After our very own Tom Graham reviewed some portable hard drives, today we"ll have a look at a Desktop counterpart by Maxtor. The massive 250GB DiamondMax 10. As large hard drives are becoming of an increased importance, we will also cover a small guide so you know what to look for when buying a new hard drive.
- After plugging everything in, the drive was visible to my onboard Promise RAID/SATA Interface controller’s BIOS. In here, you can setup the “bootability” of drives and decide whether you want your hard drives to work in a RAID environment or simply to work alone; I decided to skip the RAID options and work alone. Maxtor offer a setup of tools to help you format the drive; MaxBlast, a piece of hard drive management software for Windows by Maxtor, for Maxtor drives.
The first thing you may notice, or not, is the noise level of the hard drive while in operation – it is, to say the least, very quiet. I found noise only noticeable whilst doing sustained file transfers between itself and my DiamondMax 9. I felt the drive was probably about twice as quiet as the DiamondMax 9; serious credit to Maxtor’s “Quiet Drive” technology, the Fluid Dynamic Bearings, and the fact that the spindle runs at 7,200 RPM (Western Digital has a line of hard drives running at a noisy 10K RPM).
Will this massive drive keep up to par with the other drives available? Namely the 10K RPM Western Digital Raptor drives? On to the review...