Well, this finally happened! The announcement made last September has finally come true (see this press-release). What am I talking about? I am talking about that notorious Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 hard disk drive, which was supposed to have 80GB platters, but turned out to have anything you like except them.

The first 6Y060L0 models to become available in stores were based on 60GB platters. In fact, this is quite logical: what other platter could a 60GB model actually have? So, we asked ourselves this question and started searching for larger HDDs. We found 6Y120L0, but this solution also was built with 60GB platters. We thought: OK, we are dedicated optimists and we will continue our search for 6Y080L0, which should definitely have “proper” platters. No way! This hard disk drive used two 60GB platters, namely three surfaces, where 10GB were simply “blocked”.

This was a blow for our optimism, really. But we didn’t give in. As you know, the DiamondMax Plus 9 HDD family includes 160GB and 200GB models, but doesn’t have any 180GB (60GB x 3) models. Besides, the 200GB model is evidently made differently. Maybe Maxtor decided to save the large-capacity platters for more expensive High-End models? This seemed a reasonable idea, but to check it out we needed a large capacity HDD. So, as soon as we saw 6Y160P0 HDD, we got a couple of pieces for our experiments. After a series of tortures, which we are doing really professionally already, they confessed that there were no 80GB platters in them (see our Roundup: IDE Hard Disk Drives with 8MB Cache-Buffer).

Unbelievable! And what about the announcement stating more than clearly that Maxtor broke all industry records by shipping the world’s highest density HDDs. Have we been cheated on? Is it true that Maxtor was playing an unfair game, while its direct competitors, such as Samsung, Seagate, WD and IBM were manufacturing HDDs on 60GB platters?

Nope. The thing that we have been so desperately looking for for a long time, and which we doubted were a reality at all, has finally started selling in retail. The first HDD revisions were noticed in mid February 2003, about 5 months after the actual announcement. And all those 5 months they were actually selling semi-ready products based on the platter of the same storage capacity as their competitors had. And then Seagate, Maxtor’s No. 1 competitor, released its barracuda 7200.7 with 80GB platters, so in reality Maxtor was not ahead of its rivals. However, Maxtor still was the first one to announce 80GB platters, and while we were trying to figure out what’s going on they started selling the drives based on these platters. Anyway, this time, Maxtor managed to win due to a very smart strategy...

So, what actually happened? What did they do it? Of course, there is no official info answering this question, but I dare share my suppositions in this respect. There is no doubt that Maxtor managed to reach the data density required for 80GB platters. For example, the successfully shipping 6E040L0 model from the DiamondMax Plus 8 family is based exactly on this kind of platter. Nevertheless, the earlier DiamondMax Plus 9 models were based on 60GB and 67GB platters. Maybe, they faced some problems with the mass production of record-breaking 80GB platters or read/write heads for them and trued to find a way out until the problems were eliminated. Now the new HDDs will oust the older models from the market. So, I wonder how greatly the new DiamondMax Plus 9 differs from the older one.