One recent entry into the high-end IDE hard drive market has been the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 series. These drives feature capacities from 120 to 200GB and more, with large 8Mb buffers, and 7200RPM rotational speed. They also support UDMA-133, and loads of other features. The test model sent to us by Maxtor was a standard retail version, which came with an 80-pin IDE cable, and a high-quality UDMA-133 PCI. The card is based on a Promise two-channel IDE controller, which proved to be very fast in our tests.

Let’s take a look at the drive itself:

Here’s the underside, where the drive’s cache is located.

The elongated chip on the left is a Samsung 8Mb SDRAM chip, rated at 6ns, or 166Mhz maximum speed. It is located very close to the Ardent chip which controls the drive’s mechanics, which allows for good data integrity, and fast transfer rates.

Here’s the label on top, which shows the simple jumper settings to specify IDE master or slave.

We tested the drive in two systems, using a suite of benchmarking tools.

PCMark 2002 is a well-recognized benchmarking tool that reports the speed of your system overall, along with a score for the drives using a system of points.

HD_SPEED is a small downloadable benchmarking program which can use buffered or unbuffered data packets to measure speed. You can also specify block size.

Nero Burning Rom includes a testing tool that measures unbuffered transfer rates, to see if your drives are fast enough to write CDs with.

For the fixed file size transfer rate tests we copied a 9.08Gb folder located on one partition of the drive to another partition on the drive. There were 2093 files in the folder, for an average size of 4.33Mb each.

Test Notes
If you install Windows on the drive using the controller card, you must use a drivers disk, with Ultra.sys. The disk can be made using the included Maxtor CD. After Windows is installed, you should open Device Manager, select the controller card, (it shows up as a SCSI controller) and click on the properties tab. Once there, uncheck the box labeled "Pass windows flush-drive-cache commands to disk drives." This prevents Windows from flushing the drive’s cache after every command, which greatly increases transfer rates.

Test Results
Using PCMark 2002, using the Pentium 4 test system, we were able to achieve a score of 1513 HDD Marks. Using the Pentium 3 test system, we were able to achieve a score of 1288 HDD Marks.

Using HD_SPEED, we were able to obtain some very high transfer rates. On the P4 test system, the highest transfer rate achieved was 110.0Mb/sec, using buffered transfer mode, and 256Kb block size. Using the unbuffered transfer mode, which completely bypasses the 8Mb cache, we reached a maximum transfer rate of 53.0Mb/sec. On the P3 Test system, we were able to achieve a buffered transfer rate of 109.9Mb/sec. Bypassing the cache, we achieved a maximum transfer rate of 52.8Mb/sec. Here is a graph of the overall results-

Using Nero Burning Rom, we achieved results similar to the unbuffered transfer rates above. The maximum transfer rate with the Pentium 4 test system was 52.4Mb/sec. The maximum transfer rate with the Pentium 3 test system was 50.8Mb/sec.

The final test we performed involved transferring 9.08Gb of files from partition to partition across the drive. This serves as an excellent burn-in test, and pushes the drive to its limits. During this test, the drive became quite warm. It was also louder than usual. This test was the only one in which the drive was louder than either of the test systems’ processor fans. On the Pentium 4 machine, the transfer took 10 minutes and 26 seconds. On the Pentium 3 machine, the transfer took 17 minutes and 11 seconds. On the Pentium 4 machine, when we enabled the "Pass windows flush-drive-cache commands to disk drives" check box, the transfer took 21 minutes and 8 seconds. This proves the importance of disabling this option for optimal performance.

The Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Plus series of hard drives is one of the best options currently available for desktop and end-users. The drives are fast, and come packed with features, like an 8Mb buffer, and a free two-channel controller card. They perform well for most purposes, from gaming to file storage. We also found that if you shop around, 160Gb models are available for as little as $128 after rebates. In short: If you’re looking for more storage space that won’t burn a hole in your pocket, go with Maxtor.