Maxtor DiamondMax9 160GB SATA

Overall, the experience with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160 GB SATA has been very good. As long as non-random transfers are the main workload, the drive is very fast, which makes it an ideal solution for e.g. video editing / additional storage. MaxBoost is an interesting approach but we are a bit concerned about the inherent risk for data corruption. In addition, MaxBoost does not work in RAID configurations. In random I/O environments, the DiamondMax Plus 9 appears to fall behind e.g. the Barracuda 7200.7 and the performance lag is exacerbated when MaxBoost is enabled. Whether this is representative or not for the typical desktop environment is another question. Likewise, it is not clear whether any "typical" desktop environment even exists.


What is holding back the DiamondMax Plus 9 series is that as a parallel drive with an integrated SATA bridge, it will not be capable of doing Native Command Queuing, which is expected to boost random transfers and I/O performance by approximately 20-25 % over non-queued solutions and appears an ideal compliment to Intel's HyperThreading technology. Given the fact that the only controller currently supporting NCQ is the new SiliconImage controller, which is not yet on the shelves, it is almost safe to say that at this point, it does not matter too much. Another 2-3 months down the road, this may change, though.