Maxtor DiamondMax 60gb Hard Drive

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It is faster than my ten gig, and subjectively seems very fast in boot time and program loads. It's a bit odd to judge because without sound I'm often thinking the program locked up without hearing the chugging of a drive. This is not one of those highly scientific reviews, I recommend looking at Storage Review for excellent hard drive reviews and specs, it's the best.

The specs on this drive are 66mb transfer (I don't have UDMA 66 so I run it at 33), <9.0ms seek time. The platters in the drive hold 15 gigs each, where the 7200 RPM 40 gig holds 10 gig per platter. So in theory, the transfer rate should be similar, because around the same amount of data is going across the 60 at 5400 RPM because it's 1.5 times more dense (did you follow that??)

One word of caution. I had all kinds of problems transferring my data to it. First, I tried using xcopy from a DOS box, which is what I always did in the past, but after 8 gigs or so it bombed windows! Same thing using the windows GUI. I ended up copying the disk in a few passes grabbing smaller chunks of subdirectories. I think Windows 98 has a problem with large quantities of files, or perhaps the size. 8.7 gig is a boundary that can be trouble.

Worst the included Maxblast software has a copy utility, and it not only bombed after 8.7 gig, but corrupted the destination as well (it said I had used 50gb!). Nasty!!!

Finally, your system BIOS may have limits and need an update for a drive this size. Some only do 8.7 gigs, and others only (only?) reach 32 gig. So check on that first. But finally after all the trouble, at 3:30am my drive was set, whew.

I picked the drive up at CompUSA for around $300, which is about what I saw it for everywhere else (lowest was $270 online, but add shipping as of 6/00).

If you have any questions about this or need more info on drive buzzwords, post in the forum!