I got tired of reading half-way through, so if this has been mentioned, then I appologize. It's simply impossible to find 1 single benchmark anywhere that shows even the slightest increase of ATA133 vs a fast ATA100 drive. Yes, many theoretical benchmarks will show an increase in burst transfer rates, but that will never equal an increase in performance and there are a few reasons for that. Number one, the only time transfering something at 133MB/sec will help is (I bet you didn't see this coming) if you're transferring or reading an entire file that's over 133MB. Now I have a few videos on my computer that I might transfer from one hard drive to another that would move a little faster with 133, but in games and most other programs, you don't yet need to push that amount of information.... yet, but we'll be coming back to that. Second of all, Maxtor made that standard, and nobody else has bothered to jump on that bandwagon yet. Remember, I said that you won't see an increase over a fast ATA100 drive. Everyone else in the industry has been working on things that really matter in a pinch like seek times and cache. Maxtor hasn't bothered trying to keep up with the speed of Seagate, IBM or (my personal favorite) Western Digital, relying instead on their ATA133 standard to move units out the door. Finally, as I said before, these bursts are completely useless in the current environment. Few programs need the ability to move that much information at a time. Worse than that, the drives don't even get the kind of increase you'd expect given the "133" monicker. ATA100 moves at a real speed of around 66MB/sec. ATA133 moves at about 72MB/sec. Somebody check my math, but that doesn't look like a 33% increase to me. I did notice that somebody mentioned that it might not work at ATA133 if you have an ATA100 mobo. OF COURSE IT WON'T!! You can get a controller to fix that, but then you've really wasted some money on a worthless technology. Just in case you're still worried about the future, then realize that the future is not ATA133, it's serial ATA and it should be out in a little over a year. It will run at either 150 or 166, I can't remember which, but it doesn't really matter. The point is, ATA133 is a complete waste of money. Maxtor has lost the speed war in the hard drive arena and needs to do something more than ATA133 in order to stay in the fight.
By the way, in case you're worried about some kind of bias, I bought the computer I'm typing this on with a Maxtor 17GB 7200 RPM drive on purpose. About a year later, I put in a 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor. But that was then. After Maxtor released this "marketing trick" they call a standard, I went with WD. I've since bought two 80GB 7200RPM WD's, and my boot drive is now on a WD 800JB, Western Digital's 80GB special edition hard drive with an 8MB cache. Currently, it's not only the fastest hard drive on the market, but it's only slightly behind Seagate in the heat category as well. If you wanna spend extra money, spend it for one of these.