|
The
Maxtor DiamondMax 4320 - 17.2G EIDE/UDMA Hard Drive
| |
| |
A
JUMBO Drive For The Hungriest Of Users
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Are
you feeling a little thin on space these days with the ol' workhorse
2 Gig drive you are running? Time to put that poor thing out to
pasture... Have we got some room for you! I'm talking "fit a
small tribe of Gypsies" size room here! 17.2 Gig ! Holy
Mackerel! Do you remember being excited about your new shiny Mode 3
drive, a whole 540 Meg? Guess what? Drive Technology just leap
frogged you and it doesn't show any signs of ending anytime soon.
The DiamondMax 4320 - 17.2G may not be the largest drive on the
planet but it is up there in the top 5% of all drives in the
marketplace. Here are the specs... |
|
| |
| |
| |
DiamondMax
4320 Model # 91728D8
17.2GB,
5400 RPM
Average
Seek 9.0 ms Read and Write
PIO
4 and UDMA/33 Data Transfer Modes
512KB
SDRAM Buffer
On
Board Digital Signal Processor
On
Board Flash EPROM For Firmware Updates
S.M.A.R.T.
Function Support
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Features
There are a
number of things that set this drive apart from the rest. First,
this is a 9.0 Millisecond Drive. Compared to the IBM drive we
reviewed here, this is only .5ms faster. That seems trivial but it
is not when you are transferring data at up to 33MB/sec. Every tenth
of a millisecond adds up. Next is the drive's DSP supported design.
Maxtor uses Texas Instrument DSPs in their drives which I feel
really help the drive process data. A lot of drive vendors use
custom ASICs (Application Specific I.C.s) and I am not familiar with
their effectiveness but the Maxtor/T.I. approach works well. Another
interesting feature is the drives on board ST Micro 1Mbit Flash
EPROM for holding the drives firmware. If there are ever
compatibility problems in the future ( we didn't find any during our
tests ), you'll most likely be able to fix it with a Flash Update.
Last but not the least, this drive uses fast SDRAM for its data
buffer.
| |
| |
|
|
| |
So
let's fire this Big Boy up, shall we? |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
Test
System
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium 2 -333 Overclocked to 515, Abit
BX6 Rev. 2 Motherboard, 128 MB of PC100 CAS2 RAM, IBM Deskstar 14GXP
10GB 7200 RPM EIDE UDMA Hard Drive, STB Velocity 4400 TNT AGP Video
Card, Metabyte Wicked 3D 12MB Voodoo 2 PCI Card, Monster Sound MX300
PCI Audio Card, Toshiba SDM1202 3rd. Gen. 4.8X DVD/32X CDROM
| |
| |
|
|
| |
Notice,
for this drive review, we ran our tests at 515 Mhz. This drive was
as stable as the IBM drive in all tests. This drive should serve you
well if you intend to overclock. OK, here's how she ran vrs. our IBM
Rocket... |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
Higher
scores represent better performance.
|
| |
BX6-2.0
Maxtor |
BX6-2.0
IBM |
| WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
3000 |
2840 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
3000 |
2840 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
4500 |
6430 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
45100 |
36900 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
7940 |
8950 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
8710 |
9310 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
6430 |
5380 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
8290 |
8440 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
14100 |
15200 |
| WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
11600 |
11500 |
| WinBench
99/High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
8710 |
9310 |
| System
Info/CPU Clock Speed Reported |
517 |
517 |
|
| |
|
|
| |
Surprisingly,
this was a very close race. The IBM disk is a little slower on the
Business side of things primarily because of its slightly slower
access speed of 9.5ms. However, the IBM disk beat out the Maxtor on
the High End Disk WinMark because of its faster spindle speed at
7,200 RPM which translates to higher data transfer rates.
Regardless, this Maxtor 17 Gig is no slouch and will probably give
other inferior 7200 RPM drives a run for their money! Let's
reconfirm our findings. On to Wintune... |
|
| |
|
|
| |
WinTune
98 Offline Test Results
| CPU |
(1)
Intel Pentium II with MMX@502 MHz |
| Video
Board |
NVidia
RIVA TNT |
| Video
Mode |
1024x768@16bits/pixel |
| RAM |
128
MB |
| OS |
Windows
98 4.10.1998 |
| | |
