellent medium for archiving my video. I currently have about a half TB online on my main PC. Several hundred GB worth of just video. Strictly speaking, yes, I could get a whole bunch of miniDV tapes or something, and spend god knows how many hours putting all my video on tape, and archiving it. Then what would I get? I cabinet full of tapes. Dammit, why the hell would I want that?

My Hard drives are smaller than tapes would be. They let me get at all my video instantly. They let me manipulate all of it without having to copy back to a HD to bring it online. When I get another big hard drive, I can back it all up easily.

Because, really... Why *wouldn't* you want a complete collection of Doctor Who on your PC? (Mine isn't actually complete yet... I have Peter Davison on, and am in the middle of acquiring the complete Tom Baker. I don't have much of the first three Doctors. And, in point of fact, none at all of the first)

Re:Linux SATA support?

[martok]

I can't speak to Ubunto, but SATA works fine using the Sarge install. Just boot the linux26 target rather than linux as the default Sarge install target uses Linux 2.4 which though does support SATA, doesn't support the wealth of chipsets 2.6 does. I've done several installs on SAATA root and all have gone well.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[ZagNuts]

Any modern distro will boot from a sata drive. I have been booting from one in Redhat Enterprise for 2 years and I am writing from an Ubuntu install booted from a sata drive.

Self review?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

My favorite part is when the submitter reviews his own review:

A solid reference for those shopping for a new drive.

In other news, Rob Schneider says "Deuce Bigalow 2" is "a comedic tour-de-force that will leave you wanting more."

Dan Brown, author of "The DaVinci Code", further chimed in saying, "My book is 100% factual, and the Catholic Church is teh suX0r!!!1!!"

Open source hard disk encryption

[Mustang Matt]

There's an open source program called truecrypt that seems to work on the same principal as the one in your add. I've been using it for a while now and it works great.

My Maxtor just died recently

[tomzyk]

I bought a Maxtor 120Gig drive about a year ago and it already died on me a little over a week ago. I had it full. FULL! And it died on me.

This is the first harddrive that has ever died on me in 15+ years of owning my own personal computer(s).

Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor? Seriously!

Because I really don't want to spend all of that time re-ripping all of my CDs to OGGs again. And it's not just music that I lost: all of my backups of software apps, games, programming projects... hell, I just realized that I think my resume was on that drive too.

I've always used my newest harddrive as my backup drive, thinking that it would be the most reliable. guess I was wrong.
"... all your eggs in one basket" and all that... rassinfrassin.... :-(

(And the porn! Dear God, all of that porn... GONE!!!)

Re:My Maxtor just died recently

[pla]

Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor? Seriously!

Very much depends on how it died...

Did the controller roast? Try swapping it for another from the same exact model (and batch, if possible)... Only viable when the data has a value greater than the cost of a throw-away drive, but it works (Or at least it used to... Not sure how newer drives would work, since they keep track of bad spots on the disk and automatically avoid them).

Does it not spin up? Drive bearings seem like a pretty common point of failure - Try sticking it in the freezer overnight (no joke!), and see if you can get it to spin up one last time, just long enough to copy everything important off it (And make damned sure you know what you want, and in what order you value it,, because you'll only get 15 minutes tops out of the drive this way).

Did you have a head crash? In that case, you don't really have any data left to recover. A professional recovery house could probably get 90% of it back, for a few grand, but the average Joe should consider it a total loss.


I've always used my newest harddrive as my backup drive, thinking that it would be the most reliable. guess I was wrong.

If you already have a well-organized system of backups, you might want to consider an offline backup-backup... With HDD space so cheap, you can set yourself up with a cheap Linux box with a TB of space for under $500. Turn it on, mirror your live backup system, then shut it back down... Repeat whenever you have enough new stuff that it would hurt too much to lose it.



As an aside, to keep this OT, I've never had a problem with the DiamondMax line from Maxtor. They supposedly had a crap run back in the late 90's, the ones Dell used in all their boxes (wouldn't know personally, I don't buy name brand PCs), but I have half a dozen (exactly) DiamondMaxes running, including two 10s, a 9+, and three from before that (don't have them visible and not about to shutdown a machine just to check, but definitely pre-9). Not a single failure yet.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[HazE_nMe]

Mandriva 2005LE boots fine from my SATA drive using the 2.6x kernel, so does DesktopBSD.

SATA "Performance"

[pestilence669]

I own an older 9GB IBM Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive. The drive boasts an access time below 5ms. As anyone serious about performance knows, a hard drive's access time is an enormous factor. Read and write performance tends to increase exponentially with lower access times (non-sequential operations). The difference between 9ms and 5ms is deceptively large. I haven't come across any hard drive as fast as my IBM for nearly a decade. To witness it in person, specs aside, is a miracle to behold. I shit you not.

When I sometimes come across articles about SATA or SATA peripherals, I keep reading about the "performance" that SATA brings to the table. Not much can be said about the differences between IDE and SATA regarding bandwidth, they are nearly the same. I still don't know what all the hype is about. Modern hard drives don't even come close to saturating an ATA-133 bus. Burst (cache) speeds don't count. Without RAID, you'll never hit the upper limits anyway. Modern hard drives don't even have access times to justify a lower latency. Sure SATA scales better, but who cares? For the time being, SATA is ATA with new clothes.

My love of SCSI aside, IDE is almost always faster in terms of raw performance. SCSI shines in RAID configurations or with multiple devices (five or more). If all you need is one drive on a Linux server, IDE wins hands down. IDE is also free from the nightmares of SCSI termination and ninety+ connector types. My attraction to SCSI comes from the availability of high performance hard drives. No self respecting manufacturer would release a high-speed drive to the budget market. In the 90's, the best drives were exclusively SCSI and they still are.

When SATA was announced, I hoped that it would offer the advantages of SCSI with the simplicity and cost of IDE... a replacement to both. How wrong I was. Sure, the bandwidth is higher and the connectors are much more sexy. I hate ribbon cables and 68-pin connectors just like anyone else. Even the technology behind the interface is sound, but the manufacturers haven't taken it seriously. The best drives are still exclusive to SCSI. The best servers don't have SATA. SATA is neither the absolute replacement to IDE nor the successor to SCSI. It's been positioned as some bastard to fill the gap between the two.

Now that digital photography, music, and video have finally become commonplace, the focus has been placed on increased storage capacity. Performance has taken a back seat and will for some time. There has always been a trade-off between the two, they are mutually exclusive. SATA solves this in no way. Low-end consumer hard drives that would normally be released with an ATA interface are simply offering SATA if they want to be seen as "high performance." Even the new Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB drive, is offered in a comparable ATA-133 model. Hitachi sells a drive that offers SATA-300, not because it can physically transfer data that fast, but because it sounds good.

We had this problem in the SCSI world too. There was SCSI, Fast SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Ultra Wide SCSI, Ultra2 SCSI, Ultra2 Wide SCSI, Ultra3 SCSI / 160, Ultra-320 SCSI, and Ultra-640 / Fast-320. The thing is, they are backward and forward compatible. The oldest drives work with the newest controllers and the oldest controllers work with the newest drives. The bus speed is very useful if you use RAID, made more feasible since the wide variations of SCSI support up to 15 devices per controller. SCSI advances have been more about performance and less about marketing (UDMA-33, UDMA-66, UDMA-100, UDMA-133).

Admirers of SATA should shut up already. It's only a nominal increase over IDE in performance. The hard drives you can buy are exactly the same as one would expect of the low-end / IDE market. Even though SATA may be technologically superior in every way to IDE, what's happening is no better than putting a SCSI interface on a slow IDE drive. I've learned that you can use SATA drives on SCSI controllers. Why? That's exactly the same stupidity I'm referring to... the combination of the extremely budget conscience with the high-end.

SATA will never be "high performance" unless SATA drives become "high performance."

Reliability

[WalksOnDirt]

http://www.storagereview.com/ is now trying to put reliability data in their reviews. Not sure how well it works, but it at least seems better than nothing. They have not reviewed this drive yet, but you can check out how some recent drives from all the major manufacturers are doing.