Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA Hard Drive

**Doctor Feelgood**

The performance of the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB drive was impressive in both the benchmarks and real world testing. It managed to put up the best numbers of all the drives on hand in pretty much every test conducted... Comparing apples to apples, the SATA-150 performance of the Maxtor drive was the best. - The Review

Guspaz · Rated PG Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 2

I feel that one part of this review is critically flawed, and that is that you tested the reference drive with SATA-150 instead of SATA-300. This is an apples to oranges comparison.

That is akin to benchmarking a gaming rig with 1GB of RAM against a budget machine with 512MB of RAM, and removing half the memory in the gaming rig to make it "fair".

A user installing either of the two drives into a machine with SATA-300 support would use what the drive supports. If the user bought the SATA-300 drive they would run it in SATA-300 mode, if they bought the Maxtor drive, they'd run it in SATA-150 mode. As such, the drives use as a reference benchmark in the article is meaningless.

Allow me to make another analogy; this is like reviewing the improvements from the GeForce 4 to the Radeon 9700, but running the Radeon in AGP 4x mode. Would the change make a large (or possibly any) difference? No. Is it fair? No!

I urge you to re-benchmark the reference drive in SATA-300 mode to provide an unbiased reference.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:34:54 Post Subject:

Hi Guspaz - welcome;

The same Guspaz from many of the hosting forums (like WHT and SM)?

Anyway, I can see your point, although I do not agree...

The reference Hitachi drive was tested in various SATA-300 modes when it was reviewed on its own here: http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/hitachi7k500/index.php?file=1

This review is for the Maxtor drive, which is only SATA-150 capable, as are the two Seagate drives used as other points of reference.

Sure, the review is not using the Hitachi drive to the best of its abilities, but that wasn't the point and was made clear in the review... Full testing on that drive occured in its own review. The methodology of this review was to take controller X and to run tests 1, 2, 3, and 4 on drives a, b, c, and d... which I did. This review used a SATA-150 controller to run some benches on the SATA-150 Maxtor drive. Then, the various other drives were also connected to the same SATA-150 controller and the benches were all repeated.

I am careful to say the Maxtor drive put up the best SATA-150 scores I have seen, and not just the best scores period, as I did bench the Hitachi drive in SATA-300 mode and it did do better (but that was on a different controller, obviously). For the majority of people with SATA-150 controllers, these results are hopefully neither "meaningless" or "critically flawed".

Thanks, I do appreciate the feedback.

Guspaz · Rated PG Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 2

Yes, the same one Smile

Certainly they're not meaningless on a SATA-150 controller. However many new motherboards have onboard SATA-300 support, and on one of these, the inclusion of an SATA-300 drive in SATA-150 mode is, well, let's not say meaningless, let's say not representative of the drive's true performance.

I look at it this way: SATA-300 support is a feature of the drive. By "disabling" the feature, you're not testing the drive as it is, but instead a non-existant replica of the drive with SATA-150 support.

Another analogy, because I like useless analogies Wink

It is like reviewing the Kyro 2 videocard, which lacked T&L support, and then disabling T&L on the cards you benchmark it against to create parity. You're not really providing accurate benchmarks, since it is undesirable to disable T&L on the other cards; it is a feature of them that is part of what makes them what they are.

EDIT: I should respond to when you said "This review is for the Maxtor drive, which is only SATA-150 capable", you're inferring that the only reason to buy the Maxtor drive is if they are limited to an SATA-150 motherboard. I think that is a limiting view for the review.

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:56:24 Post Subject:

**Modulok** · Posted: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:51:27 Post Subject:

You can get this drive for under $90 before shipping at TigerDirect