The review is devoted to the new Maxtor hard disk drive - D740X-6L. This HDD was developed by Quantum engineers, but Quantum didn't have the time to launch it under their brand name, because it was purchased by Maxtor. In fact, we don't think that it matters for the customers that much, under which brand name the product is sold and produced, they only care about the quality. And Maxtor D740X has every chance to be a really high-quality product: it boasts 40GB platters and new ATA/133 protocol support. If you can hardly surprise us with the first feature, because we have already seen the drives with 40GB platters not only by Maxtor, but also by Seagate (though only Seagate could boast a HDD with 40GB platters and 7,200rpm spindle rotation speed), then the support of the new ATA/133 deserves our most scrupulous attention.

In July 2001 Maxtor announced a new ATA interface, which specification was worked out by the whole consortium of the storage industry (including Maxtor, of course). This standard became ATA/133, or FastDrive, as Maxtor called it.

The number "133" in the name of this standard means that from now on the maximum theoretical data transfer rate between an ATA/133 HDD and an ATA/133 controller makes 133MB/sec. According to our previous tests, there is no real need in increasing the data transfer rate between the controller and the hard disk drive so urgently nowadays. Even the speed of the UDMA66 mode is more than enough to squeeze all the juices out of the contemporary HDDs. However, if you connect two hard disk drives via one cable, then the overall channel throughput of 66MB/sec or 100MB/sec may turn out insufficient to ensure normal communication with two HDDs. But let's leave the discussion of the necessity of 133MB/sec aside for a while. We suggest taking a closer look at the second novelty introduced by the new ATA/133 standard, which Maxtor calls BigDrive:

Namely, the second significant change of the ATA standard introduced by ATA/133 is the increase of the sector address length from 28bit to 48bit. It will allow developing HDDs with the storage capacity of up to 144Petabyte (Petabyte = 1,024Terabyte = 1,048,576GB). This is immense size, which we can hardly imagine, but who knows how fast the progress will go with the time and what we will have to get used to later…

At present only one hard disk drive manufacturer sells HDDs with the storage capacity exceeding the notorious 137GB barrier. As you have already guessed it is Maxtor with their D540X-4G (Neptune) family including two models: 120GB one and 160GB one. Two more manufacturers, Western Digital and IBM, have already come as close as possible to the limitations imposed by ATA5 having introduced their 120GB WD1200BB and IBM 120GXP. And one more manufacturer, Seagate, is most likely to join them in the nearest future. If the per platter data density will keep increasing like that, then all the hard disk drive manufacturers will face the choice very soon: either to move to ATA/133 or to cede in the competition.

Intel, which is playing the first fiddle in the SerialATA orchestra, is going to implement SerialATA support in its chipsets only in the second half of 2002, and unfortunately, all the other chipset and HDD manufacturers do not dare leave the wake of the flagship. This way, there is going to be no alternative to ATA/133 (neither technological, nor marketing) in the nearest half a year, and we will have to put up with it.

The current review will focus on the peculiarities and features of Maxtor D740X-6L HDD. We will test the drive in standard conditions (that is with UDMA33/66/100 controllers) and will take the first look at the new ATA/133 and its benefits.

Closer Look

First of all, here is the new Maxtor D740X-6L HDD:

As you can guess from the HDD's exterior, it was developed by Quantum, and, as Maxtor Sales Manager in Eastern Europe told us, all upcoming Maxtor products would be developed by a joint Maxtor-Quantum engineering team.

The HDD we received for testing was marked as "6L040J2", which allows reading its basic parameters. Namely: "6L" denotes that the drive belongs to D740X-6L model, "040" stands for the drive storage capacity in GB, "J" signifies that the drive is equipped with the regular bearings and not with the FDB, which are usually marked with an "L", and the last position of the marking most probably stands for the number of read/write heads.

The maximum storage capacity for the drives from this family makes 80GB. All the HDDs are equipped with a 2MB cache buffer (which can be emptied in 0.015sec at 133MB/sec speed) and support Quiet Drive technology, Shock Protection technology and Data Protection System.

Here are the main technical characteristics of the Maxtor D740X-6L HDD and the other testing participants selected for our investigation:

You probably wonder why we selected these particular HDDs to compete with the Maxtor newcomer? As for Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, everything is clear: it is the first hard disk drive with 40GB platters, which we managed to test (see our Seagate Barracuda ATA IV HDD Review). IBM 60GXP is included into this competition due to its high performance, as it still remains an indisputable leader in some tests (see our IBM Deskstar 60GXP HDD Review). And Quantum Fireball Plus AS was included in order to find out how greatly the performance of Maxtor-Quantum HDDs increased due to new electronics and denser platters.

Testbed and Methods

We tested the newcomer in the following test system:

• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• ASUS CUBX-E mainboard, bios 1007A;
• 2 x 128MB PC133 SDRAM by Hyundai;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Windows 98/Windows 2000 Pro.

Besides, the HDD was also tested with ATA/133 controller from HighPoint - HPT372, integrated onto Iwill XP333-R. This mainboard is based on ALi MAGiK 1 Rev.C chipset and works with AMD Athlon CPUs. As a result, the second testbed was configured as follows:

• AMD Athlon XP 1500+ CPU;
• Iwill XP333-R mainboard;
• 256MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM by Hyundai;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• HPT372 ATA/133 controller;
• Windows 98/Windows 2000 Pro.

We decided to put the results obtained on this testbed together with those for the first testbed, although we will try to avoid making direct comparisons, as these two test platforms are of pretty different configuration.

Well, now that we have agreed that the results for Maxtor D740X obtained on ATA/133 controller should be regarded as preliminary, it's high time we passed over to the discussion of our testing methodology.

In order to check the HDDs performance in different UDMA modes, we had to use the following controllers:

• UDMA33: the controller integrated into i440BX chipset;
• UDMA66: Promise Ultra66 controller;
• UDMA100: integrated Promise Ultra100 controller on ASUS CUBX-E mainboard;
• UDMA133: HPT372 controller integrated onto Iwill XP333-R mainboard.

For Promise controllers we used the drivers ver. 1.60 (build 33).

The disk drives were connected as Master-units to a separate IDE-channel. DMA support in Windows was enabled. We used FAT32 and NTFS file systems to format each of them as one logical drive of the maximum size with the default cluster. All the tests were run 4 times and then the average results were taken for the diagrams. The HDDs didn't rest for cooling down between the tests.

Here are the benchmarks used:

• Windows 98 WinBench 99 1.2
• Adaptec Threadmark 2.0
• Windows 2000 WinBench 99 1.2
• HDTach 2.61
• IOMeter 1999.10.20

Performance

Average Access Time

We measured the average access time with the help of two benchmarks: HDTach and WinBench99. The diagram below contains the results for UDMA100 mode:

Yeah, it's been a while since we saw a HDD that fast from Quantum (of course, Quantum LM was faster but do you remember how much time has passed since then?). Here Quantum-Maxtor HDD won the first prize.

Sustained Linear Read Speed

We measured the linear read speed with WinBench99: Disk Transfer Rate test. The diagram below contains the results shown for UDMA100 mode:

Well, the best results in the beginning of the drive belong to the HDDs with 40GB platters. Although Maxtor D740X yielded to Seagate Barracuda ATA IV here, it is considerably faster than the predecessor, Quantum Fireball Plus AS.

HDTach 2.61

Here we are going to take the first look at the results shown by Maxtor D740X-6L in UDMA133 mode:

Hm… The read speed from the buffer by Maxtor D740X-6L running with ATA/133 controller made 99MB/sec, which is over 10MB/sec higher than that of the fastest ATA/100 hard drives. But if we compare the ratio between the maximum read rate from the buffer and the maximum interface throughput by ATA/100 and ATA/133 HDDs, the result will be not in favor of ATA/133, for sure. Although, we shouldn't hurry with the conclusions, especially since we haven't yet seen any other ATA/133 controllers.

We should also take note that when testing with ATA/133 the CPU utilization increased immensely great: up to 51%. Is it the raw drivers, or the price of the extra 13MB/sec?

Now let's try to figure out if ATA/133 interface influenced the read rate from the platter:

Yes, we do notice that the read rate from the buffer has increased. However, we will be able to state that ATA/133 works, only if the read rate exceeds 100MB/sec :-)

As we see, the presence of new ATA/133 electronics doesn't tell in any way on the read rate when large data blocks are transferred.

The write rate also didn't fall under the influence of the new interface.

WinBench99 1.2 for Windows98

As usual, we will compare the performance of our testing participants in two integral benchmarks: Business Disk WinMark and High-End Disk WinMark. We didn't test in UDMA133 mode here this time.

We could point out right away that Maxtor D740X-6L made an excellent debut in the benchmarks emulating the work of Windows applications. The previous model, Quantum Fireball Plus AS also performed quite well in this benchmark, but yielded to IBM 60GXP in UDMA100 mode. The new Maxtor HDD yields to IBM 60GXP drive only in a relatively rare UDMA33.

Here we've got two leaders: Maxtor D740X-6L and IBM Deskstar 60GXP. We decided not to give the laurels to any of them, as their results are very close to one another.

Well, in Windows98 Maxtor D740X-6L proved just excellent. Now let's pass over to Adaptec Threadmark.

Adaptec Threadmark 2.0

This benchmark allows studying how fast the drives work with several data streams simultaneously. The results represent the total data processing speed in MB/sec.

Here Maxtor D740X-6L didn't prove that fast, though it managed to outperform Quantum Fireball Plus AS.

WinBench99 1.2 for Win2000 (FAT32)

Now we return to our tests of Maxtor D740X-6L in UDMA133 mode, so see the table below attentively:

DTR: Beginning

Graph

Graph

Graph

Graph

Have you noticed how greatly the performance of our hero differs in different protocols when working with FrontPage files? The impressively high performance with ATA/133 can be explained by the advantages of the ATA/133 protocol as well as by the different CPU clock frequencies of the testing platforms (as you remember, ATA/133 controller was tested on a different testbed). However, we wouldn't dare make any definite conclusions so far.

In this benchmark, Maxtor HDD is also doing quite fine, we should say.

The parity with the previous leader, Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, is evident. So are considerably higher results in UDMA/133 mode.

Here Maxtor D740X-6L failed to become the leader (finally, as we were getting quite nervous that IBM would never do that :-)). But it won a good second prize having left the nearest competitor far behind.

And now a quick look at the optimization for NTFS file system.

WinBench99 1.2 for Win2000 (NTFS)

Have you noticed that even though the file system changed, the performance of the drive when working with FrontPage files remained as high as in the previous case? What could that mean?

Here the HDDs got positioned in the following way. Maxtor D740X-6L again appeared the No 1, having turned out over 10% faster than all the rest, including IBM Deskstar 60GXP and Seagate Barracuda ATA IV! But the most exciting part is still ahead:

What a brilliant stability! Again Maxtor D740X-6L won the race, and its performance proved hardly dependent on the interface. It is a very rare thing that a HDD appears equally fast in both file systems considered. Maxtor D740X-6L hard disk drive proved equally successful in both: FAT32 and NTFS file systems.

Intel IOMeter

When the workload is not very high, Maxtor D740X-6L outperforms all the other drives due to faster seek time. However, as soon as the number of requests increases, IBM Deskstar 60GXP rushes forward thanks to its progressive ability to change the operations order. The more requests are waiting in a line to be executed, the more opportunities has the HDD firmware to build up the most optimal rout for the heads unit.

Almost the same picture can be observed in the WorkStation pattern.

The situation repeats in the DataBase pattern, which is actually the least suitable for Maxtor D740X.

These tests show that Maxtor D740X-6L firmware isn't that well optimized for random-loads.

Temperature

To measure the temperature of the working HDDs we resorted to DTemp utility (only Quantum Fireball Plus AS doesn't support temperature monitoring via SMART). The room temperature stayed around 22^oC, and the measurements were made after more than 2.5 hours of IOMeter tests running. Here is what we've got:

As we see, there is no big difference between the testing participants.

Conclusion

Maxtor made a really wise move having purchased Quantum. First of all, they eliminated one of their strong competitors, and secondly, Quantum brought in some beautiful engineering projects and developments, which proves true every time we come across their ideas and solutions in real life and in our testlab.

The hard disk drive we reviewed today, Maxtor D740X-6L, appeared an indisputable success in WinBench99 for Windows98 and Win2000 due to universal optimization for Windows applications.

The support of the new ATA/133 protocol is most likely to be just a marketing trick so far, aimed at attracting more attention to the product. At least the first testing of the ATA/133 product didn't show any significant improvements compared with the previous interfaces.

All in all, Maxtor D740X-6L HDD is a well-balanced solution, which can potentially become a worthy competitor to Seagate Barracuda ATA IV and IBM Deskstar 60GXP in terms of performance and noise level (here we are talking about a model with fluid dynamic bearings), and, of course, in terms of price.