Everyone has their own opinion on hardware these days. Hard drives have been one of the few components that most people have brand loyalty to for years and years. I have owned Western Digital and Samsung hard drives, but I had larger storage needs and needed a little more space. I decided to try a new brand, and this can lead to a change in brand loyalty. I chose a Maxtor due to their reasonable price and quality.
The Maxtor DimondMax® 200Gb ultra ATA133 8mb cache 7200rpm drive features:
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Contents:
Maxtor provides you with every thing that you would need to install this device as an extra storage drive. It comes with an ATA cable, mounting hardware, documentation, and Maxtor’s installation/partitioning software (MaxBlast™ 4). The drive itself is well packaged in the box almost centered in a plastic pedestal supported from both sides, and the drive is wrapped in an anti-static bag. Maxtor does take pride in their products!
Drive installation requires 4 standard screws to attach the drive to the case. My Lian Li v2000a case has a slide in hard drive cage, so I have to pull out my well organized hardware container and attach the special sliding HD screws that came with my case. If you noticed the HD is installed upside down in the cage to give the circuitry on the bottom breathing room. The jumper settings are printed on the drive’s top label (or page 7 of the instruction manual), so there are no questions about the jumper settings. This drive is set as slave in my system, and requires no jumper installed. This drive does ship from Maxtor with a jumper set to the Cable Select position.
***NOTE*** When installing or removing new hardware, always ensure that the power is off and removed from the system. Remember to dissipate the static in your body by using a static strap, or touch a bare metal spot on the case before touching the internal hardware. Damage could occur if these steps are not followed.
Attach the ATA cable to the drive first, and then attach the 4 pin Molex power to the drive. Ensure all connections are secure and then close the case up.
I got the rig all fired up and ready to go I slipped the MaxBlast 4 INSTALLATION CD to configure the drive. With the software you can make a boot diskette/CD to use for a clean install and partition. Only experienced individuals should low-level format their drive and install from scratch. I used the MaxBlast software to install my new 203.941 GB HDD into 4 equal partitions of 50 GB each.
This is where it gets interesting be cause the first thing I did was move 15 gigabytes of MP3s from my SATA150 to another partition. That’s a lot of files and I thought it would take 20 minutes or so, but it only took 8min 12 seconds! Now this drive has my attention! The next test was to run Sandra 2005 and benchmark the drive speeds, comparing my SATA and Samsung drives.
| Test Setup:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ @2.65GHZ Vcore 1.57 Test drives: SATA 150 Western Digital 120Gb Caviar SE 8Mb cache Benchmark Programs: |
SiSoft Sandra posted a drive index result of of 40mb/s, which was quite interesting as my SATA (without RAID) was equally as fast. The drive size has a lot to do with the results, as more bytes are packed into a tinier space in a higher-capacity drive. Next test was Everest Home Edition, which reported that my drive actually sports 16MB cache, instead of the 8MB posted on the box!
The PCMARK scores were very biased towards the Maxtor…
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Conclusion:
For an off-the-shelf retail drive the Maxtor Diamondmax 6B200R0 is well packaged and easy to use from the start. The Installation guide is well organized and uses illustrations to aid the novice user. Overall the drive is worth the $100 price tag, especially since the drive has bonus 16MB cache. The drive would make a wonderful addition to any system needing extra storage space, or as a primary drive. This drive has surprising performance, and I shall not be wary of buying another Maxtor drive (well, soon to be Seagate)!.
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