Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA Hard Disk
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA Hard Drive
Date: September 2003
Site: Maxtor
Price: £150 at time of writing
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The main connectors on the rear of the unit are the common Molex connector, the bank of jumpers then the Serial cable connector, and the Serial Power connector.
First Impressions:
Well from the outside it looks fairly standard and similar to a usual 3.5" drive. The drive we looked at come encased in a rubber slip which like many drive now do as it helps reduce any vibrations from the drive through the case.
Installation is similar to the older PATA standards you still need to secure it to a drive bay and you can change jumpers if needed or just use the good old cable select option. Connecting the cables is easier with SATA as the cables are much thinner and easier to connect than the standard IDE connectors.
The drive was fairly quiet and had a slight 'hum' to its operation. With the side of the case back on you could barely hear the drive, drives used to be notorious for noise and some drives are well known that the noise is a downside to the faster speeds.
Testing:
To Test this drive I used it with the following setup.
Athlon 1800 XP
Windows XP + SP1
Soyo Kt400
512Mb RAM 2100
Highpoint SATA PCI card 1520
I firstly decided to install XP from scratch so began the install by setting up the SATA card during the installation so that the card could see the drive and then installed XP as normal. My reasons for doing this to check how simple the install was from within XP set-up rather than a XP system already running, and to see if any problems arose.
