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Maxtor 120GB ATA-133 5400RPM Hard Drive

Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 | Hard Drive Reviews, Reviews

Maxtor is a long time name in the hard drive business. Most of it’s offerings are reliable and can do the tasks they are designed for well, if not great. This hard drive is not exception.

Of course the greatest feature of this drive is it’s price. At around 50 bucks after rebate you get a lot of space for your money.

The drive is 120GB which is plenty of space for most people on cheap desktop computers. It connects to the motherboard using ATA-133 which is very fast, but still a tad slower than SATA which is a newer technology.

It’s spin speed of 5400RPM work against it, but not excessively so.

Reviews of this drive are positive. Most people found it to be easy to use with no hassles in installation.

A common report is that the drive is slow compared to other drives like Western Digital. This is not too surprising considering it’s fairly small 2MB of cache, which acts to store information on the way between drive and computer, usually speeding things up.

My recommendation is to use this drive as a secondary storage drive. If you plan to use it as a main drive where many applications will be accessing it at the same time, the slow speed will become apparent. But as a data only second drive this should be a minimal issue.

Overall a good drive for it’s price, just a little on the slow side.