Neowin Review: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB Hard Drive
Posted by Toxicfume on 28 March 2005 - 15:49 · 33 comments & 6096 views
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(2 replies)
#1 Posted by bush on 28 Mar 2005 - 15:54
- nice to see so much neowin reviews lately
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#2 Posted by FuricTrax on 28 Mar 2005 - 16:00
- I can vouch for the 160GB version of this. It is very quite and fast when compared to my DM+9 160GB!
As far as reliability is concerned I had a Maxtor go awol on me in a RAID 0 array some time ago, but I move my computer large distances quite a lot since I'm at Uni so I wasn't too surprised!
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#3 Posted by StuRReaL on 28 Mar 2005 - 16:12
- and then sit back as your crapstor hdd's die, because there cheap crap. I also disagree with the raptor statement, they aren't all that noisy and there perfectly suited to desktop machines in fact any machine. Also seagate drives rate very highly
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#4 Posted by CrisCr0ss on 28 Mar 2005 - 16:22
- I am using the Maxtor 80gig and a Seagate 40gig with no noise only noise comes from fans.
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#5 Posted by Ivand on 28 Mar 2005 - 16:26
- nice nice, I like neowin getting more editorial
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#6 Posted by ripgut on 28 Mar 2005 - 16:36
- This drive would be killer as a storage drive and windows loaded on a 74GB raptor, now THAT would make for an awsome rig.
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#7 Posted by crackhbob on 28 Mar 2005 - 16:43
- Maxtor has a good reputation? Sorry, but I respectfully disagree. No one I know likes them.
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#8 Posted by kl33per on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:00
- I have a 10k RPM drive and it's not noticeably more noisy then my 7200rpm drives. Once you and in multiple drives, fans, and background noise the difference is negligable. Obviously 10k drives are louder, but to call them 'noisy' as compared to 7200rpm drives is a bit of a stretch. Also, they reviewed different size drives for the 10 vs. 9 section, a big no-no.
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(2 replies)
#9 Posted by okidoki on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:19
- What kind of craptastic "review" (read: propaganda paid for by Maxtor) is this?
1) You talk about Maxtor as if they're a good company with great products..
.. which is why I've in the last 18 months sent back approximately 100 bad maxtor drives (typically failing within 3 months)
2) You mention WD's raptor drives (10krpm) like they're bad? The 10k rpm allows for *much* better seek-time , which is something that people in the heavy-server business like. Or perhaps you think we should all go back to 5400 rpm drives? Better yet, why not 4200 rpm? I "hear" they're really quiet.
3) You also fail to mention that while the SATA specs provide 150Mb/s and upwards in transfer speeds, this harddrive will *NEVER* see anything close to that - so whining about ATA100/133 "not being enough" is about as stupid as it gets.
4) The raid capabilities of your motherboard has nothing to do with this harddrive. We also don't need to know that the BIOS "recognizes" the drive.
5) You mention the heat, and say that you could use active cooling to help against the heat.. but what happens to your supposedly low noise-level when you've got a big whooping fan infront of the HD? That's right ma, more noise than the "noisy 10k rpm raptor drives!"
I wonder.. how much did it cost Maxtor to get this Editor's Choice award?
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#9.1 Posted by Knight' on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:23
- hehe... nobody visits Neowin for news mate I come here for the forums sometimes, there is, occassionally, something interesting on them.
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#9.2 Posted by thequestor on 29 Mar 2005 - 16:14
- I personally think your full of it. 100 RMA, BAH. I EXCLUSIVLY use Maxtor harddrives and have for years. WD are loud and have a mich higher failure rate. I TOO have been in the business for many years, and lets give these people a little more insite.
Failure Rate:
Seagate =high DOA Bad in Raids
Western Digital = Low Doa, High failure. Decent in raids
Maxtor = 0 DOA and only 2 RMA's after 150+ Drives.
IBM = "old" EXRTREMELY high failure rate [clickof death] New Low doa, not out long enough to detirmine failure rate.
I Personally own 18 Maxtors, 3 Western Digital, and 3 Seagates. I have had to RMA one Western Digital and 2 Seagates over the last 6 months on my personal drives.
When Maxtor first came out, they where AWESOME drives. then a few years later when to hell, with at least a 50% failure rate. I one time ordered a box of 25 and out of them almost 1/2 were DOA nearly the rest failed within the first month. I had 10 drives have the molex connector fall off the drives completely. But about 4 or 5 years ago they starting putting out good drives again, and after my completely horrid luck with Seagate, I went back to WD. Sold them exclusivly for years. Now I am back to being a maxtor house, and will continue to do this until they give me reason to look elsewhere.
It is pretty bad when Zeolots focus on a product and will always yell the loudest about whats GREAT about thier chosen product. Be it Apples, Linux, AMD, and now WD.
We just need to learn to weed out the BS from facts.
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(5 replies)
#10 Posted by Miran on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:44
- It is a rule of thumb that EVERYONE will think that their own experience with 2 or 3 hard drives from a certain company, over 15 years determines the reliability of that hard drive manufacturer today. No matter how computer-literate people are they will always stick to one of the following:
1) Maxtor and Seagate drives are horrible, Western Digital is the only good drive.
2) Seagate and Western Digital drives are horrible, Maxtor is the only good drive.
3) Western Digital and Maxtor drives are horrible, Seagate is the only good drive.
Personally, I have no experience with Seagate, but I have a lot of experience with both Maxtor and WD and I have found they are the exact same when it comes to reliability and lifespan - it really depends on the individual drive. Some are good, some are bad. I have had WD's go bad and Maxtor's go bad, and I have WD's that are still running after 6 years, and Maxtor's that are still running after 6 years.
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#10.1 Posted by Treefrog on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:49
- That is, unless said person was a tech monkey for a few years and had experience with a *whole* lot more than 2 or 3 hard drives from any company.
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#10.2 Posted by Toxicfume on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:52
- That's exactly the point no one seems to get here. It depends heavily on the kind of usage the drive goes through and the environment the drive is in. Personally, Seagates have given me some of the worst experiences of any hard drives, whereas they've been awesome for Tom, as he mentions in his previous reviews.
I've been using Maxtors for a long while, and I find no problems with them. It's just like how Steam works well on some people's computers and doesn't work well for others. What's so hard to comprehend here? And aside, where I live atleast, Maxtor has the great warranty options. -
#10.3 Posted by Miran on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:55
- I would have to know the capability and test conditions before using any advice a tech-monkey provides. Techies in shops like to brag that they know because they have seen hundreds of hard drives.. But people forget hard drives are also manufactured in different places - and a lot of the reliability stems from where it is manufactured. If a company only ever gets drives from a certain manufacturer, then no - they still can't provide an accuracte gauge of the overall reliability of the company.
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#10.4 Posted by okidoki on 28 Mar 2005 - 20:18
- How about actually calling to make sure we get drives with different manufacturing plant and manufacturing date?
100 drives and counting? That's more than one per week for one and a half year.
Of course, we make sure we don't get refurb ones.
Usage?
Internet Café, each rig typically sees about 8 - 12 hours of use per day (hint, the box I use at work sees *WAY* more random file access etc, and that's being used whenever there's someone at work.. it's a WD, because i've been working with WD drives in huge server clusters for ~5 years, and I know them to be reliable.
I simply won't touch a Maxtor drive with a ten-foot pole, unless I'm using said pole as a sledgehammer. -
#10.5 Posted by Martin Blank on 28 Mar 2005 - 20:23
QUOTE That is, unless said person was a tech monkey for a few years and had experience with a *whole* lot more than 2 or 3 hard drives from any company.
Alright, I'll bite. I've been in the industry for about ten years now. I've worked at medium-sized companies you've probably heard of, as well as a Fortune 500 company, two Fortune 100 companies, a major financial institution, and two web service providers. In that time (and including my personal experiences), I've seen virtually every brand of drive go sour -- Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Quantum, and others. In the long run, for the most part, all of the manufacturers have about the same failure rates (excepting things like the 75GXP DeskStar fiasco), and drive failure is simply a fact of life for people that deal with them in large numbers.
I'm going to take a guess at the number of drives in the datacenter a few dozen feet from me right now and figure that there are probably about 4000 drives overall in there. We replace on average about one a month or so. Sometimes we replace more (we had one month in which 11 drives failed), and sometimes less (we've gone about three months without a replacement before).
I've still not seen any details about the 75GXP Deskstar failure rate reasons, but I understand that whatever was wrong was later fixed, even if quietly and without any official word from IBM/Hitachi. I use mostly Maxtors in my own systems because they're quiet and I value that. I just installed a WD drive in my parents' system last night. I have a couple of Seagate drives in the desktop next to me right now. I have about the same amount of faith in all of them, but much of that reasoning is because I think with my head, not my heart. I've seen too many die-hard fans eager to prove themselves and looking dumb because of it to want to even risk being in that group.
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#11 Posted by Treefrog on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:46
- Give me Seagate over Maxtor any day of the week.
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(1 reply)
#12 Posted by Jugalator on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:47
QUOTE Western Digital has a line of hard drives running at a noisy 10K RPM
Yes, but quietness is sacrificed for speed. I'm sure it'll be more useful for speed on e.g. a file server than this Maxtor drive if its capacity is enough. Or as the main drive, with the Maxtor working as secondary storage if more space is needed.
The "noisy" WD drives isn't a black & white issue; they have their advantages.
The point with a very noisy, very fast drive is probably not that it's supposed to be in your bedroom.
I'm no WD drive fanboy, actually I currently use a great DiamondMax 9 drive I recommend; just pointing out that noise in drives may not always be an issue, and sometimes raw performance is more important.-
#12.1 Posted by Toxicfume on 28 Mar 2005 - 18:09
- Ofcourse, and I fully agree with you. I wouldn't forgive a system admin of a small network of computers running databases to go for quietness over performance.
And you can clearly see in my conclusion that these Maxtor drives definitely cannot compete in performance with the WD raptors. The raptors win hands down. But then you don't get those 10K RPM drives with such huge capacities, there's always a trade off - that's a no brainer. But you also need to realize for a lot of people, aesthetics are as important as performance is to you, some people don't want noise, some people don't care. It's up to you - The WD Raptors are smaller and faster but louder, the Maxtors are larger and quieter, but not as fast, and I make no attempt to try to hide that fact.
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(4 replies)
#13 Posted by moeburn on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:48
- Seagate and WD are both quite reliable, but every Maxtor drive i've owned has died on me.
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#13.1 Posted by Jugalator on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:49
- I know a guy whose last drive dying was a Seagate.
In the end, one brand is rarely more "reliable" than another, but it's more about luck.
This is my second Maxtor drive, and none has died.
The old one on year 5+, this one on year 3, I think. But it's pretty useless info anyway.
A statistican would complain about a tiiiny bit low sample size. -
#13.2 Posted by Treefrog on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:52
QUOTE In the end, one brand is rarely more "reliable" than another, but it's more about luck.
Unless you're unlucky enough to be using an IBM Deathstar... then again, if you're still using it (meaning IT is still usable) then I guess you're one of the lucky few that escaped that tragedy.-
#13.3 Posted by Miran on 28 Mar 2005 - 17:58
- Still using my deathstar after 5 years
Of course I don't use it for anything vital.
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#14 Posted by marcovw on 28 Mar 2005 - 18:23
- I'm using this disk for over 2 months now, and I'm realy happy with it!!!
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#15 Posted by robpears on 28 Mar 2005 - 19:14
- looks good
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#16 Posted by imcrazydammit on 29 Mar 2005 - 00:28
- I like Maxtor. I've had a DiamondMax 9 for a long time and it has worked beautifully. I had a WD crap out after two years and, even though I had everything backed up, it was a pain. I also have an old IBM Deskstar from 2000 that sounds like a Harrier Jet but it works beautifully. Individual opinions will vary I suppose.
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#17 Posted by bobbenedetti on 29 Mar 2005 - 02:06
- Your burst speed is half what it should be. On my computer I get around 130MBs on my DiamondMax10 and around 110 on my Diamond Max9
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#18 Posted by MitchShrader on 29 Mar 2005 - 08:15
- Some good comments and *dumb* ones, for sure. First, I'm a maxtor user and own 7 of their 250 gig drives, 4 in external aluminium non-cooled enclosures. Second, I run maxtors 24/7 on one or more computers, for the last 4 years. Third, ANY DRIVE WILL BREAK. Maxtors among them. When it breaks, and how you're treated by the manufacturer after it breaks, are variables. ALL DRIVES BREAK. Fact of life.
I didn't pick maxtors cause they were cutting edge fastest, or in any way the only option, or because (insert other brand name here) sucks. I picked them because i happen to be close to their rma warehouse and can get excellent (cross shipped) RMA service. Their customer service has KEPT my business, and the quality and value has justified my choice. It's easier for me to deal with one company. Other people who've had different experiences may say the same about (insert other brand name here). I don't argue with them.
I do have a complaint about the review, and i LIKE maxtors just fine. It didn't do enough point by point comparison. A versus B versus C .. these details are available, can be found on the web, and there are points AGAINST maxtor that aren't mentioned. First point, the 250 gig drive has a higher access time than many competitive drives. Second point, the drives are NOT rated for 24/7 use, even though many use them happily in that way (including me).
Third point, HOW you use it matters hugely. Do you need it in a RAID config? Do you do video edits, run a web server, live in a hot climate, expect 24/7 performance for years at a time, put it in external enclosures that get quite warm, have 100 drives within hearing distance, or a single one on an email machine? ..
Details MATTER when it comes to choosing a drive. Any drive will do better at some things than others, performance isn't a level playing field. I chose primarily on warranty service, others will go for cutting edge performance or absolute quietest or coolest. Addressing these points in a review (A versus B versus C) directly could help people make informed choices. I give maxtor drives an 8 out of 10, but i give the drive review about 6 out of 10. Not enough detail and direct (exact!) comparison.
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#19 Posted by jiggling_john on 29 Mar 2005 - 11:32
- There's a lot of missing the point here. Whilst it is agreed that all drives will fail, it's the frequency and time in which they do it that sways peoples opinion. Maxtor recently have been producing some of the worst drives money can buy. 3 years ago i paid £100 for a 20 gig maxtor which has been used pretty much every day since and is still running quietly and without problem to this day.
Move closer to the future and suddenly, they're utter rubbish. Personally, I had a plus 9 80, 120 2x250 gig all fail within 1 week of purchase. Now, are you telling me every single manufacturers drives do that? I think not. Maxtors bad reputation AT THE MOMENT is no mistake, they deserve it. I'm not the only on ehaving these problems - you just dont hear about people having these kinds of problems with any other makes really. That is the problem here....
After plugging everything in, the drive was visible to my onboard Promise RAID/SATA Interface controller’s BIOS. In here, you can setup the “bootability” of drives and decide whether you want your hard drives to work in a RAID environment or simply to work alone; I decided to skip the RAID options and work alone. Maxtor offer a setup of tools to help you format the drive; MaxBlast, a piece of hard drive management software for Windows by Maxtor, for Maxtor drives.
The first thing you may notice, or not, is the noise level of the hard drive while in operation – it is, to say the least, very quiet. I found noise only noticeable whilst doing sustained file transfers between itself and my DiamondMax 9. I felt the drive was probably about twice as quiet as the DiamondMax 9; serious credit to Maxtor’s “Quiet Drive” technology, the Fluid Dynamic Bearings, and the fact that the spindle runs at 7,200 RPM (Western Digital has a line of hard drives running at a noisy 10K RPM).
Will this massive drive keep up to par with the other drives available? Namely the 10K RPM Western Digital Raptor drives? On to the review...
This second generation of Cinema Displays comes in three sizes (20-Inch, 23-Inch, and the 30-Inch model), and have extra features like dual Firewire & dual USB 2.0 ports. As you might expect, like everything else made by Apple, Cinema Displays aren’t the cheapest thing on the market ($1,299 and up). With Apple’s reputation as a quality vendor, one might reasonably expect a decent deal. Especially when you spend over $1,000 dollars, you’d expect to get an honest and fair warranty. However, with this new generation of Cinema Displays, Apple only offers a 1-year manufacturer warranty. Has Apple screwed over it’s so called valuable customers with a warranty best fitting a Gateway product?! We think so. If one was so inclined, one can purchase an extended warranty for around $199, giving you a 3-year extended warranty. But there’s a catch. In order to get the extended warranty, you must purchase either a PowerMac or PowerBook along side of your $1,299+ LCD; unless you're planning on doing just this, you'll be up a creek without the proverbial paddle.
So come on guys, we hear you cry. Be reasonable. How is this a major issue? Well, consumers shouldn’t have to spend an extra $1,200 just to get an extended warranty on a product that so far hasn't had the smoothest sailing. It becomes even more of a problem considering the other, more visible, problems.
Our second concern is the growing number of faulty Cinema Displays. Website’s across the internet have been reporting on Cinema Displays that show either a strong pink or fairly visible yellow hue. Clearly, this isn't the first time that the "pink hue" symptoms have occurred - they first occurred in Apple's PowerBook G3 link (click here). This problem had previously been noticed by graphic professionals, but the more serious pink/yellow hues can be seen by your average computer user. Apple has yet to make an official statement regarding this problem, but has replaced all Cinema Displays that are experiencing this problem. More worryingly, the company has been reported as deleting support threads on their site (click here, DreamLight.com is currently down please click here to view a cached version of the site). This, however, obviously isn't a long term fix. According to DreamLight, the pink/yellow hue comes back after only a few weeks of normal usage. DreamLight suggest from user reports that these problems could be due to unnecessary stress on the LCD.
Of course, this may not be Apple’s fault, but the LCD manufacturer LG. LG produces a wide variety of products ranging from LCD TV's, Cameras, DVD Players - even Refrigerator's. Still, in the PC world, LG products are often suggested to be anything but high quality with less than average performance. Back in 1999, Apple invested $100 million dollars into Samsung to help Samsung produce a large quantity of LCDs for Apples iBooks, PowerBooks, and Cinema Displays. As such, it’s anyone’s guess why Apple switched from Samsung to LG. Even though Apple doesn’t manufacture the LCDs, Apple has a responsibility to its customers. That responsibility is to offer a fair and honest warranty. Switching back doesn’t sound like too bad idea.