Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB

Introduction

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Today we are going to take a look at the DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB ATA-133 hard drive from Maxtor. To tell the truth with the performance of this drive, I am happy to have a Maxtor drive back in my machine. Up until one year ago when Western Digital released the 120GB SE hard drive, I had only used Maxtor drives in my own machines for the previous 5 years. And still today, five of my six hard drives in my systems are Maxtor brand. The WD 120GB SE that we are testing against today is still a great drive, but I tend to loads tons of software. Games, photos, vendor PDFs and applications were filling up the 120GB. With Doom III, Half-Life 2 and some other great games coming later this year, I was happy when Maxtor offered to let me look at a 200GB hard drive.

A lot of people complained when Maxtor and some other companies dropped their hard drive warranties to one year, but not every drive suffers from the same short warranty. Here is a copy from of Maxtor’s warranty, and we can see their top performance drives like the 200GB we have still has a 3 year warranty.

• "Maxtor DiamondMax Plus ATA drives that have an 8MB cache buffer AND capacities of 120GB or greater will carry a Standard Warranty Period of 3 years. All other DiamondMax Plus drives will carry a Standard Warranty Period of 1 year."

Here is a link to the specifications PDF of the product line from Maxtor on this series of drives. The drive comes in two flavors here, ATA-133 and Serial ATA-150, and in this review, we will test the ATA-133 version.

Additionally, here is a comparison of prices for both drives we are looking at.

Western Digital Special Edition Caviar 120GB (Ultra ATA/100, 7200 RPM): $ 103.00 (86 cents/GB)
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB (EIDE, ATA/133, 7200PRM): $ 196.18 (98 cents/GB)

As you can se the price difference per GB is 12 cents higher on the Maxtor, but I think you will see from our testing below that the higher cost per GB is well worth it. For the testing, we mirrored the 120GB drive over to the 200GB using Norton’s Ghost. We made sure we had SP1 installed on XP and installed a patch from Maxtor to make sure the drive size over 137GB would be seen. Here is a link to the patch.

Benchmarks

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Test System:

Leadtek K7NCR18D PRO II nForce 2 Ultra 400
Athlon Barton 2800 @ 3200 (11x200FSB)
1GB Crucial DDR 3200 2x512MB

PC Mark 2002 HD Test

HD	Score
Maxtor	1155
WD	951

Sandra 2003 HD Test

HD	Score
Maxtor	25474
WD	22985

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