Introduction

SATA drives have been a blessing, not only for their ease of use and ergonomics but for ease on the budget as well. While they don't approach the speed of their SCSI cousins they don't approach the cost either and can store vast amounts of data. Maxtor has been manufacturing Hard Drives since 1982, in early 2001 Maxtor literally swallowed the competition acquiring Quantum HDD and in September 2001 acquired MMC Technology, Inc.. With these resources Maxtor has become one of the most innovative hard drive manufacturers on the market. In the last few years storage devices have begun to take every conceivable form and since the advent of the digital camera storage needs have increased exponentially. Regardless of size the demand for rapid retrieval is a constant and SATA drives are fast replacing Parallel ATA drives. Today we take a look at Maxtor's ULTRA 16 (Diamond Max 10) 300GB SATA Hard Drive kit.

To secure their drives during transport Maxtor has replaced thick foam inserts with a new molded plastic packing material. While this may seem a trivial point I did prefer their earlier packaging, however; when you¡¯re shipping 100,000 pieces several ounces per box makes good business sense. Of course if 50,000 units arrived damaged the cost could be devastating, not to mention the consumer confidence loss. Nonetheless the molded plastic held the drive securely and I've never had a Maxtor drive arrive damaged. Included in the box are clearly printed instructions, cables, MaxiBlast driver CD, everything you need to get your HDD up and running.

The platter technology which has allowed Maxtor to reach the 300GB capacity resulted from their collaboration with the subsidiary MMC. The 80GB limit was surpassed now approaching 175GB per 3.5" platter. Maxtor and MMC have developed a technology known as PMR (Perpendicular Medium Recording) which is more efficient then LMR (Longitudinal Media Recording) this due primarily to it's smaller grain size of 6nm compared to 8nm in diameter. Since changes have focused on platter capacity only, the cost has remained relatively unchanged from previous SATA drives. Technology such as controller chips, power requirements, etc. remain basically unchanged. Maxtor's ULTRA 16 Hard Drive Kit aka Diamond Max 10 300GB/7200RPM SATA is now one of the largest SATA drives on the market

The Diamond Max 10 is actually a member of the ULTRA 16 series of SATA drives intended for the Desktop user.

Taking a closer look at the Diamond Max 9 Plus 120GB which we'll use in this review as a performance comparison, note the Molex power connector in addition to the SATA power connector. Since the Diamond Max 9 is a Parallel ATA drive it still retains its jumpers as it can be configured as Master or Slave if the ATA adapter is used.

Installing the drive was simple enough and as I mentioned earlier its a blessing to be rid of the obtrusive flat ATA ribbons.

Although I installed the drive as a data device Windows XP SP2 still didn't recognize the drive at it's full 300GB capacity. Windows read the drive at 137GB, however; this is common and was easily remedied by downloading and installing Maxtor MaxiBlast. MaxiBlast-4 software makes the appropriate registry changes to Windows XP thereby recognizing the drive's 300GB capacity. If you¡¯re installing your Maxtor Diamond Max 10 as the primary hard drive with either a fresh Windows install or as the primary boot drive containing the OS, a CD is provided to aid in the process. The screenshot below provides an example of MaxiBlast-4 conforming our drive as a secondary data drive.