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

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.

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?

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.

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: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!!"

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.