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We won't get
into to the actual physical installation of this drive.
If you are familiar at all, with a basic 5 1/4" drive
installation, you'll have zero issues. However,
obviously Serial ATA Cables are significantly less bulky, as
compared to their Parallel ATA counterparts. If you're
a cabling neat freak (and we have a few of those types on
the HH Team for sure...
BigWop), once
you go SATA, you'll never go back. In addition, there
are no Master/Slave jumpers on a SATA drive to concern
yourself with, since it is a point to point connection and
only one drive is connected on a given channel.
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Setup and Installation Of the DiamondMax Plus 9
SATA |
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Someone had their
thinking cap on |
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Any Sales or
Marketing type worth their salt, would understand the basic
motto, "delight the customer". Let's just say the
Engineers and Marketing Managers at Maxtor had their
collective thinking-caps on, when they decided to
incorporate a standard 4 pin Molex type power connector on
the backside of this new drive. We were perfectly
delighted to see this one simple addition. It's the
little things that make a difference.
Cable
Connections and Installation
In the left
hand shot above, you'll note the two traditional types of
standard Serial ATA cabling, that are used to connect a SATA
drive to a system. The 4 pin power converter cable and
the thin gray or red colored data cable. However, with
the DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA drive, you don't need the SATA
power cable converter, since you can simply plug a standard
4 pin Molex type connector into the back of the drive.
This simplifies cabling a little more and since most
Motherboard OEMs don't pack the SATA Power Cables into a
bundle, opting to only include the Data cable, you would
have to purchase one separately. Not so with the
DiamondMax Plus 9. This does again hint that perhaps
this is a PATA drive, in SATA clothing but who really cares?
Regardless, nice work Maxtor... Thanks for thinking of
the consumer and the huge install base of SATA power cable
FREE systems out there.
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HotHardware Test Systems |
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3 Drives, 2
Motherboards, 2 SATA Controllers and 1 P4 |
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Asus P4G8X
(Silicon Image Sil3112A Controller)
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
512MB
Kingston HyperX
DDR RAM PC3500
2 - Maxtor DiamondMax
Plus 9
80Gig Serial ATA HD w/8MB Cache
2 - Seagate Barracuda V
120Gig Serial ATA HD w/8MB Cache
1 - IBM ATA100
(OS Drive only)
7200RPM 60G HD
1 - WD ATA100 Special
Edition
ATA100 7200RPM 120GB HD
ATi RADEON 9700 Pro
Plextor 40X CDRW
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9
ATi Catalyst Drivers 3.2
Intel Chipset Drivers
Intel Applications Accelerator
For ATA100 testing
Silicon Image SATA Drivers
Version -
1.1.0.0.11 and 1.0.0.27
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Test Setup and Methodology
In the
following series of tests, we used identical peripheral
components, an Asus P4G8X Granite Bay based motherboard,
with a Silicon Image SATA RAID controller. Our
system was configured to run at a stock speed of 2.8GHz
on the processor, with aggressive memory timings and 2
256MB sticks of Kingston
HyperX DDR DRAM memory.
We then
installed WinXP with the respective SATA controller
drivers, on a clean formatted 60 Gig ATA 100 drive.
In the case of the SATA testing, we attached either one
or two of the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA drives or
two of the Seagate Barracuda drives on the SATA ports,
in either single SATA150 or RAID 0 mode. With the
ATA100 testing, we simply attached another Western
Digital Special Edition, 120 Gig drive on the secondary
Intel ICH4 IDE channel.
All Test
Drives in these benchmarks were partitioned with NTFS at
their fullest capacity, formatted and left completely
blank. Testing and benchmarking software was run
off the primary boot drive and directed to test either
the blank SATA drives or the blank ATA100 drive.
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Sandra
Hard Drive Benchmarks |
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Reads, Writes and
Access Times |
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Sandra's Hard
Drive test is a decent measure of "burstable" performance,
with reads and writes on a given drive. It's certainly
not a "real world" benchmark in this regard but it does give
you a feel for file and application load time performance.
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DiamondMax Plus 9
SATA150
 |
DiamondMax Plus 9
SATA 150 RAID 0
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|
Barracuda V
SATA 150
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Barracuda V
SATA 150 RAID 0
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This is more
of a quick sanity check type of test for us here in the
HotHardware Lab. Although it is hard to directly
correlate the metrics above to real-world performance, you
definitely can get a feel for how a given drive will measure
up under heavy load and in actual application performance.
Simply put, whether we're looking at the single SATA 150
configuration or an impressive SATA RAID 0 array, this new
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA drive pushed out the best
score in this test, we have seen to date, for a Desktop ATA
drive. The 60K number in the DiamondMax Plus 9 RAID 0
setup, specifically puts the reference ATA100, 8MB Cache,
RAID 0 Array configuration, to shame in this test.
Furthermore, this Maxtor drive also handily puts down the
Seagate Barracuda V, in either single or RAID 0
configuration. Is this an indication of things to
come? Read on my friend.
Hard
Drive Tach and Winbench Disk Winmarks |