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DiamondMax 80GB Hard Drive
Article Index
DiamondMax 80GB Hard Drive
The Drive
Benchmarks
Conclusion
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Introduction

Remember the times when we lived with 500MB hard drives and thought it was a real big deal. No...well I do. Not so long ago hard drive capacities hardly went above the 1GB mark. I remember when I first got my 1GB hard drive, and had absolutely no clue as what to do with all that storage space. It no doubt sounds a joke today, but the fact is games and other applications hardly went above the 10MB mark. Games were hardly anything close to what it is today; just thinking about it makes me want to throw up. With the advent of faster and more powerful processors and video cards, applications and games have become more complex and inevitably require greater hard drive space.

Today there is a great deal of drive capacities to choose from, 20GB up to around 76GB. Choosing the right drive is totally dependent on each individual's requirements, so think twice before making any sizeable investments. Think about where you stand, are you an hardcore gamer who goes out to your local game store every week to get the latest and greatest of video games, or are you an average gamer with requirements for basic applications. If you fall into the former then my friend bigger it is the better it is. If you are an average gamer then a 20GB drive will do you justice adequately.

In this review we'll be considering Maxtor's DiamondMax 80GB drive Maxtor's latest hard drive. Maxtor claims the DiamondMax 80 to be the largest IDE drive in the market, and up to now no one has been able to questions that. Not even SCSI's have reached this limit. The significant advantage the DiamondMax 80 has is its considerably low price. We'll go into more detail of the drive later on.

Over the past few years Maxtor has spread out their wings and grasped the hard drive desktop market like a storm. Today Maxtor has a wide range of hard drive line-ups to cater to varying consumer needs. The DiamondMax and the DiamondMax Plus include their main line of drives, the DiamondMax VL (Value Line) caters to the cost conscious consumer.

First lets get a head start by going through the drive's specifications.


Specifications

* Maximum Capacity of 81.9 GB
* 5,400 RPM Spin Speed
* < 9.0 ms average seek time
* 2 MB SDRAM Cache Buffer
* Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE compatible
* Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-Based Architecture
* Ultra ATA/100 Data Transfer Rate

The drive Maxtor sent us was the full retail version, which comes with an ATA 66/100 IDE cable & Installation Diskette. If you are currently upgrading your system then all this won't be necessary, so it's best that you choose the OEM/WhiteBox version. You can save a bit more on doing this.

The drive itself is a common 3.5" drive and will fit any 3.5" drive bay with no hassle. Some of you might have to flash your motherboard bios if it initially doesn't detect the drive in the Auto detect sequence. I had this problem with one of our older boards, and after a bios flash it worked fine. So don't worry if at first the drive doesn't get detected, simply flash the bios. There weren't any other notable hitches as for the installation process. Make sure you do the formatting of the drive when you have a lot of free time though, as formatting a 80GB drive is no small deal. If you have any problems with regard to the drive simply call Maxtor's toll free support for assistance.

 




In the past IBM and Maxtor have been going head to head, trying to out beat each other in what ever manner possible. IBM's last offering was the DTLA 75GB drive, which claimed the record as the largest IDE and mechanical drive. However for every hurdle they put out to Maxtor, they seem to retaliate with force. So to take the place of IBM's 75GB drive, the newest heavy weight champion is Maxtor's DiamondMax 80, 80GB(DM80) drive.

The drive itself is a four-platter design, each platter consisting of 20GB. IBM's 75GB Deskstar 75GXP has five data platters yet Maxtor has been able to squeeze in more data than IBM has been able to with five platters.

The drive consists of a 5400R.P.M spindle speed. Some of you might consider this quite slow considering the fast 7200R.P.M drives that emerge into the market today. Maxtor could have made this drive a 7200R.P.M drive yet the price difference of the two will be extremely vast. The DM80 is offered at $320, if they changed this to a 7200R.P.M drive the price would have been in the range of $1000-$1500. Spindle speed no doubt affects the overall performance of the drive. However the performance of the DM80 ain't too bad, in fact the drive has an average access time of 9ms, which is quite good for a 5400R.P.M drive. Furthermore track-to-track seek time is clocked at less than 1ms, and the drive's 2MB buffer greatly compensates for its lack of speed.

Maxtor's main objective of introducing the DM80 has been to offer users a cheap drive with incredible capacity. It would have been nice to have a 7200R.P.M drive but then that would be going totally against their objective. Not everybody wants a drive with incredible performance, and there are a few advantages of having a 5400R.P.M drive to a 7200 R.P.M drive. Not only are they considerably cheaper as capacities go up, they produce less heat, consume less power etc. For those of you having small casings, heat can be a significant problem; so opting for a 5400R.P.M drive is the best. Nevertheless it all depends on your requirements.

Deciding how good this drive really is only possible after testing it thoroughly, so lets get to it.

 

 


Test setup

 

Processor

Intel Pentium III 933 MHz

Mainboard

ASUS CUSL2

Memory

128 MB Corsair PC133 memory

Video

nVidia Geforce 256 SDR

Hard Disk

Maxtor DiamondMax 80

IDE Controller

i815 Ultra DMA/100 controller

Operating System

Microsoft Windows 98SE

Windows 2000 Professional

IDE Driver

Intel Busmaster DMA drivers 6.0

In order to compare the tests results I included results of two other drives, the IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB drive and the Quantum Fireball Plus LM 20GB drive.

The DiamondMax's 5400R.P.M spindle speed certainly cannot keep up with the other 7200 R.P.M drives, however in windows 2000 the drive's performance is increased considerably in contrast to Win98.

Looking at the chart we can see that even though the DM80 is hindered by a 5400R.P.M Spindle speed, its performance isn't that bad at all. Thanks to the 20GB per platter data density this drive is capable of achieving such high transfer rates.

In both instances the DM 80 beats the Quantum Fireball Plus LM 20GB drive with a good margin. As mentioned above this is due to the drives 20GB data density per platter and 2MB cache buffer.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this review if you're looking for low heat producing drive then a 5400R.P.M drive is the best. If the drive had a spindle speed of 7200.P.M, with its high 80GB capacity it would have made this drive significantly hotter no doubt.


Considering all the scores and my hands on experience with the DiamondMax 80GB drive, I think Maxtor has done a splendid job with it. They have given a new meaning to high capacity hard drives by offering this drive at a very low price. Maxtor in the past has offered high capacity drives for a very reasonable price, so lets hope that they keep up this trend.

As mentioned above the DM80 performed extremely well to my expectations as a 5400R.P.M drive. Its performance may not be so great as a 7200R.P.M drive, but who cares, this drive is not meant for great performance. If you are looking for a drive with super performance then you are looking in the wrong place. You should be looking at IBM's Deskstar 75GXP drive or a SCSI drive. Be warned though, the price you'll end up paying for one of these drives can be used to buy two or more DM80 drives. Either way what you do is your choice, what we can do is simply point you in the correct direction.

The drive's audible noise levels were extremely low. Fact is sometimes the only way that you can see whether the drive is functioning is through the case HDD indicator. This could be because our systems are loaded with fancy coolers; nevertheless the only noticeable noise comes during drive seeks.

As I mentioned in the installation section, some of you having older motherboards might have a problem detecting the drive. Simply go to your motherboard manufactures web site and get the latest update for your bios, and it'll work fine.

Considering the DiamondMax's 80GB drive capacity, whether users will want a drive with such an enormous capacity is in question. This is mainly due to the fact that CD-ROM's are getting cheaper by the day, so some of you might opt to choose this. Like I said before it totally depends on your requirements. The drive will be of most use to people with high capacity storage demands and low budgets. This could be the ideal thing for those planning to set up a small-scale network. Including about three DM 80 drives will give a total of 270GB, which is an enormous amount of capacity for a small sized network. If you opt for SCSI drives instead, make sure you don't have to break into your bank the next day. Overall Maxtor has done a great job with their DiamondMax 80GB drive, giving it impressive performance yet keeping it at a very reasonable price.

Pros

* 80 GB of enormous drive capacity
* ATA100-compatibility
* Low noise, Low heat level

Cons

* Older motherboards will have trouble with recognizing the board.
 
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