Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA

Author: Ian Cunningham
Published on: 22-11-2003
Views: 53485


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Installation and Configuration

Installing and Configuring the SATA Drive

As you can see from the pictures below, the physical interface to the drive has changed considerably from the old. There is a new SATA power connection, which may require an adapter to utilise if you have an old power supply. Thankfully this Maxtor drive is able to use the old 4 pin Molex power connection, as well as the SATA power connection. The data cable is also a lot smaller, even smaller than a rounded ATA133 cable.

New SATA Data and Power Connections

There is no master/slave configuration needed when connecting these devices up, you just have a simple Primary and Secondary header, to which you can connect only one device.

Performance

How the unit performs

Maxtor primarily aim this hard drive as a multimedia storage device, as can be seen from the high storage capacity and the fast access times. This should be one of the fastest drives of this size, and the results seem to back up this theory.

Using HDTach we can see the read performance, spanning the whole range of data positions. A decline in sequential speed is expected as we get to the end of the data range:

Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Plus SATA 200GB

Maxtor DiamondMax 16 60GB

As you can see, the access time of 14.1 seconds is almost 5ms above that of the theoretical time quoted in the specifications - which is to be expected, as these are real world performance tests. 14.1 seconds is a reasonable access time to expect, nothing mind blowing by any standards - although the burst speed rate of 104.3MB/s is very high indeed!

Compared to an average hard drive from the previous generation, this seems to offer quite a large performance boost, particularly in data transfer speeds. Although this is the highest transfer rate we have recorded at PC Review, it still does not even come close to the 150MB/s bandwidth capacity possible with the SATA interface.