My new Maxtor hard drive came with "Maxblast" software. Should I use it or is it not needed?

[aic]

I got the Maxtor Diamondmax plus 80GB HD with 8 MB cache.

Do I need that software that came with it?

I am going to use this drive for my operating system win xp home. I do not want to copy the entire old hard drive and it operating system to the new one. I will copy some personal files.

I asked Dell their opinion on loading the operating system on the new drive and they gave me this link.

I have a Dimension 8250.

Thanks.

 

[Gunbuster]

Boot from the XP cd, follow the instructions

 

[Megatomic]

No, you will not need the software for such a modern computer. Your OS and your motherboard both support drives larger than 80GB in size.

 

[pillage2001]

Use the utility to disable the acoustic management. Your HDD comes with acoustic management on by default.

 

[John]

Originally posted by: pillage2001
Use the utility to disable the acoustic management. Your HDD comes with acoustic management on by default.

Is this standard for all Maxtor DM+9 drives?

 

[pillage2001]

Originally posted by: John

Originally posted by: pillage2001
Use the utility to disable the acoustic management. Your HDD comes with acoustic management on by default.

Is this standard for all Maxtor DM+9 drives?

I think it's the standard for ALMOST all DM+8 and DM+9 drive. So far, I've gotten the Dm+9 and DM+8, all the drives I got has Acoustic management on.

 

[Pauli]

Originally posted by: SeekingTao
No, you will not need the software for such a modern computer. Your OS and your motherboard both support drives larger than 80GB in size.

What about 120GB+ drives? What is needed for a slightly older system (P4 Northwood) to work with the really large IDE drives?

 

[RickH]

The drive is probably not formated. Use Maxblast for that. R

 

[Brian48]

I just use plain ol' FDISK for all my HDDs whether they're Maxtors or WD's.

FYI, Acoustic Management is set to ON by default for all Maxtors since they first started coming out with this feature. I just leave it on. I've never noticed that big of a difference with it disabled/enabled. Noise level does to go up with it disabled though.

 

[Cat13]

I have noticed a small performance increase with AM off, haven't really got a chance to listen to noise yet. Maybe this weekend when I am doing some video editing and work the drives hard I can get a better take.

 

[NesuD]

there are 3 acoustic management settings. Quiet, which makes drive accesses totally silent tp my ears but increases random access times to about 22-23 ms. Fast, which is still relatively quiet but i can faintly hear drive accesses random access times at about 13.4 ms. Acoustic management off, which was the noisiest mode to me. Random access times were pretty much the same as the fast setting. In my opinion leave it to the fast setting since the random access times are as good as turning it off all together and it is a bit quieter. If you want a really silent drive set it to quiet. contrary to what has previously posted in this thread while the drives ship with acoustic management already enabled it is set to run the fast setting which is not the quiet setting. If you want the quiet setting you need to run Amset /quiet.