Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200 GB

...I had already heard that Maxtor make just about every size, shape and speed of hard drive possible before considering buying a new one. I wanted something that would be cheap, around one hundred pounds; fast, most hard drives are anyway so I thought that it was best to go for this little beauty. I brought it of Dabs.com, for around £97.00, very cheap if you compare this to similar priced hard drives with less capacity than this one. One thing though, ...
...incase it goes wrong and Maxtor have to come and fix it. You can find the phone numbers/ email addresses at the back of the English section of the manual.

▼Testing this hard drive out▼

As I said before, I already had windows 2000 installed and SuSE Linux 8.2, so I needed extra space, and I wanted to keep my existing hard drive and put a second one in.

This was easy, as I had enough connectors ... more

▼ How I obtained this little beauty▼

I had already heard that Maxtor make just about every size, shape and speed of hard drive possible before considering buying a new one. I wanted something that would be cheap, around one hundred pounds; fast, most hard drives are anyway so I thought that it was best to go for this little beauty. I brought it of Dabs.com, for around £97.00, very cheap if you compare this to similar priced hard drives with less capacity than this one. One thing though, if you are looking for cheap, high capacity drives, you need to look at the highest capacity first and compare it the next highest at the highest price, so you end up getting a better deal, and more space.

▼Why did I want it? ▼

Well, I wanted something that was fast, very large and most of all, better than my original hard drive. I wanted a second one to do image editing on and some audio editing. I usually work with large video files, like movies for my studio, and also so that I could record TV with my TV card.

This was by far the cheapest hard drive to buy, for the space reasons, and also by the fact that it was the fastest for the amount of money that I paid for it. Many people ask me what the hell I want with 200GB, but I tell them, I’m claustrophobic; I don’t like small/crowded space.

▼Little more information on Memory and space▼

Back in the 1960s and 70s, a megabyte of space on any component of computer was unheard of. Most computers only had a couple hundred bytes of space at most. But now in the 21st century, a single document takes up more space than that. This is why they have prefixes to all the space on our computer hard drives and everything.
Almost all of us have heard of kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. But what about Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, and Yotta? Probably not. Kilo, Mega, Giga, etc. are just prefixes. Tera, Peta, etc. are too. Prefixes don’t have to specifically relate to computers. I.e. kilometres
Prefix Bytes (before Kilo)

▼Kilo ---------- 1024
▼Mega ----------- 1,048,576
▼Giga ----------- 1,073,741,824
▼Tera ---------- -1,099,511,627,776
▼Peta ----------1,125,899,906,842,624
▼Exa ---------1,152,921,504,606,846,976
▼Zetta ----------- 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424
▼Yotta -------- 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176

Ok, I think I’ve listed all of them here, I know, most of you will never have heard of any of these, but hey, it’s a long time till we get hard drives about 4 yottabytes!, we can only hope till then.

▼What the box contained, manuals, drivers & cetera▼

Most people don’t really imagine hard drives having drivers, because in most cases the BIOS (basic input and output settings); already set the hard drive up for you and all the settings for it. Windows and nearly all operating systems should automatically recognise hard drives such as this, and how big they are.

The box contained a manual, the main hard drive, some leads to install it and one driver cd. I firstly read through the manual to check that I would get everything right, I know, I never usually bother reading manuals for the simple reason that you don’t really need to, in some cases.

The box was quite small, with a fair amount of packaging, of course dabs had gone into packaging this with just about every single piece of packaging they could find, but I usually keep the boxes, incase I need to take the item back.

The driver CD includes some pieces of software, antivirus, drivers and some other utilities, in case you hard drive didn’t install correctly. I installed this hard drive as the second one, so I could check it out with windows first of all.

I didn’t have to install any drivers for this, so I was lucky, some people spend hours configuring their new hard drive, until they finally found the option in the BIOS to set it to automatic! I have to admit that I have spent hours before doing this manually, until the computer crashed to my misfortune.

Some extra leads were included, for the hardware installing bit, this didn’t take long, as my computer already had these installed on it, so I didn’t need them. These were just basic cables, power and flat data cables for the IDE interface.

Some extra language CDs were also included, for users of other countries.

▼Features and options▼

This hard drive was 200GB, above the standard for most hard drives around at the moment. This is enough space for anybody, personal use, home use, power users, and professional users. I use it mainly for video editing, as I said above, and it’s very suitable for this because of the high reading/writing speeds of it.

It’s got speeds of up to 7200RPM, this is about the standard for most hard drives for today, you can get some faster but there isn’t really much point as you won’t notice the difference anyway.

With a 150MB/PS transfer speed, you can’t really go wrong for speed and also it’s very good for newer computers as they take full advantage of this, therefore getting more money for the price you paid for this hard drive.

The buffer size on this hard drive is around 8MB, so it’s very fast and faster than a few of the hard drives around at the moment, and well worth the money for speeds as fast as this.

The interface on this hard drive is ATA-150, a 7 pin ATA connector, so good for all round compatibility and data speeds.

For the user who wants their hardware to be a s quiet as possible, FDB motors are attached/included so that not very much noise in emitted. The shock prevention system (SPS), makes data loss less likely and also the new DPS makes data loss less likely than ever with this new hard drive.

▼Dimensions/weight/Extra▼

WxDxH

10.2 cm x 14.6 cm x 2.6 cm

This is about standard for most hard drives, so you can’t really go wrong here. It is also only 0.6 KG, so it’s really light and so doesn’t make your PC base/tower any heaver than it probably already is.

It also comes with a one year warranty, so this is good incase it goes wrong and Maxtor have to come and fix it. You can find the phone numbers/ email addresses at the back of the English section of the manual.

▼Testing this hard drive out▼

As I said before, I already had windows 2000 installed and SuSE Linux 8.2, so I needed extra space, and I wanted to keep my existing hard drive and put a second one in.

This was easy, as I had enough connectors and plugins for it. Installing hard drives are easy because the BIOS set it all up for you, so you only have to do a little bit of manual labour.

I first booted into windows 2000 to test this hard drive out as it was easier to do it in this operating system. All I can say is that this hard drive worked on the first boot, and worked instantly.
I decided to format it to the NTFS (network file system), as you can encrypt data and also because of larger Sizes when you format it, unlike the unreliable FaT32 or FaT16, in older versions of windows.

I just tried it by first copying a large video, about 300MB, this was very quick, about 2 seconds and it was done. Then I tried to install another program, paint shop pro this time, it installed very quickly and also ran quickly.

▼Usability of this hardware▼

For day to day use of data copying and reading, this hard drive is perfect. I have used it for the past two months (approximately), without any type of data loss, crashing or system failure.

Even with large amounts of data and information on this hard drive, it still hasn’t slowed down at all. I find that installing programs on this drive is easier than installing them onto my old hard drive, and I had soon copied over all my existing programs onto this drive so that windows could have a larger swap file and so that the operating system could find files faster.

I defragment my drive every month or so, to keep up reliability and to stop any kind of data loss, I also back up some of my videos onto my old drive, just in case.

I also leave my computer on all the time, so I never turn it off at all, this is because I find that windows prefers to keep a continual session going rather than loads at a time. This is also because I have loads of fans in my base, so I do this anyway.

Downloading files of the internet takes less time than usual, because its downloading to a faster drive so it writes to it quicker that my old drive.

▼availability and prices▼

I didn’t think that I paid that much for this hard drive, the lowest price I found was on Buy safe, for £85.53, very cheap, considering what you get for your money. The most expensive that I found was on Lowest on Web for £139.99, either a very good model of hard drive or just extremely expensive.

I don’t think that thee are very many equivalent hard drives for this amount of money, or for what you do get for your money.
▼what other people think about this hard drive▼

Other people have commented to me about how they think its really cool having as much space as I have, for the amount of money that I paid. All of my friends and relatives are seriously considering upgrading their old 10GB slow drives for this super fast, high capacity beast of a hard drive.

People complain to me and ask me for advice on how much space too “upgrade” to, I tell them not to bother, do bother to just but two separate hard drives, one about 10GB, and another like this one, for all round data storage, 200GB.

▼what I think of it▼

Well, I think that this hard drive is well worth the money that I paid for it, and worth its weight in gold, seriously! Considering how much some companies are charging for it. You can get similar items on other sites, such as dabs, but they probably won’t be the same.

If you, like me, are looking for stability, reliability, and most of all the most amount data you can get for your money, then his had drive is for you. Its also very quiet, small, light and user configurable, compared to most other hard drives.

Think of it also as an investment, not just something that you have to buy every year, when the space is too low, but something that will last for even maybe years and never wear out an become useless, and unusable.

I would advise many people to buy this, if you have the money of course, and also if you want a new data load that is fast, reliable and will last you ages. Most of all, something that will store everything, and archive old emails that you may well have before had to delete, but with this hard drive you can keep everything without having to worry about it.
 

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