DiamondMax 80GB Hard Drive

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.