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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB Hard Drive

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 | Hard Drive Reviews, Reviews

The DiamondMax 80GB is a slightly older model from Maxtor and was the first hard drive to be offered by them.

This model came in sizes up to 200GB. It’s not the fastest around anymore, but is still worth a mention as it does a very good job anyway.

One of the nice features of the drive is that it comes with fluid dynamic bearings making it much more quieter in use than its traditional ball bearing breathren.

Its features are

• 8MB of cache
• SATA interface
• fluid dynamic bearings

In testing it doesn’t perform too badly. Although it does slightly underperform it successor the DiamondMax 10 it does a good job against it’s bigger 250GB brother. The DiamondMax outperforms it by about 10% or so.

In terms of raw performance modern drives have taken a fairly smooth increae in speeds, often to do with the compactness of data on the drive as well as speeds of the platter and things like NCQ.

It’s overall I/O performance is cetainly at the lower end of new drives, but still enough for probably most peoples needs.

The interface bandwidth of this drive is quiet high. It falls in the upper half amongst its competitors. Unfortunately it has one of the slowest random access times, but still faster than the Seagate 400GB.

Overall this drive is a good look into the history of drives, but not great in terms of comparitive performance.