X-bit labs

Mega Roundup: 20 Hard Disk Drives with 80GB Storage Capacity (page 4)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 04/15/2004 | 01:43 PM ]

Now, let’s take a look at the Maxtor products.

Like with the IBM-Hitachi drives, we will go a little bit more into details.

Here, three drives out of four show similar results and it’s no surprise since they come from the same family, the DiamondMax Plus 9. The fourth drive behaves differently. Maxtor 6L080L4 was developed by the Quantum engineering team and their swan song was a success. This drive has the best seek time (11.7msec) of all 7200rpm IDE drives.

As you see, 6L080L4 drive is the fastest of all Maxtor devices in all modes, save for the random write mode. 6L080L4 doesn’t use lazy write algorithms, but processes all requests in the order they are received – this fact explains its bad results with 100% writes.

Under higher workload, DiamondMax Plus 9 with the SATA interface took the lead, although the “old” Maxtor (of the D740X series) was just a little behind it. Interestingly, the two remaining Maxtors from the DiamondMax Plus 9 series showed close results, in spite of their difference in the cache buffer size. At the same time, they were both far behind the 6Y080M0 model! This fact cannot be explained by our Maxtor 6Y080M0 having 60GB platters (i.e. it is has a “cut-down” platter, just like IBM IC35L090AVV207-0), as our 6Y080L0 also has 60GB platters – that’s obvious from the WinBench Disk Transfer Rate diagram…

A thrilling thing happened under the maximum load: Maxtor 6L080L4 is on top again, leaving all others behind. The old beat the young!