Reviews
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10
The buffest 7,200rpm drive ever
T
he first consumer-level hard drive with 16MB of onboard cache has
arrived, and it’s kicking buffer and taking names. Its official name is
DiamondMax 10, but it’s known around these parts as “the fastest
7,200rpm drive on the market.” That’s right. This drive outpaced the reigning
7,200rpm king—Hitachi’s 400GB 7K400—in almost every one of our bench-
marks. And with its 300GB capacity, it’s almost as cavernous. It’s also important
to note that the DiamondMax 10 is significantly faster than the 250GB 7,200rpm
DiamondMax 9 drive we tested in January, and is just as quiet.
This newfound speed
is the result of two fac-
tors—increased areal
density as well as the dou-
bling of the drive’s onboard
cache. The onboard buffer
size has increased from
8MB to 16MB, and platter
density has skyrocketed
from 83GB per platter to
100GB per platter.
In testing, the DiMax
10 posted the fastest
sequential read speeds
we’ve ever seen from a
7,200rpm drive, topping out
at a staggering 52MB per
second on average. This isa lot faster than the 45MB/s read rates of Hitachi’s 7K400, but not quite as fast
as the Western Digital Raptor’s smokin’ 61MB/s transfer rate. The DiamondMax
10’s random access times were a smidge slow, averaging 9.3ms after subtract-
ing the standard 4.17ms of rotational latency for a 7,200rpm device.
Despite this deficit, the Maxtor drive still achieved the highest score
we’ve ever seen in our Application Index benchmark, which measures a
drive’s overall performance in “real world” apps such as Word, Photoshop,
and four others. The Maxtor’s score of 26.6 was even higher than the unflap-
pable Raptor (26.4), illustrating
just how important onboard
memory is for an average
desktop workload.
In conclusion, all we have to
say is, “wow!” Say hello to the
new 7,200rpm king.
—JOSH NOREMHD Tach
Sequential read (MB/s) 52.23 45.8
Burst speed (MB/s)^118 112.8
Random access (ms) 13.7 12
SYSmark
Office Productivity 163 169
Content Creation 272 283
H2Benchw
Random access (ms) 13.5 12.4
Burst read (MB/s) 123 111
Sustained read avg. (MB/s) 51.9 45.4
Sustained write avg. (MB/s) 51.9 44.8
Application index * 26.6 25.3
Best scores are bolded. * Application index is the geometric mean of a
drive’s performance in six “real world” application profiles, such as Word ,
Photoshop, and so forth.This pre-production version of Maxtor’s new DiamondMax 10
set new benchmark records thanks to its 16MB of cache.ATI HDTV Wonder
All we can say is: It’s about time!
We don’t enjoy too many things more than watching a baseball game in glo-
rious High Definition, so we greeted ATI’s latest addition to the ATI TV tuner
family, the HDTV Wonder, with considerable enthusiasm. For years, we’ve
expressed to ATI how desperately we wanted an HDTV-version of the All-
in-Wonder card, and they’ve finally delivered—including full Personal Video
Recorder support. Well, kind of.
Unfortunately, the HDTV Wonder only works with old-fashioned over-the-
air broadcasts. For the foreseeable future, cable and satellite HDTV sub-
scribers are out of luck. The problem lies with the way signals from cable or
satellite receivers are encrypted before they’re output from the cable box.
PCs aren’t equipped to decrypt the signal, and it’s unlikely they will be any-
time soon thanks to digital-rights management issues. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the HDTV Wonder works surprisingly well with
over-the-air broadcasts. We had some minor troubles with early versions
of the viewing software, but the most recent revision works well. Both the
default Windows interface and the nifty 10-foot interface suitable for use on
the couch allowed us to channel surf and record programs with ease.
Note that this add-in card isn’t labeled an HDTV “All-in-Wonder.” That’s
because this HDTV Wonder is a stand-alone PCI card, not an AGP videocard
with an integrated tuner. This means you need to provide your own DirectX
9-compatible videocard (a Radeon 9500 or GeForce 5700, or later); the HDTV
Wonder will use some of the videocard’s onboard muscle to handle the
video decoding for demanding 19Mb/s HDTV streams. This isn’t ideal, but
it does allow you to use a relatively low-power CPU for your home enter-
tainment PC and still get HDTV PVR functionality. The HDTV Wonder also
includes a standard NTSC TV tuner for satellite and cable broadcasts. Thisgives you dual-tuner function-
ality on a single card, which is
always handy.
The PVR functionality on
the HDTV Wonder is indis-
tinguishable from the earlier
non-HD ATI TV tuner prod-
ucts—that is, until you look
at the hi-def images you’re
capturing.
—WILL SMITHFastest 7,200rpm drive, huge capacity, quiet.MEMORYMIME-ORY
Needs to beat 10K drives to get a perfect 10.
$250 (250GB version is $200), http://www.maxtor.comMA XIMUMPCVERDICT 9
Two tuners rock. Great picture quality, includes a
remote and antenna, and works with any DX9 card.HDTVNTSC
No cable or satellite HDTV reception makes us
sad pandas.
$200, http://www.ati.comMA XIMUMPCVERDICT 9
84 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2004
BENCHMARKS DiMax 10 7K400
The new HDTV Wonder won’t replace your videocard, but
it does come with two tuners, a remote control, and a
HDTV antenna.