Ultra ATA 66 Hard Drive Roundup - March 2000

The Maxtor Diamond Max 6800 hard drive is a 27 GB, 5400 RPM drive with sub 9 ms seek times, and a 2 MB data buffer. It also utilizes the Ultra ATA/66 interface, as do all of the drives tested for this roundup.

The Diamond Max 6800 sports some unique feature such as an onboard dual microprocessor controller, which is supposed to help achieve a theoretical 27.8 MB/sec transfer rate to and from the media. In practice however, the Maxtor’s slower rotation speed hindered its performance, as it didn’t not even approach the claimed data transfer rates.

Some of the other benefits the Diamond Max offers are Maxtor’s “No Quibble Service” policy in which you can call up Maxtor and they will next day air you a replacement drive and you can send back the defective drive at usual ground rates.

In the tests, the Maxtor consistently appeared on the bottom of the charts along with the other 5400 RPM unit, the IBM Deskstar 23GP. While some may think this comparison unfair, the Maxtor did meet our basic specifications, >25 GB capacity and used the Ultra ATA 66 interface. We wanted to demonstrate the importance that the other features of hard drives contribute to the overall performance of a drive, and to further illustrate that simply having an Ultra ATA 66 compatible drive doesn’t necessarily equate into better performance.

Overall, the Maxtor was a fine drive, outperforming the 5400-RPM IBM unit in several tests, but, as we stated with the IBM Deskstar 25GP, unless you are simply looking for the most storage space for the dollar and performance takes second place, then you would be better off looking at a 7200-RPM unit. The days of 5400-RPM drives are surely numbered, as the price differences are so slight that we cannot see choosing one over the higher performance 7200-RPM models.

The Maxtor Diamond Max 6800 comes with a standard 3-year warranty and can be found for around $190.00.