take a look at the STorage Review database for comparisons..
in some synthetic tests, the Western Digital drive does well (these tests are simply ones that take disk access patterns and puts a drive through them, and from what I can tell, it measures the speed at which it accomplishes these tasks), and in others the IBM 60GXP drive beats the Maxtor, even though the access times are better for the maxtor.
just take a look at the access times that Storage Review gets with the latest maxtor drive to see if you'll see much of an improvement over your current Maxtor drive (you can use their database to compare if the review doesn't have your drive in it). if it's more than a millisecond difference, you might see a bit of a difference, it's tough to say for sure.
the difference between the Western Digital drive and the Maxtor drive in measured access times (not synthetic tests, just a pure test in access times) is around 1.3 milliseconds, which is a fairly large difference for a top of the line drive (in other words, it does not bode too well for the Western digital drive). the Western digital manages to beat the maxtor in transfer rates by what appears to be 2 megs/second from top to bottom.
the performance difference between the two drives will probably end up with the Maxtor on top. why? well the Western digital takes 110.65% as long as the Maxtor drive to get TO a file, whereas it reads data 109.84% (at it's best where the percentage is highest) as fast as the maxtor drive.. if the files took as long to read as they did to access, these drives would be in a dead heat, however most files take longer to GET TO than to actually read (at 25.4 megs/second the speed of the Maxtor drive transfer rate at its worst, a 100kb file is transfered in about 0.00393700787401574803149606299212598 seconds, or 3.9 milliseconds. as you can see, the average access times change things more than the overall speed when you are dealing with files that are 100kb in size or smaller on IDE drives (cause it takes them an average of more than 12 milliseconds to get to the file)..
the majority of files on your hard drive end up to be smaller than 100kb.. so, what does that mean to you now? the Maxtor drive is on average a bit faster than the Western Digital drive. you might not notice a difference between the two when operating your computer though.
one thing that changes things, is the large cache on the western Digital drive (the SE version of it that is). it's hard to say how many hits it gets, but it is I think about 4 times more likely to get a hit than the cache on the Maxtor drive (cause it's 4x as big). when it DOES get a hit, that catapults the Western Digital drive ahead.. so the lead that the maxtor drive gets can evaporate and possibly turn into a loss, simply due to the large cache.. it's hard to say.
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