i am in the market for a new HD and i was wondering if the Maxtor 80gb Diamondmax plus 9 SATA hard drive was a good drive. I am a moderate gamer and i do need the speed for other things. i just need to know if it will bring me good performance and stablility, over IDE.
Thanks,
Pops
there are two questions here: whether or not they're reliable, and how much better they are compared to normal ata drives.
maxtor drives are generally reliable (at least in my experience).
compared to normal ata drives, though, you won't see much of a performance increase. sata speed is 150, but that's a theoretical maximum, and you don't reach that level during normal usage.
I use a maxtor on my home server and its been solid. As to the speed issue I have to respectfully dissagree with Mr. dreamz here. I saw a instant increse on my server. Its VERY noticable if you raid them also.
So only x86 can support SATA drives?
News to me and my G5 >.<
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The Topic Has Been Moved
// Seph
SATA drives are basicaly a PATA drive with diffrent circutry (with exception to the WD raptor drives). They use all the same mechanical pard, arms, platters, memory, etc.
SATA isnt MUCH faster, a little faster for specific applications where your streaming tons of data (ie copying a 1 gig file, or unzipping something). Basicaly it removes a potential bottleneck.
Features such as NCQ(native command quing) and SATAII should revelutnise this tho. Im not shure there are any 32bit controlers that support NCQ tho.
Basicaly the advantages are
1) cables are much smaller
2) slightly better preformance
3) easy to RAID
4) no setting jumpers, 1 drive to a cable
I realy only notice the difrence when im ripping a DVD or unzipping huge files, and its minimal at best, mabie 5-10% faster.
well i have another question, i also have a western digital WD400 i pulled from an emachines. will that HD work in my computer if it was emachines branded?
Originally posted by popsandthefamily@Aug 21 2004, 06:47 AMwell i have another question, i also have a western digital WD400 i pulled from an emachines. will that HD work in my computer if it was emachines branded?
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haha metalmusicaddict, respectfully disagree. 
sounds like people don't like to disagree. anyway, usually the performance gain is small, but i'm glad it worked out for you. i'll probably move to sata later when it becomes the standard.
and what do you mean by emachines branded? it's just a hard drive. oem manufacturers and distributors don't make their own hard drives. they use drives from other companies, like western digital. it's just a western digital drive.
the only difference is if they opt to add in a hidden partition (like the recovery partition).
Originally posted by popsandthefamily@Aug 21 2004, 12:47 PMwell i have another question, i also have a western digital WD400 i pulled from an emachines. will that HD work in my computer if it was emachines branded?
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The drive is no diffrent from any other WD400, unless its become infected with emachine filth, and forever blighted to hardware failure.
Infact for a while, people were buying emachines, because the hardware in them was worth much more then the whole thing costed.
Im running a Maxtor 160Gb 10k RPM SATA 8mb cache w/ liquid bearings and its by far the best drive Ive ever owned. This was upgraded from a 7,200 IDE 133 liquid bearing drive and this baby has given me a noticable speed increase in every aspect of my system.
Especially when dealing with large (30-45mb) files in groups of 50, 100 or 150) file manipulations, I gain a measurable amount of time.
the liquid bearings make it quieter, the speed is faster when dealing with large files. What more can i ask for? I went and ordered it, should be here round Noon on Monday, i will let you know how it performs!
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