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?

It's too big to be useful

[The One KEA]

A drive that big is hardly useful by itself; it's better off in a RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 configuration. Having 300GB of data on a single hard disk only guarantees that when the disk crashes and FUBARs all of your non-backed-up data, you'll wish you'd gotten 2 of the monsters. Drives this big are just too vulnerable when used singly without RAID or a sound backup plan.

I'm all for innovation, but seriously, who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?

Tom's Hardware conclusion

[elviscious]

Conclusion: Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer

Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spinning flagships from Western Digital and Maxtor, its overall performance is respectable for a 5,400 rpm drive. Above all, the excellent data transfer rates are certainly welcome.

Only the longer seek times resulting from the low turn rate and the lower I/O performance mean this disk makes little sense for demanding users running it under permanent load or as a system drive. That said, the hard drive is not designed to do this. After all, anyone able to cough up the princely sum of around $411 will no doubt have their own operating system hard drive that also spins quicker. A 7,200 rpm 80 GB hard drive with 8 MB of cache will currently set you back little more than $106.

In view of its large storage capacity, the guarantee of just one year is dubious, since even in two years, 300 GB should still be big enough to save it from the scrap heap. Even if guarantees of several years are reserved for the top 7,200 rpm models, a two-year warranty would at least reduce the vendor's risk of having to honor a guarantee of two years. Ultimately, equipment purchases should not only be a question of numbers, but should involve a fair degree of trust, too.

However, it is curretly part of a promotion, which means that if you go for the kit now, the card will be included.

Reliability is #1 for me

[CraigV]

If I want speed, I get more RAM, but with hard drives I want reliability and I suspect that higher speeds bring less reliability. Does anyone have a link to an analysis of the reliability-speed tradeoff?

300GB isn't that much

[mcryptic]

Today maxtor announced that they have perfected perpendicular recording [shareholder.com] to allow for 175GB per platter.

Whos up for 700GB drives?

record everything you hear?

[Fzz]

Hmm, a good quality voice-grade codec uses perhaps 32Kbit/s. Less if you'd accept cellphone quality. Assume you recorded everything you hear when you're awake (say 16 hours/day). 300GB would fit 3.5 years of recording. I tend to assume upgrading disks every couple of years, and before then disks will have doubled in size again. So you could record everything you hear for the rest of your life, and keep it on a single disk.

Now whether you'd want to do this, and how you'd index the data in a useful manner are more difficult questions. As are backing the data up. But you could do this now if you wanted to. Food for thought.