Maxtor DiamondMax 10 Hard Drive Review

Maxtor’s first NCQ-enabled desktop drive is the DiamondMax 10. Available in capacities up to 300GB, the DiamondMax 10 comes equipped with as much as 16MB of cache and the promise of improved performance. Read on to see how command queuing affects the DiamondMax 10’s performance and how the DiamondMax 10 stacks up against the competition.

…Perhaps the most striking thing about the DiamondMax 10 is that it doesn’t suffer from the same command queuing-induced performance penalty in some applications as the Barracuda 7200.7 and Raptor WD740GD do on our test platform. The DiamondMax is able to overcome whatever’s slowing the Barracuda and Raptor down in tests like WorldBench, and I suspect that the drive’s larger 16MB cache may be at least somewhat responsible.

…At the end of the day, the DiamondMax 10 is best suited for single-user desktops where its fast transfer rates should keep performance-hungry enthusiasts happy. Unlike the 10K-RPM Raptors, DiamondMax 10 drives also offer plenty of storage—up to 300GB for under $200 online sounds good to me.

Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 hard drive
NCQ gets 16MB of cache
The Tech Report