Maxtor Diamond Max 16 250GB

At 250 GB, this is the highest capacity IDE drive that has been introduced till date. It’s a 5400 rpm drive that works only on UltraATA133 compliant motherboards. If you don’t have one, then you can use the ATA133 card that ships with the drive.

The drive can give problems such as lower capacity recognition on the standard ATA100 interface. 

We tested this drive on an Intel 845GVB motherboard housed with a P4 2.8 GHz processor, 128 MB DDR memory and ATA133 PCI card. We created 4 GB of partition out of 250 GB, formatted on NTFS with Win XP. To check its transfer rates, seek time and CPU utilization, we used Winbench 99.

Snapshot Price :  Rs 22,500 Key specs : UltraATA 133 interface, 2 MB cache buffer, 250 GB, 5400 RPM Contact : Cyber Star, Delhi Tel : 26438216 E-mail : yogi@maxtor.com

The drive’s raw transfer rates are very good, in the order of 40 MB/sec. However, it did take a toll on the CPU utilization, which went up to 34 %. The seek time was, in fact, slightly better than its rated, giving us 10.3 as against its rated 11. 

Overall, it’s a good buy for people who need to store huge amounts of data on their PCs. The drive’s price translates to just Rs 90 per GB, which is

quite good. 

Sanjay Majumder