When testing the read and write speeds, HDTach analyzes not the entire available storage space, but limits itself to 1/65 of it. The remaining surface stays uninvolved, that is why the Write Verify is ready to go any minute. When it comes to WinBench, it uses other parts of the disk surface, but again not all of it. After that Intel IOMeter has to deal with terra-nova, too. Since we do not repeat Intel IOMeter tests several times, because it takes too long, we get the lowered result. So, all benchmarks results suffer from Maxtor’s care in a way.

We don’t quite understand why Maxtor didn’t mention publicly the Write Verify option in the new HDDs, and didn’t modify its utility to support them. Especially, since the HDDs get into reviewers’ hands usually right off the production line, so the Write Verify option shows us its best and worsens the results a lot. Since there are not too many reviewers who can afford to run the entire test session a few times, Maxtor’s results are far not the best and the products usually get not very positive verdicts.

One thing is quite consoling though: now we know exactly where the next underwater rock is, and how we could avoid it. From now on all Maxtor HDDs, which arrive into our lab, are going through “run-in” procedure first. And we are already seeing the positive effect of that. Finally the results of tests run with different controller cards stopped contradicting one another. Unfortunately, we can’t immediately retest all the Maxtor drives, which have already been reviewed on X-bit labs, but the new 6Y080L0 was definitely retested anew after a “warm-up lap”. This is actually why the review appeared a little late.

Testbed and Methods

The testbed configuration looks as follows:

• ASUS P3B-F mainboard;
• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• 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:

• HDTach 2.61;
• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 1999.10.20;
• FC-Test v0.3.

Before the tests the AAM register of all HDDs was set to OFF position (FAST mode) with the help of Hitachi Feature Tool Utility. For WinBench tests all the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical drive with the default cluster (to format the drives in FAT32 we used Paragon Partition Manager utility). The tests were run seven 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.