Quick review of Maxtor 11.5 Gig drive
(Put this here in case you're interested, SW.)
Got the drive Friday, for $337 shipped from TJT International (who gave me excellent service, the best price I could find, and a fed-ex tracking number.)
A great, great drive. I ordered because storagereview.com and others posted remarkable performance, noticably better than even the deskstar 8, at a great price and huge capacity. Also, it was important to me that the drive run cool, so I didn't want one of the new Segate 7200 rpm drives, which have caused some problems.
I like IBM's reputation and quietness, but they've been slow to market on their newest drives. With the added performance and capacity of the Maxtor over the deskstar 8 (the other leading choice for me,) I went with the Maxtor.
Here's some other impressions:
-It's noticably smaller, quieter, and cooler than my Quantum fireball ST 6.4 gig (circa July '97.) So much so, in fact, that it works happily in one of my removable IDE drive trays (ZP may wish to take note) without even getting hot to the touch, even with no extra cooler or fan.
-It only has IDE jumper settings of Master/solo and slave, unlike some drives. This means that if you make it master, you can add or remove another slave drive on the same IDE channel without cracking the case. (In may case, I don't even need to change a bios setting--tho if I do, it will detect it quicker.)
My only misgiving is that I'm having what looks to be either bios problems or possibly partition magic related problems with the drive being >8.4 gig. Had I to do it over again, I would have grabbed their 8 gig Diamond Mx 2880 for this reason. I'm using a new bios on a Supermicro P5mma98 main board, which I suspect is the culprit. Since several of you are using PowerQuest stuff now, I'll post more as soon as I've isolated the problem.
If it is a bios problem, that will give me one more reason to try the FastTrak. |
