Maxtor's MaXLine III 250GB: Bringing 16MB Buffers and NCQ to Hard Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2004 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Maxtor's MaXLine III: NCQ Enabled
The first drive that we've had a chance to test with NCQ enabled is Maxtor's new MaXLine III, a brand new SATA drive that should be shipping in the coming months from Maxtor.
The MaXLine III uses 100GB platters and is available in both 250GB and 300GB flavors. The performance difference between the two is negligible and for this test, we used the 250GB version as that was what was provided to us. The 300GB version would have performed identically in our tests.
Maxtor is also going to be releasing a PATA version of the drive; however, the SATA version of the drive is Maxtor's first native Serial ATA solution with no PATA-to-SATA bridge.
Both the PATA and SATA versions of the drive feature a massive 16MB buffer, double the size of any of Maxtor's previous offerings as well as any competing 7200RPM drive available today. The larger buffer should help out in sequential access performance and when NCQ is enabled, random access performance should be improved as well.
The MaXLine III drives come with a full 3-year warranty; pricing and shipping information is not yet available.
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araczynski - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
yawn,if ncqprice <= raptorprice then
ncqproduct = possiblesuccess
else
whocares = 1
endif
I would say forget the spinning crap alltogether, why aren't we advnacing the solid state field storage? like that HyperDrive3 thing mentioned on the forums, THAT'S something to drool about.
Da3dalus - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
I wanna see a Raptor with that 16MB buffer ;)I'm not gonna put a Maxtor drive in my comp again no matter what they come up with, bad previous experiences...
Demon - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
The Seagate 7200.7 does support NCQ."The Barracuda 7200.7 is the industry's first hard drive family capable of supporting SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ)"
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea...
apriest - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
#4, I believe the drive has to support NCQ as well. Doesn't the Raptor support NCQ though?Zar0n - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Why did u not benchmark Seagate 7200.7 with NCQ enabled?1GB of ram? Most users have 256mb or 512mb.
What is the technical explanation for some many tests being slower with NCQ?
AnnoyedGrunt - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Hmmm, I thought the conclusion in this article gave too much credit to NCQ as far as boosting performance. It helped in one test which has significant multi-tasking, and that is by no means a bad thing, but I do wonder how often that scenario would arise. It seems to me that the human operating the computer would have a hard time keeping that many activities occuring @ the same time. Also, the Hitachi drive (as well as the other 7200 RPM drives) were all usually quite close in performance to the new Maxtor. Finally, in the game loading tests, the Raptor still had a significant lead, which is somewhat dissapointing for me since that is my main concern and I was hoping the Maxtor would do better in that arena.Well, I'll check out the storagereview article to see how that turned out.
-D'oh!
Sivar - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Hmm. The results using a Promise TCQ controller were quite different (See StorageReview.com's latest review).Jeff7181 - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Well it had to happen sometime... competition for the Raptor.