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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA
Author: Ian CunninghamPublished on: 22-11-2003
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Performance
Performance Continued...
SiSoft Sandra is a good synthetic benchmark test, which is excellent for a baseline comparison of drives. Several ATA100 drives are listed in comparison, ranging from low to high end - but the DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA beats them all by a large amount.
With a score of 37920kB/s, this is one of the fastest drives we seen so far. The synthetic values are slightly higher than those of HDTach, but they do correlate.
PCMark2002 is able to show some real world performance differences between the two drives, and shows the caches/uncached performance difference.
Type | 60gig 5400rpm ATA100 | 200gig 7200rpm SATA |
Cached file write | 16.2 | 43.7 |
Uncached file write | 20.8 | 52.3 |
Cached file read | 30.1 | 45.2 |
Uncached file read | 34.7 | 53.6 |
File copy | 12.4 | 24.3 |
As you can see, the new Maxtor drive outperforms the old ATA100 drive by quite a margin. None of these speeds are approaching the 150MB/s limit, but they are still some of the highest results we have seen.
Conclusion
Final Conclusion of the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA Drive
After using several large capacity hard drives over the past few months, this is one of our picks of the lot. With a price of between £100-£150 at the time of writing, this seems like a good deal for the capacity of the drive - irrespective of the speed. Luckily, this is also one of the fastest drives we have seen.
This drive seems future proof with its SATA interface, 8MB buffer, and silent running, but there is a much more important point to consider... the warranty. According to Maxtor's site, this drive comes with a 3 year warranty ("Maxtor DiamondMax Plus ATA drives that have an 8MB cache buffer AND capacities of 120GB or greater will carry a Standard Warranty Period of 3 years."), but this is worth checking when purchasing your drive (OEM or retail).
One thing worth noting is that this is almost identical to the non SATA version, and appears to be a PATA drive simply converted to SATA using the Marvell 88i8030 Serial ATA Bridge chip.
Heat and noise do not seem to be a big issue with this drive, as it has been running without any extra cooling or noise dampening to no ill effect. The drive does get warm, but only to the same extent most other 7200RPM drives do.
