Maxtor 5T060H6 60GB Hard Drive Review
Maxtor is the old standard and a personal favorite
around here. Based on our experiences with their drives, longevity and quality
are pretty good. Even more importantly, the RMA service is fast and easy. When
comparing Maxtor drives to those made by IBM and Seagate, you'll generally find
the Maxtor drives less expensive, and slightly noisier.
If an ultra quiet hard drive is your desire, the
less expensive 5400RPM Samsung drives are worth noting, although we've seen that
the 7200RPM Maxtor drive posts faster read times.
| Maxtor 5T060H6 60GB Hard
Drive |
 |
 |
- MFG: Maxtor
- Model No: 5T0606H6
- Est Drive Cost: $140USD
- Cost/GB: ~$2.33 USD
- Features:
| Memory Type |
 | |
The Maxtor 5T060H6 uses 7ns PC100
(100MHz) Micron memory for its 2MB cache buffer. The drive uses an Ultra ATA/100
interface and the "DualWave" twin DSP processor to keep average
seek times under 9 ms.
Comparison
Drive Specs :
For
comparison we will be using a 5400RPM (60GB) Samsung drive with just two
platters. The Samsung drive boasts a higher areal density, but a lower
RPM and cache buffer. The Maxtor drive has 2MB of 7ns PC100 memory, where the SV6004H
has just 513Kb. Both drives are 60GB in size and have closely similar seek
times (8.7 vs. 8.9ms). The cost per GB is higher for the
Maxtor drive ($2.33 per GB).
| Parameter |
Maxtor 5T060H6 |
Samsung SV6004H |
|
| - Capacity |
60.0 GB |
60.0 GB |
|
| - Areal Density |
20 GB/platter |
30GB/platter |
|
| - Interface |
Ultra ATA/100 |
Ultra ATA/100 |
|
| - No. of Platters |
3 |
2 |
|
| - No. of Heads |
6 |
4 |
|
| - Buffer Size |
2 MB |
512 Kb |
|
| - Rotational Speed |
7200 RPM |
5400 RPM |
|
| - Acoustic Noise |
3.3 bels |
3.2 bels |
|
|
|
|
|
| - Avg. Rotational Latency |
4.17 ms |
5.56 ms |
|
| - Internal Data Rate (max) |
N/A |
402 Mbit/s |
|
| - Avg. Seek Time (Read) |
8.7 ms |
8.9 ms |
|
- Avg. Track-to-Track
Seek Time
(Read) |
1.0 ms |
0.8 ms |
|
| EST cost |
$140 USD |
$116 USD |
|
| Approx. price/GB |
$2.33 |
$1.93 |
|
|
|
|
|
Test Bed System
Specs:
Each of the test hard drives was cleanly formatted and
set to one partition of the maximum size. Hard drives were connected to the test
motherboard via an 80 wire ATA-100 compliant cable in groups of two. No other
devices (like CD ROM's for instance) were connected to the same IDE channel as
that of the drives being tested.
| Test System
Specs |
 |
| Computer: |
Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz
MSI 845Pro Motherboard
ProLink GF2 Ti200
Video card
TwinMos PC166 256MB SDRAM
10/100 Realtek NIC
Enermax
430W PSU |
| Software: |
Windows 2000 SP2
All devices had their respectable latest drivers
|
| Benchmarks: |
HD Tach 2.61
Winbench 99 V1.2
Sisoft Sandra 2001
Le |
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