Installation

     The rear of the drive is still the focal point during installation, however it does appear that Maxtor bent the rules with the Diamond Max Plus 9. The keyed connectors for the "special" power and data cable are present, but there is still a jumper block and a Molex power connector. The presence of the Molex connector mostly means that users will not be required to acquire and use the 15-pin Serial-ATA power adapter. It is also a good indication that Maxtor is leaving their options open during the construction process, and mostly just converting the existing Parallel Diamond Max Plus 9 drives into Serial ATA units.

     Performance

     The Diamond Max Plus 9 will be subjected to a few of my favorite benchmark applications. The drive will be attached to the native Silicon Image controller on an ABIT NF7-S and operated in a single drive configuration. An AMD XP2600+ processor running @default for the benefit of this test will provide the CPU power.

     Hard Drive Tach is up first. We see a Read Burst Speed of 65.4 megabytes per second and a Random Access Time of 12.9 milliseconds. After we take off the average rotational latency time of 4.2 milliseconds, we get a Random Access Time of 8.7 milliseconds which comes in under the 9.4 milliseconds average that Maxtor gives the drive. As usual, there is some degradation in speed as the end of the drive is reached, with throughput starting at roughly 61 Megabytes/second.

     The last set of benchmarks only spit out numbers and there they are. The scores are represented in Megabyte per second fashion.  The SiSoft Sandra score is slightly above what a typical ATA/133 drive with an 8 megabyte cache would offer in terms of performance. The last set of benchmarks are taken with Winbench 99 (version 2.0) to show effective load handling under office and multimedia access patterns.

     Conclusion

     The Diamond Max Plus 9 from Maxtor is a great Serial ATA adaptation of an already well established ATA/133 hard drive. By leaving in the Molex connector, Maxtor has given flexibility to the end user by not forcing the use of enclosure cluttering adapters. The native Serial ATA interface makes this drive a very lucrative choice when planning an IDE based RAID setup. A 160 Gigabyte drive could be the perfect unit to use as the parity drive in a RAID 0/1 array. Equipped with an 8 megabyte buffer, this drive is aimed squarely at power users who demand performance storage systems. Gaming rigs would also be well equipped with this drive as their boot and storage drive. Offered in large capacities, this drive could very well be the backbone in any small office/home office storage network that doesn't experience terribly high volume traffic. As with any new technology, and certainly no fault of Maxtor's, the Serial ATA disk drives are carrying a slightly higher price (on average $30 more) than their ATA/133 cousins. The only true disappointment with this drive is that Maxtor has lowered the warranty on the Diamond Max Plus 9 series drives to a one-year period. This is mostly done to keep the price down on the units, and truly shouldn't be a factor. It has been our experience that if a drive is going to fail -- it will do so within the first 4 months of operation. Also, Maxtor has used internal workings that are rated with 5-year lifecycles which should offer some peace of mind.