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16MB buffer Hard Drives - your thoughts/tests?

phillyTIM

phillyTIM

Golden Member
Check out this sweeeeeet new Maxto Ultra16 hard drive with a 16MB, rather than 8MB or 2MB, cache!

Does anyone have any linkies to reviews/tests of these comparing them to 8MB drives? Does anyone have one of these drives and can tangibly notice a difference?

 
The 16mb cache surely increase performance, and the Maxtor 16MB cache HD is the highest performance 7.2k HD for now. Unfortunately, people in the forum generally dislike Maxtor, therefore this is the best place to ask for a Maxtor driver review.
I am guessing that you will get 10 replys of "Maxtor sucks, go seagate" replys before getting anything useful
 
good point, toattett....

so guys - back to technicalities: would 16mb of cache be worth upgrading a hard drive for...or should we wait for the 10K ATAs? will the 10K ATA drives ever come?!!

 
10K drives may come, but they will be expensive.

For $99 I'd say jump all over the 250gb 16mb 7.2K drive.
 
If speed is your primary goal, then you'd still be better off going with Raptors. They're the fastest 10K drives around, plain and simple.

The 16 MB of cache will certainly not hurt performance, though.

[Obligatory Seagate > Maxtor reference]

Edit: Holy sh!t $99!?

Less thinking, more buying dude. You can always return it or RMA it if it goes screwy, but I'd strongly suggest you try to find a couple reviews online as you're buying.
 
Originally posted by: Sqube
If speed is your primary goal, then you'd still be better off going with Raptors. They're the fastest 10K drives around, plain and simple.

The 16 MB of cache will certainly not hurt performance, though.

[Obligatory Seagate > Maxtor reference]
Click to expand...

Not when a 300GB drive offers over 4 times as much capacity and costs the same as a 74 GB Raptor with very close performance. Buying a Raptor will only help you if you are moving large (> 1GB) files around fairly often. It may also help your boot time by a second or two, if you can't stand those 13 seconds it takes on an 8MB, 7200 RPM drive.
 
i read a review not too long ago and there were some performance gains but its really nothing spectacular... i dont particularly have a problem with maxtor and im currently relying very heavily on my 8mb 120gig drive so more power to maxtor! 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Sqube
If speed is your primary goal, then you'd still be better off going with Raptors. They're the fastest 10K drives around, plain and simple.
Click to expand...

You are critically mistaken, they may be the only 10k ATA drives around, but they eat the dust of current gen 10k SCSIs.
 
I just bought one of these. The performance jump from my 8mb HDDs was noticable, but it didn't exactly floor me over. Most obvious was the bootup time and transfering large number of files from one partition to the next. Overall, I'm glad I bought it. The fact that CompUSA has it for sale this week for $99.95 (w/instant rebate) certainly helps too.

FYI, I have had no issues with Maxtors. Gone through zillions of them over the last eight years as well as other brands, both at home and at work. For me, they're just as reliable as the rest. One of the biggest killers of HDDs is overclocked FSBs without PCI dividers or PCI/AGP locks. In this regard, Maxtors have gained a reputable in the past for being more fragile than the other brands. That used to be case, can't vouch for that now since I only o/c if there's a way for me to lock down the PCI bus at nominal speeds.
 
Originally posted by: ribbon13
Originally posted by: Sqube
If speed is your primary goal, then you'd still be better off going with Raptors. They're the fastest 10K drives around, plain and simple.
Click to expand...

You are critically mistaken, they may be the only 10k ATA drives around, but they eat the dust of current gen 10k SCSIs.
Click to expand...

I stand corrected. 😱

WARNING. WARNING. Fantastically Stupid Question Alert.

I've got the Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9, and it comes with 2 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE connectors. I'll be able to use those cords with the aforementioned hard drives, right?

Man, I feel so bad for having to ask, but I just want to be 100% sure before I buy. I had like $350 budgeted for 2 hard drives and this will be a lifesaver x1000.
 
Thanks. Great comparison. I do believe the raptor is a great drive. I did buy twelve of the damn things. To bad my fvcking 3ware don't do NCQ. And I'm unaware of any SATA+NCQ/SATA2 RAID controllers with 12/16 ports.
 
Hey, umm... I hate to inconvenience with what's an obvious question, but I'm needy that way.

Could someone answer the question from my previous post?
 
I got 2 maxtor SATA 16MB Cache, 300GB Drives in a RAID 0 in my computer, They are fast in a RAID, Faster than my other 2 RAIDs in my computer.
 
Originally posted by: ribbon13
$200 more WTF?

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-148-065&depa=1

Try again there skippy. And it could be had for $145 elsewhere.. So going from IDE to SATAII and Maxtor to Seagate and 3yr to 5yr for $45 more? Yep. I'd take it.

Edit: Concision.
Click to expand...

Sorry, it's because I'm always thinking in terms of buying two since that's what I plan on doing with my next system.

But you still have me blown with the .05% performance increase. Unless you mean 5%?
 
It would be hard to assign a real % value to it, since there are many factors. Seek time, random access, burst read, burst write, sustained read, sustained write, I/Op/s...


I already have a 810GB RAID5 of Raptor 74's anyway... I got Seagate Cheetah 15ks for performance 😀
 
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