X-bit labs

Battle for 160GB: Hard Disk Drive Roundup Part I (page 3)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 03/16/2007 | 03:32 PM ]

Maxtor

We’ve got two HDDs from Maxtor for this review. The first is a refresh version of the DiamondMax 10 . The second is the company’s swan song, the DiamondMax 17 . Yes, there had appeared two more HDD models under the Maxtor brand – DiamondMax 20 and DiamondMax 21 – before the company was devoured by Seagate, but those were Seagate’s HDDs from the Barracuda 7200.9 and 7200.10 series with a Maxtor label and slightly revised firmware. Let’s start with the DiamondMax 10:

It looks like a regular DiamondMax 10, but take note of the second digit in the drive’s serial number “V300GJ7G”. This number indicates three read/write heads whereas the original 160GB DiamondMax 10 has four heads!

The second difference from the original DiamondMax 10 is new SATA-300 electronics. Unfortunately, the drive’s cache buffer was not increased to 16MB.

The DiamondMax 17 resembles the previous model, except for the bottom view:

The PCB is turned with the chips facing inward and is also smaller (which is an important thing for some hardware reviewers). However, the electronics is no different functionally: SATA-300 and 8 megabytes of cache memory. If you take a look at the drive’s serial number, you’ll see its main difference from the previous model. The DiamondMax 17 is a single-platter drive!

Having one platter and one head less is important for this class of HDDs as it helps reduce the prime cost considerably. Well, Maxtor was too late, anyway…