Maxtor MaXLine III

Note: Since the publication of this review, this drive has been retested under Testbed4, a newer hardware/software/benchmark platform. Please see this article for updated results. This review remains for reference purposes only.

Maxtor MaXLine III Capacities Model Number Capacity 7B250x0 250 GB 7B300x0 300 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction Originally introduced over two years ago as the 120 GB and 160 GB DiamondMax D540X drives, the MaXLine series represents Maxtor's foray into the growing "nearline" storage sector. Traditionally served by fibre-channel subsystems, nearline systems rest in between the industrial-strength, high-IOs/sec systems served by 10K and 15K RPM devices and linear archival mediums such as tape backups. They serve as an intermediary where data is staged and prepared for backup while remaining randomly accessible, though not at the speeds delivered by primary storage.

The D540X series featured 5400 RPM operation. Its successors, the MaXLine II and MaXLine Plus II, respectively carried on with 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM spindle speeds. The MaXLine III represents Maxtor's third-generation nearline product.

With the MaXLine III, the series migrates exclusively to 7200 RPM operation- the "Plus" moniker used to denote 7200 RPM operation in the earlier MaXLine iteration as well as the DiamondMax series has been dropped. In this third-gen unit, Maxtor integrates three platters to yield a flagship 300 GB capacity as well as a slightly smaller 250 GB unit. The firm specs seek times at 9.3 milliseconds.

The MaXLine III brings significant changes to the table. Previous SATA MaXLine products (and DiamondMax products, for that matter), were designed with legacy parallel operation and retrofitted for the SATA interface through a bridge chip. The MaXLine III represents the firm's first from-the-ground-up SATA product. As a result, the drive does not feature a standard 4-pin molex-style power receptacle like earlier Maxtor SATA offerings did and instead relies exclusively on the 15-pin SATA standard. Note that a parallel ATA version featuring standard 40-pin PATA and 4-pin molex connectors will also be available.

Along with this native implementation, Maxtor has incorporated some second-generation SATA features, most notably native command queuing (NCQ). Command queuing allows a drive to intelligently reorder requests to minimize seeks distances and rotational latency. Though CQ has been implemented in the SCSI world for years, it is just now reaching ATA shores. When paired with an appropriate controller, NCQ-enabled drives potentially enjoy significant increases in performance under heavy-depth, highly-random operation.

The MaXLine III also features a 16 MB buffer, the first increase since Western Digital upped the bar to 8 megabytes nearly three years ago. A large buffer and its accompanying firmware is much the opposite of command queuing- read-ahead and write-back optimizations shine in highly-localized scenarios.

Although nearline storage represents the MaXLine's chief market, Maxtor also hopes the drive will capture some high-end workstations and entry-level servers. The manufacturer rates the drive at 1 million hours of MTTF "at low duty cycles." More specifically, highly linear, low-seek nearline access patterns are less stressful to the mechanism than the full-on, heavy use that a busy server drive experiences. As a result, Maxtor admits that this figure is not directly comparable to the 1.2 million hour figure quoted for devices such as Seagate's Cheetah series or its own Atlas line. Even so, the firm claims that significant mechanical and electrical optimizations nonetheless place the MaXLine a decided step upwards when contrasted with the "standard ATA" drive. The MaXLine III features a three-year warranty.

On paper, Maxtor's latest is a formidable entry. The results that follow represent the MaXLine's performance when paired with our reference Promise SATA150 TX4 controller. Results with an NCQ-enabled controller are coming soon! While our evaluation drive is prominently marked "Promotional Sample," Maxtor reaffirms that the unit is "feature complete" and representative of the drives now in the channel.

Maxtor has also recently announced the DiamondMax 10 series. The higher capacity DM10 units (250 GB and 300 GB) feature construction similar to the MaXLine III right down to the 16 MB buffer. As a result, these high-end DM10 drives are functionally identical to the MaXLine III. Maxtor claims that the MaXLine uses select premium components and premium testing and manufacturing. In the end, however, the performance figures that follow also apply to the 300 GB DiamondMax 10.

StorageReview's original look at the MaXLine III was published last June. The drive posted a 16.3 millisecond access time, the highest SR has ever recorded for a 7200 RPM drive. Maxtor argued that this access time was not representative of the line and eventually requested a retest of a different unit. Given the original sample's anomalous access time, we agreed to another look.

In the following tests, the Maxtor MaXLine III is compared against the following drives for the following reasons:

MaXLine III 1st Sample	SR's original MaXLine III sample
MaXLine Plus II	The review drive's predecessor
Deskstar 7K400	Current-generation competitor
Caviar WD2500JD	Current-generation competitor
Barracuda 7200.7	Current-generation competitor
Samsung SP1614C	Current-generation competitor