Introduction

We all know that when it comes to hard drives, size matters. With all this advancing technology, software, and media, you need some beefy storage to contain it. Maxtor's latest hard drive is the Diamond Plus 9, a 200 gigabyte 7200 RPM hard drive. If that isn't enough for you, I don't know what is. Not only does this drive have an extreme storage capacity, but it also has speed to back it up. Boasting a high cache buffer of 8 megabytes, a 9.4 ms average seek time and the new Fluid Dynamics Bearing Motor, this is one of the best ATA drives on the market.

The Fluid Dynamics Bearing Motor is a fairly new technology that Maxtor has adopted. This allows the drive to run at extremely low sound levels and increases the reliability of the drive.

There are two versions of the DiamondMax Plus 9, the Parallel ATA and the Serial ATA. SATA allows speeds of 150 Mb/s, but the performance difference is questionable. The DiamondMax Plus 9 comes in 60, 80, 120, 160, and 200 GB. It is also available in 2 MB and 8 MB cache.


The box claims that older versions of Windows (95/98/ME) do not support drives over 137 GB, so Maxtor has included their Ultra ATA 133 PCI card free of charge. You supposedly need Windows XP sp1 or Windows 2000 sp3 to utilize all 200 GB, but with this card, older Windows versions can use the entire 200 GB.

Now, I have gotten some feedback about the full drive size being supported under different OSes. Some people have been able to use the full 200 GB without the PCI ATA card on Windows 98 SE, and I have been able to use all 200 GB with Windows XP (not sp1). I am not sure how Maxtor came to the conclusion that you needed Windows XP sp1 or Windows 2000 sp3 to use all 200 GB, but apparently they are wrong. By just using the formatting utility found on the included CD, Some people (including me), have been able to use the entire drive space under a single partition in many different OSes that "do not support it." We are talking with Maxtor, and hopefully will have an answer soon.

UPDATE

Maxtor gave me this information: "The only way they users can use the entire 200 GB of a hard disk that is connected to the motherboard's ATA bus in Windows 98 and ME is if they have one of the specified Intel chipsets and are running the Intel application accelerator. Article ID # 960 in the Maxtor Knowledge base describes the specifics. This article also includes a PDF link with more information."

The article can be found at HERE

And the referenced PDF can be found at HERE

/UPDATE


Performance

Test system:

AMD Athlon 1700+
DFI Lan Party KT400a
512 MB Corsair PC3500 DDR
Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti200
Sound Blaster Live

PCI ATA 133 ULTRA X bios ver 2.0.0050.42

To test the performance of this drive, we will be using HD Tach, PCMark 2002 and SiSoft Sandra. We will first use SiSoft Sandra to get a general idea of how the drive performs. Sandra is a synthetic benchmark to test the performance of the drive, and the results may not be applicable in real world use.


Sandra reported the drives performance at 34741 Kb/s with the ATA card and 36580 Kb/s with the onboard ATA controller. There is a significant performance drop using the PCI ATA Controller.

To get a better idea of how the drive performs, we will now test it with FutureMark's PCMark 2002.

PCMark02
(Show All Graphs) (Collapse Graphs)

Uncached File Write

Cached File Write

Uncached File Read

Cached File Read

File Copy

PCI ATA Controller

Onboard ATA Controller

29.4

42.9

0

Speed (MB/s)

75

 

 

Uncached File Write

Cached File Write

Uncached File Read

Cached File Read

File Copy

PCI ATA Controller

Onboard ATA Controller

35.3

52.8

0

Speed (MB/s)

75

 

 

Uncached File Write

Cached File Write

Uncached File Read

Cached File Read

File Copy

PCI ATA Controller

Onboard ATA Controller

45.1

44.9

0

Speed (MB/s)

75

 

 

Uncached File Write

Cached File Write

Uncached File Read

Cached File Read

File Copy

PCI ATA Controller

Onboard ATA Controller

51.8

51.8

0

Speed (MB/s)

75

 

 

Uncached File Write

Cached File Write

Uncached File Read

Cached File Read

File Copy

PCI ATA Controller

Onboard ATA Controller

14.7

23.8

0

Speed (MB/s)

75

 

 

As you can tell from the graph, the speeds are very good, but the PCI ATA card definitely holds the card back when writing to the disk.

Finally, we will test the drive using HD Tach with and without the included PCI ATA 133 Ultra card. HD Tach is different from many other benchmarks out there as it bypasses the OS and directly accesses the hard drive for read and write testing. To do this, the drive must not be formatted or partitioned.

As you can see, there is hardly any difference between the read speeds, but once again the ATA card definitely hampers the drive's performance with the write tests. Also notice the difference in the Random Access Time using when using the ATA card.

Maxtor has had a reputation for producing some very hot running drives, and I am pleased to say that this drive isn't overly hot. After the computer was on all day, being subjected to gaming, mass file transfers, and constant use, it was warm to the touch. HMonitor reported the temperature at 39*C, while my 40 GB 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda IV was at 40*C. The case temperature is at 32*C and the ambient temperature is at 30*C. Throughout all testing, the drive was extremely quiet.

Now, you may ask why I didn't compare this drive to my Seagate Barracuda IV. Well, the Barracuda has been through quite a bit, and isn't at all up to its original performance. You'll just have to trust me on this one.

Conclusion

The DiamondMax Plus 9 has it all: Speed, size, and it is extremely quiet. With 200 GB of storage, you couldn't ask for more, and with high access speeds and 8 MB cache, you can be sure that your overall system performance will jump. The only fault I can see with this drive is if you decide to use the PCI ATA 133 Ultra card that Maxtor included with the drive, then you may lose performance from a card you might not even need.

Pros

Extreme storage
Great speeds
Included PCI ATA card
Quiet

Cons

ATA card hampers write performance