Maxtor DiamondMax 10 - 300GB

Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 hard drives greatly impressed us with their superb performances and low noise emissions.

They are definitely a far cry from the DiamondMax 9 range of drives, which we have found to be slow and noisy. Capacities for the Diamondmax 10 drives start at 80GB, and all the drives in the range feature a spin speed of 7200rpm. Drives up to 200GB have an 8MB cache buffer. Larger drives have a 16MB cache buffer.

The Maxtor DiamondMax 10 has fluid dynamic bearings, which improves the longevity of the drives and reduces their noise. All DiamondMax 10 drives also support native command queuing (NCQ).

NCQ rearranges data requests from applications to increase access efficiency. Its function is to organise seek operations so that they occur in a more logical order, minimising the time it takes for the drive heads to go from one request to another.

In this review, we looked at the 160GB, 200GB and 300GB DiamondMax 10 drives.

When it comes to moving massive amounts of data, the DiamondMax 10 range is nearly unbeatable. The 300GB drive, in particular, with its 16MB cache buffer produced an incredible file transfer rate of 1.059GB per minute! We were also pleased to note that its temperature during testing did not exceed 44 degrees.

The smaller capacity drives also fared very well, with the 200GB managing 932MB per minute, with a maximum running temperature of 41 degrees. The 160GB drive achieved 935MB per minute with a maximum running temperature of 40.8 degrees.

Noise was not an issue for any of the three drives; we could barely hear them at all during our tests.

What's interesting about these DiamondMax 10 drives is that, apart from having advanced features such as NCQ and in some cases up to 16MB cache buffers, they also had, at the time of testing, the lowest dollar-per-gigabyte cost in their class.