Advantages: Very fast, reliable and quiet... and Cheap! Disadvantages: Absolutely nothing!
a disk that would give me years of happy use with no maintenance whatsoever, and so far all of my Maxtor disks have been this way.
So I settled on the DiamondMax10 in the 250GB size. It has a whopping 16MB (!!) cache, and a good 7200RPM spin speed. I do not have native Serial ATA on my motherboard, so I opted for the PATA version. I have never had a problem with the performance of PATA drives, so see no real reason to upgrade.
When I got the drive it was already set to the correct jumper settings, making installation a doddle. I had made a Ghost image of the 80GB drives and transferred it to my laptop, so I just used the USB case from my 10GB drive to restore the image to the new drive.
It worked first time, and within 20 minutes of opening the box I was going about my business as usual. The speed bump was most noticeable gain from ...
Advantages: Very Cheap, Very Quiet Disadvantages: Poorly Made, Burn Out Easily
In my first foray into PC building 5 years ago, I spent a great deal of time researching components and learning to build a system competently and properly. I decided upon a Maxtor Hard Drive, which was a 40GbDiamondMax model, mainly for it's price (around £20 cheaper than similar models by Samsung, Hitatchi, Seagate, etc). This was a poor decision.
Not 4 months after purchase the hard drive failed. A burn out on the IDE controller board on the underside of the disk, blew up the electronics. I was frustrated, but considered myself unlucky at the loss of much of my data. Undeterred, I sent the hard disk back to my retailer and received a new one on warranty. Installed and ready to go, I was happy I'd managed to sort it all out. However, 2 months later the hard-drive failed, this time the motor had burnt out. Right.
I pressed my ...
Advantages: Quiet, Swift, Great warranty and Online Support. Disadvantages: Not much of a Manual but details can be found online!
I have now been using this drive for over one month after waiting to gather all the components for my HTPC (Home Theatre PC). What do I think of this drive?
I think that it is the best drive I have owned yet! Not only is the storage capacity great on this drive but it is lightning fast (compared to my old DiamondMax IDE Drive) and is also very quiet. The bios recognised the device instantly and with SATA cables being used instead of IDE, this gave my Silverstone case some extra space for air to help cool my system down.
I have Windows Media Center 2005 loaded onto this drive and saw a few recommendations for this drive when using a HTPC. My system is linked to Sky Digital through a Hauppauge PVR card which is able to record straight onto hard disk without the need for a Sky+ Box.
I fournd that the drive is able to record ...
Product Information for "Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250 GB" »
Performance
Drive Transfer Rate
300 MBps (external)
Seek Time
9 ms (average)
Average Latency
4.17 ms
Spindle Speed
7200 rpm
Reliability
Start / Stop Cycles
50,000
Manufacturer's product description
DiamondMax 10 drives feature native command queuing along with the company's exclusive dual-processor technology and large buffers to deliver unparalleled speeds compared to traditional drives in their class. This unique set of features combined with Maxtor's latest firmware technology, allows the drive to self-balance its workloads for a more efficient hard drive operation. With DiamondMax 10 hard drive-enabled systems, consumers can easily run multiple applications, such as games and music, at the same time without overwhelming the PC. Designed for multimedia PC users, graphic artists, system integrators and white box builders, the 7200 RPM DiamondMax 10 drives are ideal for performance desktop computing storing high-resolution images, multimedia content, and personal and business information.
