Maxtor's 300 GB Monster Reviewed

bustersnyvel writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a nice article about Maxtor's new 300 GB DiamondMax harddisk. " The question is - will the drive perform despite having only 2mb of cache, and running at 5400 rpm?

who cares if it performs

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares if it performs? If you can afford/need 300 gigs you're probably not using it to store application, you're using it to store large amounts of data that doesn't need to be bursted, etc.

Re:who cares if it performs

[J-B0nd]

You care a lot if you're capturing a lot of lightly compressed video. That requires a fairly quick drive, I have noticed more dropped frames using Vdub on my 5400 rpm drive than my 7200 drive.

like every new maxtor

[matticus]

Like every new Maxtor, the first one that comes out is the 5400/2MB model. This is for the warez kids and the movie people. Then, in a month or two, sure enough comes the 7200/8MB model for the uber-raid systems sold by Advanced Unibyte and Transtec and the like. Give it a year, and the rest of us will be able to afford it when the 500GB model comes out.
Until then, it's dual 120s or 160s for price reasons.

Re:Slashdotted already... (Page 1)

[Anonymous Coward]

Opinions differ wildly in the hard-drive business. While Seagate supplies hard drives with 160 GB of capacity in the ATA area, Hitachi and Western Digital already have 250 GB disks. They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space. If you're one of those people for whom "big" isn't big enough, this is the one for you.

However, criticism of manufacturers with smaller maximum capacities is inappropriate since the focus of many of these vendors' attention lies elsewhere. As one of the quietest drives spinning at 7,200 rpm, a Barracuda ATA 7200.7 is designed most of all along ergonomic lines and to deliver a good price/performance ratio. Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital join the running for highest performance at regular intervals. The result is larger, faster and correspondingly expensive hard drives.

With the 4A300J0, Maxtor is traveling a different route: its aim is to provide as much storage capacity as possible at an acceptable price. The recipe it has chosen consists of 5,400 rpm instead of the favored - because it's quicker - 7,200 rpm and only 2 MB in place of the 8 MB cache usual in top models. Since SATA still costs more, it uses an UltraATA/133 interface. This is ample for the coming months, as transfer rates on the fastest ATA disks are still below 70 MB/s max.

We took a closer look at how the 300 GB monster shapes up against the established major-leaguers from Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital.

Personally...

[blitzoid]

Personally I'm not worried so much about speed as I am about reliability. I've had to RMA a couple maxtor drives recently, and losing 300gb of data would really, REALLY suck.

The question is

[Rufus211]

The question is - will the drive perform despite having only 2mb of cache, and running at 5400 rpm?

Because you know...if I have a 300gb hard drive I am OBVIOUSLY using it to run my games off of. Get real, this is for backing up mp3s or videos to. Or if you're a profesional doing video editing that needs insane space you get two of these and RAID them together and poof, they're already faster than a single 7200 rpm HD.

Backup

[rf0]

OK performace might not be that hot but if it can fill a 100Mb ethernet connection then its going to work fine as a small office backup/storage system with RAID 1. Sometimes big and slow is better than fast and small.

Rus

RAID 1 for me

[Nom du Keyboard]

With that much data at risk and Maxtor's lousy warranty length and previous poor reputation, I'd want a RAID 1 (mirroring) configuration for starters. Does push the cost up a bit.

(For those of you frothing at the keyboard to tell me that RAID 1 is the worst configuration, there's nothing else that works with 2 drives and provides full data backup.)

Sweet TiVo drive!

[Rex Code]

Assuming the TiVo BIOS can handle it (or even has to... maybe that's a kernel function), this will easily exceed 400 minutes in "basic" resolution!

And spinning at 5400 is a big plus. It's plenty fast for a Tivo, and will run cooler on less power.

Re:Better link ...

[Ianoo]

I've noticed this recently, Slashdot submitted posting links to individual servers over at THG, which are obviously going to get hammered. That site has like, 10 load balanced boxes, so really they should take the number of the wwwX.tomshardware.com before they post the link!

Re:RAM is SO Cheap!

[Michael Hunt]

Product differentiation. No more, no less.

The same reason that Intel has been locking their multipliers since the p2-233 came out. If you make product X with fixed cost Cx, sell it for Rx, which is Cx+20%, and don't have a higher-spec product, it makes sense to introduce brain-dead product Y, which you build for the same fixed cost (Cy=Cx), but sell for Cy+20% and jack up the Rx to Cx+40 or 50%.

The WD 'special edition' drives are a good example. Several tens of dollars more for $2 worth of semiconductors.

Another good example was the Celeron 300s and 400s, most of which were capable of running at at least 450 mhz, but due to multiplier locking issues, only the 300 (which could be run at 4.5x100) was up to it. Intel sold them dirt cheap in the knowledge that even though they cost the same (or even slightly more) in production than the p2s of the day, they would create an artificial dichotomy and make the outrageous (then) prices of the high-end p2-400s and 450s justifiable without losing any market share (the people who would have bought the p2s if they were sensibly priced instead bought celerons.)