Maxtor 7200/40gb on Sale for $249 @ CompUSA

[cjyo~]

No, I don't work for them.

CompUSA has an in-store sale this weekend on the new Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 7200/40g drive: $249 (after $50 instant rebate) +tax. If you're in the market for a monster video drive, I think this is a good deal.

I have been waiting for this drive for a couple months and I just picked one (almost 2) up today. I don't know if the $50 rebate is a one-time offer, but I haven't seen a cheaper price anywhere.

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Please visit http://spincycle.n3.net - My System: Celeron 300a(@450/2v),ABit BH6, 128mb ram, Win98, Marvel G200TV, Diamond MX300, IBM 8.4gb UDMA Deskstar system drive, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI, 2x 9gb Seagate Barracuda UWSCSI video drives, Hitachi GD-2500 DVD-Rom, UltraPlex CD-Rom, Plexwriter CD-recorder, Viewsonic PT775, Soundworks 4.1 speakers

[DrMordrid]

Two of those on a Fasttrak66 should be quite a beast. Maybe I'll swap out those 10g IBM's on the other machine. HELL, I"ll put that setup in this one and let the wife have the 40g ;-))

Dr. Mordrid

[Questor]

Picked one up at Best Buy and they price matched the CompUSA price of $249. Great drive and great price.

[wkulecz]

Minor warning about compusa and the maxtor 40GB drive.

On some motherboards drives greater than 32GB lock the BIOS and prevent booting (can't even get into setup on some of them I've seen).

CompUSA has a 15% "restocking fee" (at least here in Houston) I specifically asked if it would apply to the above situation and they said yes, so I left.

Best Buy will match their price and give you a full refund if you have such a BIOS problem (within 14 days). One can hope for a BIOS update, but depending on your motherboard its a crap shoot.

Hey Doc, does the promise BIOS/drivers handle individual drives greater than 32GB without problems?

--wally.

[SteveR]

There is hope, even if your motherboard BIOS is limited to 32GB.

I ran into the 32GB limit with a 5400 rpm 40GB Maxtor drive on my Tyan motheboard. After installing the cylinder limitation jumper, running the Maxtor jumpon utility (on their website) and preparing the drive using their Maxblast diskette (which installed an EZ-BIOS overlay) the drive worked fine. Win98 recognized the full capacity. The drive was good for capture up to about 7 MB/s before dropping frames, but this was the write speed before the CPU utilization maxed out during capture (using a K6 III 450).