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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Internal Hard Drive
Author: Daniel Topler
Date Posted: May 4th, 2003
| SLRating Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Internal Hard Drive (200GB): |
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| SLRating Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Internal Hard Drive (160GB): |
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Bottom Line: If you are need more space on your PC, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Internal Hard Drives are inexpensive, offer high capacity and performance. We believe they are good value but is it worth paying extra for 8MB of Cache and how did they perform? Read on to find out in our official review....
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Noise
The drives are both fairly quiet, considering each drive's massive size. I can barely hear anything while the drives are idle, and while I can hear a slight whirring noise during activity, it is almost non-noticeable, and it can't be any more noise then any other hard drive, and it's actually less then others that I've heard.
Performance
I tested both drives using three different benchmarks: HD Tach, PCMark 2002, and SiSoft Sandra 2003. I compared the two drives (of course), but I had no extra drives lying around, except for a old 40GB Seagate drive, but I didn't think it was even worth even testing that drive. Before testing, I formatted each drive (NTFS), and I installed Windows XP Home. I then benchmarked. I installed no programs on the drives before benchmarking, so the results may be lower with more programs installed.
HD Tach
First up is the HD Tach benchmark. I find this to be the most adequate representation of a hard drive, and it is my favorite hard drive benchmark. Results were strange. The 160GB drive performed slightly better then the 200GB drive in all of the tests excluding CPU Utilization. While this was probably caused because of slightly different settings while formatting (?), I thought I should point that out. Despite that, the results were very high, and compete with SATA performance. The first screenshot is 160GB, the second is 200GB.
SiSoft Sandra 2003
Next is SiSoft 2003's File System Benchmark. I was very surprised with the low score of the 160GB drive, and it compared to a 30GB drive. While it is most likely a personal computer issue, I thought it was worth mentioning. I tried re-benchmarking the drive over and over, but the results stayed approximately the same. The 200GB drive demonstrated excellent performance, however, and did better then the 120GB 8MB cache drive, but trailed the RAID setup with two 80GB 2MB cache drives. First screenshot is 160GB, second is 200GB.
Futuremark PCMark 2002
Here are the results from FutureMark's PCMark 2002. I liked the score of 1210 that the 200GB drive achieved, but there was a 357 point drop to the 160GB drive, which I expected, but I was still slightly shocked. This score is still high, but there is a wide margin between the two scores. This shows the benefit of the 8MB cache over the 2MB. When looking at the chart below, you can see the huge margin between the two drives. The first set of screenshots are for the 160GB drive, the second set is for the 200GB drive.
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