Maxtor’s 100 GB Hard Drive

The 536DX 100 GB drive is the latest addition to Maxtor’s range of disk drives. It’s by far the highest-capacity, 5,400 rpm disk drive with an UltraATA/100 interface and 2 MB SDRAM cache buffer.

We tested the drive on an ASUS CUSL2 motherboard with 64 MB RAM and Celeron/600 processor. We ran WinBench 99 to test the seek time, transfer rates, and CPU utilization of the drive. The drive performed quite well in all our tests. In data transfer rates it gave a score of 31 MB/sec, which is one point more than Seagate’s 80 GB drive (reviewed last month), and also the best score so far. The drive’s seek time came to 10.7 ms, which is quite close to its rated seek time of 11 ms. The drive was also quite low in disk CPU utilization and gave a score of 3.4 percent. Thus, the drive doesn’t hog up the CPU much, and leaves it available for other processes as well.

The drive is priced at Rs 12, 800 and it’s per GB cost comes to Rs 128, which is quite competitive; even cheaper than Seagate’s 80 GB drive. The drive also ships with 5.25” mounting brackets, mounting screws, IDE interface cable, and the MaxBlast Plus utility for partitioning and formatting your hard drive. The 5.25” mounting brackets can be used to install the hard drive in the 5.25” device bay.

Overall, the drive is good in terms of performance and price, and comes with a warranty of one year.

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs