Maxtor DiamondMax 11 Hard Drive

This Maxtor DiamondMax 11 drive is meant for the large data
storage

systems like NAS, file servers and data

centers. It comes in 400 GB and 500GB variants, but this time we have reviewed
the 500 GB variant which has a spindle speed of 7,200 rpm and a 16MB buffer
memory.

Price: Rs 16,250 (3 Yrs warranty)

Key Specs: 500 GB, 7,200rpm, 16MB buffer

Contact: Maxtor Corporation, Delhi Tel: 51609661 E-mail: maxtorinfo@denave.com

It supports the SATA II controllers specified to give you
an accelerated data transfer rate. This large capacity drive is beneficial to
store large chunks of data like regular system backup or multimedia files and
you can also have high data reliability with the different RAID configurations.

As for the performance, we tested the hard drive on Athlon
FX 55 machine with 512MB DDR RAM. It achieved an average data transfer rate of
53.7 MBps, which is lower than 58.3 MBps of the Western Digital drive (also
reviewed this month). The Maxtor drive scored 13.8 and 40.7 MBps in the Business
Disk and High-End Disk Winstone 99 benchmarks respectively, while the Western
Digital scored 17.2 and 38.7 MBps. The Maxtor drive had a high disk access time
of 15.5 milliseconds against 9 milliseconds and 13.6 milliseconds of the Western
Digital drives. Both these drives had the same CPU utilization of 96%.

Surprisingly, we have been witnessing higher CPU
utilization by almost all the drives reviewed over the past several months. A
hard drive should not be extensively CPU-intensive so as to take most CPU
resources.

Bottom Line: With the extended warranty it offers,
the Maxtor Diamond is a competitor of the Western Digital WD5000KS. Coupled with
high capacity and fast seek times, large buffer and enhanced reliability this
drive is the perfect one for systems and applications that demand the best.

Anubhav Verma