Maxtor DiamondMax 60gb Hard Drive

By Rick LaBanca

OK, sixty gigabytes? am I insane? Well I thought ten gigs was infinity and yet I filled it, easy when you have a lot of software development tools and video capturing.

Regardless, I'm posting this review not because of capacity. One of my two drives (one is ten, the other four gig) was not winding up reliably. Since I wanted to get my case cooler and quieter anyway, I decided on a larger drive to replace two now that one was acting up.

One goal is QUIET! It seems that even other users not doing home automation too are looking for the adjective "quiet" as a good feature for a PC. I leave mine on and it's in a main room, not buried in the cellar so quiet is good. Previously I let the power management wind down the drives after 10 minutes, but that makes speech from HomeSeer delay if it has to wind up.

My first attempt was a Maxtor 40gb 7200 RPM drive. Now that's a fast drive, and I thought why not go for some speed, I hear they are fairly quiet. Not so! 7200 RPM drives are faster than the normal 5200, and you would expect additional spin noise, but this one was at such a frequency that I began to pull out my hair as I was getting it ready, back to the store with it!!

So I got the 60gb instead. I had heard about Maxtor claiming a quiet mode feature. Upon further research, I found that they lower the seek rate (speed at which the heads move) to get it quieter. It can be set to three levels, from slowest to fastest, by computer distributor, but the default is slowest (quietest). The utility to change it is on the Maxtor site but I don't know if it is non destructive or not, so I won't play with that just now.

To my surprise it really is quiet! The spin noise is very low but the surprising thing is no head noise at all. I had my ear to it and could barely pick up a sound! In the case I can't if it's running, no lie, I would call the seeking noise virtually silent.

On to the specs-->