Maxtor ata 133 drives

sterling

Banned
Sep 18, 2002
445
0
0
HI

I bought a Maxtor ata 133 drive on sale at Office Depot awhile back. I'm having second thoughts about this purchase. I saw an article in the PCWorld magazine and it rated the ata133 drives near last. Supposedly their slowwwwwwwww. However, i saw an article in Geek.com and the author there said it was the best hes ever used. Some of the worst purchases of my life has been the result of reading the pcworld magazine. I was wondering if any of you guys have used the ata133 drives and what u thought? Also, I thought buying a retail version of their drive i would be guaranteed to have the liquid bearings. Naught, i talked to customer service and the only way u can tell is if the package is open, but then i wont be able to return it.

thanks
 

kalster

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2002
7,355
6
81
frankly
this hdd is really slow
i have an ibm dekstar 40 gig and its noticably faster than my 80 gig maxtro ata 133 driver, both are 7200 rpm, i am using a high point tech ata 133 controller card, dont get the drive, get a wd if u can
 

Duvie

Elite Member
Feb 5, 2001
16,215
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ATA133 for the most point is a huge marketing scam as we all know these drives do not even due ata66 standards for average transfer speeds.

I would think if the ata133 is noticeably slower then the ata100 there may be a problem...Is maxtor running some sort of acoustical (limiting noise) feature that is degrading speed and thus performance???


I think my wd 40gb drive ata100 is definitely zippier then my maxtor ata45g ata100 drive but the 40gb was newer and based on 20gb platters....

maxtor in hdtach used to get 38mb in transfer and like 84mb burst...wd gets 41mb transfer and pegged in burst speed at the highest shown.
 

earthman

Golden Member
Oct 16, 1999
1,653
0
71
Every Maxtor I've tried seems slow, but how it works in the real world is what matters. Benchmarks don't always tell the whole story, but a Maxtor would probably not be my first choice.
 

FordFreak

Senior member
Oct 2, 2001
333
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I have one of the new maxtor fluid bearing drives. Not sure if it is 133 or 100 since some places say one thing and others say the other. I think it is 133 though. For pcmark2002 the score is a lot higher with this drive than my ata100 maxtor drive. Seems to be faster also.
 

apoppin

Lifer
Mar 9, 2000
34,890
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alienbabeltech.com
I also got in on one of those OD 40GB Maxtor ATA 133 HDs (sadly I paid $19 after MIR having a 'lesser' B&M coupon). I believe it is the "fluid" bearing and it scores significantly higher in PCMark than my "old" Maxtor 30GB ATA 100.

It has a 3 year warranty and at least you don't read post after post deploring the reliability of Maxtor drives. ;)
 

rbV5

Lifer
Dec 10, 2000
12,632
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I use Maxtor ata 133 drives for my main OS drive (60GB), and 2 X 40GB in a RAID 0 array for video capture/editing. These drives are fast, fairly quiet and trouble free. Don't sweat your purchase, Maxtor makes good HD's, also you can distinguish vetween the two models of drive look at the second to last digit of the model#. The fluid dynamic bearing drives have 'L' and the ball bearing drives have 'J'.
 

deejayshakur

Platinum Member
Aug 7, 2000
2,584
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my d740x just ERASED ITSELF. it's an 80gb i got a little less than a year ago. i had 2 partitions, 50gb worth of video caps, etc. i wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary but when i tried to open a folder, my system crashed and after a reboot, no partitions showed.
 

Pariah

Elite Member
Apr 16, 2000
7,357
20
81
Originally posted by: deejayshakur
my d740x just ERASED ITSELF. it's an 80gb i got a little less than a year ago. i had 2 partitions, 50gb worth of video caps, etc. i wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary but when i tried to open a folder, my system crashed and after a reboot, no partitions showed.

Before you do anything to drive, run out and buy norton utilities. Boot to a DOS prompt and run the DOS version of NDD, I've saved quite a few drives that mystically lost all partition information after crashes this way. I'm not going to guarantee you anything, but it's certainly worth a try if you want that data back.
 

DaFinn

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2002
4,725
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Maxtor drives are high quality and reliable! I use them exclusively where I work + at home! After having tons of troubles wit other IDE drives, I've never had a Maxtor die on me! The D740X series and new 8+ and 9+ series drives are as fast as any drive out there with similar specs (=7200 rpm + 2Mb cache or 8Mb for 9+ series). You WILL NOT see the difference between your Maxtor and whatever you switch to (w. similar specs).

You want fast, get SCSI!


-DaFinn
 

deejayshakur

Platinum Member
Aug 7, 2000
2,584
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i did inded use norton disc doctor (mysteriously, i didn't read pariah's post until AFTER i recovered the data).

IT FUCKN WORKS!!!! im so amazed... really. YAY!

so what exactly happened? my friend said it was probably a write-error that destroyed the partition table and norton fixed it. AMAZED... sigh (of relief).