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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 (hereinafter called DM+8) was announced back in September 2002. A month later, it hit the stores and drew our attention. Yeah, it was the first hard disk drive with a 80GB platter, the first “thin” drive with 7,200rpm spindle rotation speed and so on. Unfortunately we had no luck with the samples we got for our tests. Two DM+8 HDDs showed unstable graphs, which indicated poor quality of these two given drives. Meanwhile, there appeared a number of new products from other manufacturers and we put DM+8 off to return to it later. And we do it now. Moreover, Maxtor has recently posted detailed specifications of this series on its website, and they tell that models of different capacities have different platters! We can’t allow this fact to pass unnoticed and benchmark three HDD models from the DM+8 series in a bunch.
First Time on the Arena!
Ladies and gentlemen! Let us introduce to you three DM+8 brothers that carry on the glorious traditions of Maxtor in low-profile HDDs development. Now they are 7,200rpm fast! Let’s welcome the junior 6E020L0, the middle 6E030L0 and the major 6E040L0, which has already drawn close attention of PC users.
Maxtor DM+8 was the second HDD series after Seagate Barracuda ATA IV to be wholly equipped with fluid dynamic bearings. It means you won’t hear the spindle buzzing: Quiet Drive Technology guarantees the low noise level. Besides, DM+8 features Shock Protection System and Data Protection System that make DM+8 one of the most “shock resistant” solutions in the world.
The 2MB buffer and ATA/133 interface complete the description of the distinguishing traits of the DM+8 family. We may also add that this is the first-ever low-profile 7,200rpm drive. So, if it shows good performance, it is sure to be welcome in 1U servers.
Testbed and Methods
The testbed configuration looks as follows:
- ASUS P3B-F mainboard;
- Intel Pentium III (
- 2 x 128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM by Hyundai;
- IBM DPTA 372050 HDD;
- Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
- Promise Ultra100 TX2 and Promise Ultra133 TX2 controllers;
- Windows 2000 Professional SP2.
The following software was used:
Before the tests the AAM register of all HDDs was set to OFF position (FAST mode) with the help of IBM Feature Tool Utility. For WinBench tests all the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical drive with the default cluster. The tests were run four times each, the maximum result was taken for the diagrams. The drives didn't cool down between the tests. The tests in Intel IOMeter were run in SequentialRead, SequentialWrite, DataBase, WorkStation, FileServer and WebServer patterns. If you are looking for the detailed description of these patterns, please, see our previous articles.
Specifications
The product manual appeared in December, three months after the sales had started, and it gave us some food for thought. Look at the specs we took from there:
Judging by the specs, each of the three models is based on platters of different capacity! As far as we know, no manufacturer has ever produced anything like that. Sometimes they “shortened” the platter, by turning off the access to the short inner tracks. We can also remember the MPG series from Fujitsu. It was based on 20GB platters, but one model used two 15GB platters.
O.K. If the major 6E040L0 has a 80GB platter (let us remind you that only one platter side is used in these drives – so only half of the total platter capacity is used), we may suppose 6E030L0 to have a 60GB platter and 6E020L0 – a 40GB platter. We looked up the specs of the previous HDD series from Maxtor, D540X-4D, and saw that its speed characteristics were higher than the parameters of 6E020L0! There’s something wrong about it. We will see very soon what platters are there in reality, and now let’s discuss the rest of the specified characteristics.
The number of servo-sectors per track is only 180, while the closest relative of DM+8, Fireball 3, has 232. This may be the cause of very high maximum physical speed of DM+8 (by physical speed we mean the data exchange rate with the platters, measured in megabits per second). This physical speed is the highest we have ever seen in ATA hard disk drives. The average access time of DM+8 is also good enough, but the wide range of allowable noise level looks alerting.
Usually, DM+8 can emit about 27dB of noise in the idle mode and 28dB during seek. These numbers are just a little poorer than the parameters of the current record-holder in noiselessness, Seagate Barracuda ATA IV. But the above listed specs allow the noise to grow up to 31dB! Our experience suggests that any noise over 28dB is quite perceptible in a closed chassis. Previous “thin” drives from Maxtor would sometimes buzz a lot. I wonder if the same story is happening once again..?
