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Maxtor DiamondMax™ ATA/100 Hard Drive—As good as it gets
by By Fredrick Rea O’Keefe January 2001 Bit of Blue newsletter www.tpcug.org/ , fredrick@tech-center.com - January 21, 2001 at 19:10:22:
UP FRONT SUMMARY—Product – DiamondMax™ Plus 45 GB hard drive kit, Model #54610H6 Manufacturer – Maxtor® Website: http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm Class – Hardware, part PC requirements – Available PCI slot, Ultra-DMA capable system, Pentium-class processor. MaxBlast™ Plus software comes on 1 diskette. If HD capacity is < 32 GB, requires a full installation of Windows 95 or higher; >32 GB requires full installation of Windows 98 or higher. Cable Requirements: An 80-Wire UDMA Interface Cable is required for all UDMA/100 & UDMA/66 hard drives. (Recommended for UDMA/33, too.) Cable comes with both the drive and the card. Used with Maxtor Ultra ATA/100 PCI Adapter Card for UDMA 100/66/33 devices. Street price – varies, if you can find it in stock. I paid $180 at Staples, $50 for the card. Rating (0-10) - 10Recommendation –This makes a big difference in performance and the price is most reasonable – if you need a hard drive and your PC meets the requirements, a lesser drive would not be the thrifty choice..
KEY FEATURES—Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE compatible Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-Based Architecture Ultra ATA/100 Data Transfer Rate 2 MB SDRAM Cache Buffer 7200 RPM DualWave™ twin processors <8.7 ms average seek time Up to 100 MB/sec data flow rate
(To skip the verbiage, jump to the table at the end.)
All right, that kind of detail appeals to techies. It even appeals to me, when comparing products into which to sink my hard-earned dollars. 45 GB in a 3 ½”, 1.3 lb. package. Remarkable how technology developed by hard drive manufacturers packs more, more reliably, into ever smaller packages. Happily, the marriage of Maxtor and Quantum has brought the fastest drives to market at a reasonable price. I am impressed with the performance.
Usually I review books and software, so why hardware? Despite partitioning my old hard drive, using Microsoft’s DriveSpace 3 compression, I ran out of room. Believe me, you don’t want to run short of hard drive space. When Windows doesn’t have enough resources, including room for data, temp files and swap space, disaster awaits.
My ordeal began when Windows 98 Explorer got bollixed up. Windows refused to boot, and Windows wouldn’t reinstall. DOS was useless, although I did manage to delete enough files to give me back enough room on the HD to supposedly be able to reinstall Win98. Nope. After several attempts to repair or reload, the SR-1 upgrade CDs refused to try again. (Why did I donate my original Windows software?) None of my local suppliers had or could get the Maxtor ULTRA ATA/100 drives. Mail order vendors either never heard of them, or couldn’t get them. Maxtor’s regional rep couldn’t help other than to suggest that the drives weren’t released yet, but “try Tech Data”. No luck.
My aggravation and lost time depleted my patience. Off to the new, nearby Staples. They didn’t have the hard drives in stock or in their catalog, and couldn’t help, even through their regional Staples Direct® sales rep. But, the store had Windows ME ($180 full version) and Norton SystemWorks™ 2001. (Seems that Windows 98 is an antique, no longer stocked.) Hating to shell out the money, I was in need. How could I function without the damned computer?! So, maybe a miracle could occur.
Forget it. Regardless of DOS-deleting much more data and programs from the HD, WinME refused to recognize that there was valid Windows somewhere, somehow on the old drive. Nor could I free up quite enough space for an install. The old Windows was causing problems. Time to buy some kind of hard drive to get me through. Back to Staples – convenience was the goal. I was getting worn down.
At the sales counter, what did my eyes focus on? Eureka!!! Both the Maxtor hard drive of my dreams, and the PCI adapter card to go with it! Perhaps I had paid enough for my sins? $180 for the hard drive kit, complete with software and the required 80-wire UDMA cable, and $50 for the Ultra ATA/100 adapter card. Paying, with relief, despite the sales people having their own involved and lengthy PC/cash register problems, I rushed home (never exceeding the speed limit, naturally). I knew my troubles (might be) were over.
My fine, 5 year old ASUS mother board supports a PCI Bus Master EIDE controller with PIO Mode 3 & 4, and DMA Mode 2, with an Award BIOS (Does that sound promising? What the heck – at this point, it’s gonna work or I’ll have a new PC!).
Installing the drive and the controller was very easy. My PC has a full tower case. I decided to set the old drive as the slave on the new controller, and for once there was enough cable length for attaching readily to both drives. What could I lose?
A delay - back on the road to buy a “Y” connector for the power leads. (I am now well known at Staples. In this case, familiarity bred contentment.)
Now I was ready to finish the mechanical part of the installation. But here I had a “confusement.” The HD instructions say to install the controller software first. Unfortunately, the controller’s instructions indicate installing the hard drive software first. The latter “automatically” (I know you’ve heard that before) formats the HD and gets it ready for recognition. I chose trying the HD software first. A few choices to configure the system, including drive recognition (perfect), which drives were to be assigned as master and slave, and how to partition the Maxtor were clearly presented. (I didn’t need Windows for this.) The software ran so fast that I thought nothing useful had happened. A lengthy scrubbing, partitioning and formatting of the drive were what I expected, as always in the past. I twiddled around a bit, but was left wondering. At least the software offered to transfer any or all data from the old drive to the new one. Great – everything went except the compressed partition data.
So, the card software was next. Again, fast setup seemed too speedy and effortless. Nothing works that well for me. Apparently the drive was preformatted, and because I accepted the recommended FAT 32, single 46 GB partition, little needed doing. Wondrous, as I later discovered.
Straight away, the real test – would Windows ME install? Would my data be recoverable on the slave drive?
Windows installed effortlessly, recognizing all the attached hardware. However, a message let me know the bad news. Something like, “It appears you have a compressed partition - Drive D. Tough luck, WME doesn’t support or recognize DriveSpace compression.” Searching the CD shows a DriveSpace.exe program, but that works only for floppy diskettes. Drat! Nowhere on the Internet or on the old Win98 CDs could I find DriveSpace. (After a couple of days, I decided to jettison all the data not already backed up, and FDISKed D:. Anything not on the back up tape is tough luck for me, legal records and all.). Enough with frustration.
I lost all of the data in the compressed partition, and much of my Outlook/Outlook Express data, and the Address Book got scrambled. But I am in operation again, and satisfied, even delighted with the new hardware. Here’s why.
Comparing the performance of the original Western Digital Caviar™ 32500 2.5 GB HD, plugged into the motherboard controller, with the same drive plugged into the ATA/100 controller, versus the new Maxtor HD on the ATA/100 controller shows these results from SpinRite 5 benchmarking: (7.542 microsecond. is the measured system overhead)
Burst transfer rate measures transfer of data already in the HD buffer out to the system. This is the maximum rate that data can flow from the HD buffer.
Sustained transfer rate measures transfer of data from the disk surfaces through the buffer out to the system. This is the maximum rate that data can flow from the physical platters.
Summary— This super quiet HD with the ATA/100 card shows an easily observable increase in throughput (i.e., a much shorter time for accessing data). Hard drive operations which previously took a minute or so now take less than 5 seconds. Nowadays, the big slow down on my machine is the motherboard and the bus. The 200 MHz Pentium® II is holding me back!
As ever, wishing you safe and enjoyable computing. Rick O’Keefe u Copyright © 2000 by the author,
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