Get ready for the 80 gig drive from...

[Elie]

Maxtor 80GB Drive
Posted by Alex "Sharky" Ross: July 20th

Maxtor Corp. announced its new 80 GB drive, the DiamondMax 80 which will be available in August 2000. Leading the IDE high-capacity segment, the DiamondMax 80 is a four platter, 20 GB per platter hard drive solution that delivers 5400 RPM and is capable of transferring data at rates up to 100 MB per second.
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Can't wait to get my hands on a couple of those

Elie

[KRSESQ]

I'm giddy with anticipation!

[Brian Ellis]

This could be an interesting one. Do you think that it has its own striping mechanism or something, to achieve such rates at such a low rotational velocity? Presumably SCSI???

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Brian (the terrible)

[Walrus]

Well, I don't have the specifics in front of me, so I could be wrong. But I'm fairly sure the 100MB/sec refers to the fact that the drive is a UDMA/100 drive meaning it's peak transfer rate is 100mb/sec. I'm almost certain that it's sustained transfer rate is a lot less. (the IBM 75 gb 7200 RPM UltraATA/100 drive only sustains in the range of 40 MB/sec)

[dchip]

Walrus, I suspect you are right which is why I went with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40GB ATA-66 7200RPM. Brian, this one is probably the only Maxtor IDE HDD that has anything in it resembling SCSI... Later this year I will add another 40GB or larger Maxtor, but again it will need to be ATA-66.

I have to look at how fast a drive can spin as the best indicator of how well it will handle heavy demand for data transfer. I keep hearing that 5400RPM is plenty for video capture, yet a lot of people come here who are dropping excessive frames when capturing, but, very few of them have ATA-66 drives. 5400RPM may be fine when everything else in the box is up to snuff, but it is those borderline systems that can really benefit from ATA-66. Just my opinion.

[SteveR]

Other things that make a difference to the overall speed of a hard drive are the data density and the quality of the firmware and driver. Comparing rpm's alone doesn't tell the full story.

The 5400 rpm diamondmax 80 with 20 GB per platter ought, theoretically at least, give higher sustained transfer rates than the 10 GB per platter 7200 rpm diamondmax 40 plus.

Maxtor have also announced a 15 GB per platter 7200 rpm drive. Now a 20 GB per platter ATA100 7200 rpm drive should be very interesting when it arrives...