herjazz's Full Review: Seagate (ST0154000U) 40 GB ATA-66 Hard Drive
The DiamondMax Plus line of hard drives from Maxtor represents a great value, offering fast, reliable drives at a reasonable price. This line of drives consists of 7200rpm drives, whereas their "DiamondMax" (without the "Plus") consists of 5400rpm drives. If drive performance is critical (such as in running a server, doing digital audio/video work), you don't want anything less than a 7200rpm drive.
Pros
1. These drives are very quiet. Compared with Western Digital Caviar and Seagate Barracuda and IBM Deskstar drives, these drives are amazingly quiet during operation. I have two Maxtor DiamondMax Plus drives in my G3 and I can barely hear them spinning over the sound of the fan in my machine. The other brands, even when new, are really loud in comparison.
2. 7200rpm, 9ms seek, ATA/66 = fast enough for intensive multimedia applications. Short of getting a SCSI drive setup and/or RAID, an ATA (or, "IDE") drive with these specifications perform perfectly for even the most disk-intensive tasks, at a fraction of the cost. One of the main uses for my Macintosh is for digital audio recording as part of my home studio setup. At these prices, it's cheaper to just treat hard drives as "tapes," recording tracks on them and swapping them out for different projects. I have no problems with drive write and seek response even with simultaneous multi-track recording (8 tracks of audio) and playback. In my software (CubaseVST), there is a feature that lets me monitor CPU and hard disk usage, and it is usually my CPU that is almost peaking (reaching maximum) while my Maxtor drives are about 50-60% from being "max-ed out." For home recording, there is no need to spend ridiculous amount of money on a SCSI setup. Home digital video editing is the same: these Maxtors will perform just fine as long as your CPU and RAM is up to the task.
3. They are simple to initialize on a PC. The retail version of this drive comes with IDE cables, mounting brackets, screws, instructions, and a floppy with Maxtor's own drive initializing software. This software is much easier to use than Windows/DOS's fdisk, since you can graphically designate your drive partitions and format them. I've used this software on non-Maxtor drives as well, and it recognizes them and works. I'm never using fdisk again. This disk, however, only works on PCs, but on the Mac, it's easy to partition and initialize a disk with the MacOS's built-in Drive Setup program.
4. These drives work with Macintoshes with no problems. Macs made in the last few years (iMacs and PowerMacs from the blue and white G3s on) all have standard IDE hard drive interfaces, so you can theoretically hook up any PC hard drive to your machine. I did a lot of research and some drives work better with Macs than others. Maxtors are the most compatible with the least amount of complaints from Mac users. The packaging and sales people may tell you it's for PC only, but ignore them. All you have to do is hook it up to your Mac, set the jumpers (Master/Slave), and then initialize the drive with Drive Setup.
Cons
I found that while shopping for Maxtor drives, it can get very confusing.
1. Prices vary widely from vendor to vendor, sometimes up to a $50 difference. Some vendors combine these drives with special offers, such as rebates or free software (like Norton Antivirus). Some vendors sell "retail" version and others sell "bare drive" versions (these don't come with cables, brackets, etc.).
The best way to sift through all this is to go to the Maxtor website, find the part # for the drive you want (usu. ends with "U8") and then search/order/buy the drive according to the part #, and *not* the item descriptions. And make sure that if you want a 7200rpm drive, it says "7200rpm" on it, otherwise you'll end up with the 5400rpm version.
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