Maxtor DiamondMax D540X

Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB Capacities Model Number Capacity 4x040H2 40 GB 4x060H3 60 GB 4x080H4 80 GB 4G120J6 120 GB 4G160J8 160 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction In the heyday of SR's infancy, two companies would constantly vie for the capacity crown with their flagship 5400 RPM units. IBM would pack five platters into a single drive to deliver unheard of capacities only to have Maxtor deliver a four-platter unit with a higher density... not to mention with near zero delay between announcements and product availability.

Times have changed. Maxtor, for its part, has fallen into the trap of announcing before volume shipments. IBM, however, has stumbled a bit. Their last 5400 RPM unit was the Deskstar 40GV, a two-platter unit that provides (in today's view) a paltry 40 GB of space. Western Digital and Seagate have also topped out at just two-platters in their 40 GB/disk units, yielding flagship capacities of only 80 GB. Maxtor, on the other hand, continues to forge ahead. A couple months ago, the manufacturer announced an extension to its 5400 RPM DiamondMax D540X line with 3- and 4-platter units. That's 120 GB and 160 GB respectively!

Here we'll take a look at the 160-gig flagship. This monster packs four of Maxtor's latest 40 GB/platter disks into a single drive to explore previously unheard of capacities. Only Seagate's aging Barracuda 180 offers slightly more space, albeit at the expense of the noise and heat associated with a half-height SCSI drive. An alarmingly high specified seek time accompanies the D540X- we haven't seen the likes of 12 millisecond specs since Quantum's 4400 RPM Fireball lct20. A two-megabyte buffer rounds out the offering. Maxtor protects the drive with a three-year warranty.

The 160 GB version of the D540X is the first to exceed the limitations of the venerable 28-bit LBA standard that limits ATA drives to 137 GB of capacity. Over the summer, Maxtor announced its "Big Drive" initiative; a move to extend addressable space to 48 bits... that's 144 petabytes or 144 million gigabytes. Maxtor also stands alone among major drive manufacturers in pushing ATA-133, a last-gasp extension to a standard that looks to be phased out in favor of Serial ATA. Perhaps to make ATA-133 more attractive, Maxtor has bundled the "Big Drive" benefits of 48-bit addressing with ATA-133 in both marketing and in the physical controller bundled with the 160 GB units. To overcome the inherent capacity limitations present in most of today's ATA controllers, a Maxtor-branded Promise Ultra133TX2 controller comes bundled in each box. Promise's card not only offers ATA-133 operation but also includes the aforementioned 48-bit addressing.

Maxtor targets the ATA-133 versions (120 GB and 160 GB) of the D540X at those who need the most capacity they can get at the lowest possible price. These drives fit well in systems that need large amounts of space to backup or archive data. In these situations, its capacity and economy rather than absolute performance that's key.

That said, let's put the drive through its paces and see how it stacks up! In the following tests, the D540X's Automatic Acoustic Management was disabled (the fastest possible setting for seeks) and write verification was turned off. The drive ran off of the included Promise Ultra133TX2 (bios V2.20,0.12, WinXP driver v2.00.0.29) for the entire test. Note that these results reflect our second sample of both the drive and controller. The first combo, for whatever reason, could not cache writes back to the buffer no matter how hard we tried to set things straight.