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 Our
first look at a Serial ATA drive, quite frankly, was a
little less than inspiring. That is to say that, even
though the SATA 150 standard offers a higher bandwidth
interface and those tidy, thin little cables, the
performance of the first drive to hit our bench, a
Seagate Barracuda V, was about on par with the average
ATA100 or ATA133 drive on the market. However, as we
all know, in this game of technological leapfrog, it doesn't
always pay to be too early to adopt the latest and greatest
architecture, for your own personal use. Many times,
it pays to sit on the sidelines, as OEMs and Manufacturers
iron out the kinks in their designs and tweak them for
optimal performance and stability. What may not be
obvious to the average consumer, regarding
Serial
ATA, is that drive manufacturers have to tune their
drive circuitry to efficiently and robustly take advantage
of the higher bandwidth associated with Serial ATA, as well
as its radically different I/O structure. As we've
seen many times before, anytime a groundbreaking
architecture is introduced to the PC, you can be sure it's
going to take some time for the product to reach its full
potential.
A couple of
months have passed since we spent quality time with
Seagate's first SATA offering. Today, Maxtor steps up
to the plate with their Diamond Max Plus 9 entry into the
SATA market. Maxtor has had the luxury of the past
three months, to let their first SATA driven
Desktop/Workstation drive mature and evolve. The
DiamondMax lineage has always ranked well in performance and
reliability but perhaps not in the upper echelon with
Western Digital's top end 7200 RPM ATA100 product. On
the other hand, SATA technology brings in a new frontier.
Today, we've
pitted this new DiamonMax Plus 9 Serial ATA drive from
Maxtor, up against a Western Digital Caviar Special Edition
drive and a Seagate Barracuda V SATA drive as well.
First let's take a look at the Diamond Max Plus 9 and show
you what it's made of.
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Specifications of the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9
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Desktop or
Workstation Performance Now Available In SATA
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Capacity
60GB, 80GB, 120GB, 160GB and 200GB
Models:
ATA/133 2MB buffer
ATA/133 8MB buffer
SATA/150 8MB buffer
Performance Specifications
Rotational Speed 7200 RPM
Buffer Size 2MB and 8MB cache
External Transfer Rate (MB/sec)
ATA/133 133 - SATA 150
Average Seek (ms) 9.4
Average Latency (ms) 4.2
Drive
Configuration
Bytes per Sector/Block 512
Logical CHS 16,383/16/63
Reliability
Specifications
Start/Stop Cycles (min) >50,000
Component Design Line (min) 5 years
Data Errors (non-recoverable) <1 per 10E 15 bits read
Annualized Return Rate (ARR) <1%
Power
Requirements
Mode 5V 12V
Seek (mA) 858 662
Idle (mA) 668 334
Standby (mA) 90 37
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Physical
Dimensions
Height (max mm) 26.1
Width (typical mm) 101.6
Length (max mm) 147
Weight (LB/g) 1.27/630
Acoustics
FDB Motor
Idle (sound power: bel) 2.7
Seek (sound power: bel) 3.5
Temperature
Operating (°C) 5 to 55
Non-operating (°C) -40 to 71
Shock
Operating Mechanical Shock 2ms (G) 60
Non-operating Mechanical Shock 2ms (G) 300
Generation 1 Serial ATA Technology - 150MB/Sec
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Once again,
looking at the specs of this new Maxtor SATA drive, reveals
nothing too surprising or impressive, in all honesty.
On the other hand, this drive does boast some of the latest
compliments and enhancements to ATA drive technology,
including an 8MB Buffer Cache and of course its 7200 RPM
spindle speed. What is perhaps more impressive than at
first glance, is Maxtor's "FDB" Motor technology that this
drive is built on. "Fluid Dynamic Bearing" is what the
acronym stands for and it's safe to say that it delivers
some of the quietest 7200 RPM operation we've heard in a
drive to date. There is very little, if any spindle
whine, as we've heard for so long from many an IBM or WD
drive and the read/write head chatter is also much improved
over the Seagate Barracuda V SATA drive, we reviewed back in
January.
CLICK ANY
IMAGE FOR AN ENLARGED VIEW
The
DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA drive is constructed well and fairly
stout for a mainstream desktop unit. There are no
breather holes on the casing of these drives, so you need
not be concerned with accidentally covering one up during
installation. The drive does get fairly warm during
operation but no more so than the average 7200 RPM unit.
The circuit board is exposed on the underside and you'll
note this
Marvell chip provides a bridging functionality for the
SATA interface. It seems as though this drive isn't a
"native" Serial ATA drive per se but rather a parallel ATA
drive, that has been converted to interface to SATA.
We've got mixed emotions about this. On one hand, the
serial to parallel conversion, with Marvell's Phy chip, is a
well known high speed, high quality implementation.
Marvell easily has some of the best SERDES (Serializer/Deserializer)
technology in the business. This setup also allows
Maxtor to configure base units and then set them up for
either standard ATA or Serial ATA, depending on demand.
On the other
hand, what are we missing by not utilizing a true serial
implementation from the main controller ASIC, on back to the
actual link level? Frankly, we're not sure if there is
a tangible benefit with a "native" SATA implementation or
even if one exists at this point in time. In addition,
as you'll see in the following pages, this performance of
this drive shows no limitation, that one could attribute to
the parallel to serial conversion, that is done on board.
Setup
And Preliminary Testing
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