Summary

If you are looking for a high-capacity hard drive with the best performance around, Maxtor’s Diamond Plus 9 160GB SATA drive is your final destination. With its Serial ATA interface that offers 150 MB/sec transfer speeds and a large 8MB buffer, this drive easily stands above the rest earning our coveted Editors Choice Award with a perfect 10 score.

　　If you are looking for a high-capacity hard drive with the best performance around, Maxtor’s Diamond Plus 9 160GB SATA drive is your final destination. With its Serial ATA interface that offers 150 MB/sec transfer speeds and a large 8MB buffer, this drive easily stands above the rest earning our coveted Editors Choice Award with a perfect 10 score.

　　True SATA performance

　　If you have been following reviews which cover various SATA hard drives, then you know that there are plenty of drives on the market which are not living up to the performance which Serial ATA 150 is promising. Maxtor’s 6Y160M0 on the other hand proves that speeds of 150 MB/sec can be reached and thus gives us faith that the SATA spec was created in the name of better performance.

　　The 6Y160M0 Diamond Max Plus 9 drive we received from Maxtor was not in the retail packaging which consumers would be familiar with from retailers, rather is packaged in white box OEM fashion. This means that no documentation, cables or drivers where included. So this review will be focusing strictly on the drives reliability and performance.

　　If you are buying this drive as a white box product make sure to download Maxtor’s Maxblast program for formatting and partitioning the drive. Those buying the retail version of this drive will get a copy included on a bootable CD. If you have an operating system older than Windows XP with service pack 1 or Windows 2000 with the latest service pack, then you will most likely have to partition this drive into separate partitions. This is because Windows operating systems other than what were mentioned will not support drives larger than 137GB (or smaller depending on which operating system you have).

　　Our test system consists of the following:

　　AMD AthlonXP 1700+ with stock heat sink/fanAbit AT7MAX2 motherboard512mb of PC2700 Crucial DDR MemoryLeadtek Geforce 4 MX video cardPlextor 504A DVD WriterEnermax 350W whisper power supply

　　The Maxtor 6Y160M0 drive proved to be incredibly fast in our tests. In our Winbench99 tests the 6Y160M0 showed very fast sustained transfer rates making this an excellent drive for audio and video storage, where you need to maintain consistant substantial transfer rates. Another good sign was that our HD Tach 2.61 tests rated this Maxtor drive better than any other drive we have tested making this an excellent choice for everyday computing tasks, no doubt due to the massive 8MB buffer. The 6Y160M0 tested 11.4ms access time in Winbench99 which is very impressive. CPU utilization is about 9.5% which is average.

　　Hitting it hard

　　The Maxtor 6Y160M0 promises to be reliable and is shock rated to a hefty 60G while operating and an outstanding 300G while turned off. The 6Y160MO is also very quiet although not as quiet as Seagate’s Serial ATA drives, but performance is what matters to most and that is what the Maxtor Diamond Plus series is all about. Overclockers will want to watch out for the amount of heat put off by the 6Y160M0 as it puts off more heat than most drives.

　　Maxtors warranty includes replacement in 2 business days, 24-hour online and e-mail support and phone support Monday through Friday.

　　Conclusion

　　The 6Y160M0 currently offers the fastest sustained throughput of any 160GB drive we have tested with good seek times. If you are looking for a fast and reliable storage solution, the Maxtor 6Y160M0 offers the best solution currently on the market.

　　

Performance

Measured in kilobytes per second; longer bars indicate better performance

　　Measured in megabytes per second; longer bars indicate better performance

　　You can see how much of a performance increase the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M) drive holds over the Maxtor DiamondMax D540X 160Gb drive. Keep in mind that the D540X drive has a speed of 5400RPM compared to the 7200RPM speed of the 6Y160M0 Drive. The D540X also has a 2mb buffer and ATA 100 transfer speeds. Both the D540X and 6Y160M0 drives had read burst speeds off the chart, over 80 megabytes per second. The 6Y160M0 tested 11.4ms access time in Winbench99 which is very impressive. CPU utilization is about 9.5% which is average.