Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 6Y160M0 Review

[dang]

Checkout our latest review of the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 6Y160M0 (http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review48.html)The 6Y160M0 currently offers the fastest sustained throughput of any 160 GB drive we have tested with good seek times.

[scriptures4life]

here is what we emailed so far everybody:

Good article.



I was wondering if I could get your thoughts…



The Abit NF7-S includes ‘Serillel’ adapters, and you can purchase them and also ‘Serillel 2’ adapters for CDROMS etc. I'd like to know how 2 Maxtor DM+9 PATA Drives on Serillels compare to 2 of the real SATAs (the same line of HDs). If there's no difference then this could be a big money saver. I am considering the 80GB versions.

Thanks for your ideas.

Dan

________________________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ .. .. .. . . .


Hi Dan,



I am not sure I follow your question. The serial adapters you are referring to let you use regular IDE peripherals such as your CDROM and/or hard drive on a serial bus controller on your hard drive. The serial ATA interface will not make non-SATA components as fast as native SATA components. Does that make sense? It is just an interface converter. The 2 Maxtor DM+9 PATA drives using a serial converter will not be as fast as the DM+9 6Y160M0 SATA drive. It will still run at a max burst speed of ATA 133, not SATA 150MB/s. If you have the SATA interface on your computer, then my recommendation would be to take full advantage of it, it simply rocks.

By the way, I have heard that the Seagate SATA drives are incredibly slow compared to the Maxtor’s.

Hope that helps! :)

Ian Bell

Thanks for the response

The ‘serillel’ adapters- more info here:

Serillel 1 - http://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/news1.jsp?pDOCNO=en_0208161

Serillel 2 - http://www.abit-usa.com/news/2003/20030425b.php

It just seemed to me that if I could use 2x 6Y080P0 drives on those Serillels in a RAID-0 config then this would be almost the same as running 2x 6Y080M0 SATA natives. I guess there might be a small perf. Drop, but I dunno. This Abit NF7-S v2.0 mobo looks sweet, and I’m pretty sure that is what I will use to run all this. It was reviewed here http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/motherboards/ABIT_NF7_v2.0_11.html FYI

Thanks again

Dan

Do you have a price budget you are trying to stay within? I am running the ABIT AT7Max 2 board with AGP 8X and Serial ATA in RAID and I love it. Come post in our forums Dan so we can chat there. I am sure we can help you out!

Ian Bell

[scriptures4life]

I'd like to get the best deal, and also the best performance. Here is what I have spec'ed so far:

Case Antec Lanboy 93.86
CPU either 1700 or 2500 123.85
HSF water of some kind, maybe the Asetek WaterChill or Thermaltake Aquarius II 288.387
MB NF7-S v2.0 97
RAM 512Mb TwinMOS PC3200 DDR (2x256) 146
VIDEO ATI AIW RADEON 9700 PRO 342
HDD 2x MAXTOR 6Y120M0 DIAMONDMAX PLUS 9 120GB HARD DRIVE SERIAL ATA 8MB 7200RPM 277.9
FDD 22
CDRW Lite-On CDRW 48.99
DVD MSI MS-8216M 32
Serillel 2 adapter 28.99
Monitor SAMSUNG 957MB 287
Goo G-751 MicroSI 8
3d Glasses Wireless E-D® Glasses 99


SUM: 1894.977

sorry it is a bit misaligned i copied from excel

so there we go

Dan

* changed HSF info

[Ioman]

Hi Dan,

Glad to see you made it to the forums. There should be a lot of people here that can help answer your questions. The Abit NF7-S is a killer board. Like I said before, I would still recommend getting a true SATA drive if you can afford it.

[RageSlave]

Welcome to our forums
As I understand your question above, you are wondering about the performance of SATA drives across a PCI interface? is that correct? I will post to that effect and you stop me if you've heard this one.

First off Native boards will be faster in so much as the data has a CRC error check as it leaves the drive and again when it reaches the other end of the cable. this is incorporated into seriel technology by default and Seriel 300 and 600 are already in the works. Also seriel is hot swappable much like firewire or USB devices are. Those are some advantages.

Current IDE devices and controllers themselves, even ATA 133 have a 133 MB burst speed rating but rarely run at such speeds alone. The RAID 0 config has gotten popular with the high end PC crowd as of late because since the average IDE drive will run a constant at about 60 MBs per second, you can get darn close to top performance consistantly in a RAID 0 config. SATA burst speed as you know is 150 and certain devices will allow you to reach those speeds.
High point makes a converter for IDE drives that attatches to the back of the drive of an IDE HDD and converts the signal to serial at the drive. If you are using your older drives, this is the way to go if you use a MOBO that has seriel interface natively. You should realize 150 speeds though latency will increase some what. A small performance hit I would think. If an add on card is used, then certain other things will happen. First off a converter to serial to an addon card will be some what of a lost cause as far as gaining performance as you will double your performance hit at each end and will only realize 150 speeds across the cable where you cannot see it in the machine. If you use a card, with a PCI interface you will also suffer if the system bus is busy, especially if you have bus mastering going on above the card slot say in your sound card for example.

[RageSlave]

The hercules PCI slot was released for this very reason and incorporates a separate capacitor to provide a constant 3.3 volts to the PCI card so that slot to minimize signal weakness when the bus is full. Read about it Here (http://english.aopen.com.tw/tech/techinside/Hercules%20PCI.htm)
That will help increase the integrity of the data and keep the card fully powered at all times. At least in theory. I have not had alot of experience with AOpen boards, so as to their reliability I can only say that I cannot remember any significant problems.
So back to it.
Basically if you are using older drives then you are better off with a converter with integrated seriel on board. Small performance hit here. 2 drives in raid 0 will perform well here.

IDE HDD to seriel cable to PCI addon controller card, Here you are probably better off with IDE raid 0 with 2 IDE drives as the performance hit above will be at both ends a nd since athe IDE controller on the Mother board itself is a 32 bit device, it is a wash.

SATA HDD to addon card should theoritically out perform identical IDE drives of the same size. This has also proved to be the case in numerous review sites I've been to.

SATA drives with native connectors is of course best or you can wait until the technology ihas had a chance to evolve to 300 in a year or so, then that should prove to be the best of course.

I peronally run 2 WD 80 gigs w/8MB cache in riad 0 and I rarely see 133 unless I am running and benchmark from the HDD. This setup has proven to be very effective in itself on the same high point 374 controller. No complaints. Theoretically your setup would smoke mine though. I am converting to SATA soon for testing purposes and it is unfortunate that it is not yet complete. But stay tuned for that.

Does any of my rambling help at all?

[scriptures4life]

thanks for the input.

the NF7-S is an Abit not Aopen Mobo. I realize that there might be some perf drop using the converters, but I want to quantify it. The NF7-S has an onboard Silicon Image SATA controller and should do RAID-0.

I know that the DM+9 drive is good, but I would like to know how well the native SATA drives compare to the IDE ones on the Abit Serillel converters.

Dan

[RageSlave]

Originally posted by scriptures4life
I'd like to get the best deal, and also the best performance. Here is what I have spec'ed so far:

Case Antec Lanboy 93.86
CPU either 1700 or 2500 123.85
HSF water of some kind, maybe the Asetek WaterChill or Thermaltake Aquarius II 288.387
MB NF7-S v2.0 97
RAM 512Mb TwinMOS PC3200 DDR (2x256) 146
VIDEO ATI AIW RADEON 9700 PRO 342
HDD 2x MAXTOR 6Y120M0 DIAMONDMAX PLUS 9 120GB HARD DRIVE SERIAL ATA 8MB 7200RPM 277.9
FDD 22
CDRW Lite-On CDRW 48.99
DVD MSI MS-8216M 32
Serillel 2 adapter 28.99
Monitor SAMSUNG 957MB 287
Goo G-751 MicroSI 8
3d Glasses Wireless E-D® Glasses 99


SUM: 1894.977

sorry it is a bit misaligned i copied from excel

so there we go

Dan

* changed HSF info

Here is a deal on your mobo refurbed (http://www.excaliberpc.com/product_info1.php?cPath=156_222&products_id=866)

Good luck!

[Ioman]

Originally posted by scriptures4life
thanks for the input.

the NF7-S is an Abit not Aopen Mobo. I realize that there might be some perf drop using the converters, but I want to quantify it. The NF7-S has an onboard Silicon Image SATA controller and should do RAID-0.

I know that the DM+9 drive is good, but I would like to know how well the native SATA drives compare to the IDE ones on the Abit Serillel converters.

Dan

Dan,

If you want to know the honest truth, Maxtors Serial ATA drives from what I understand are actually the same ATA 133 models, but with an integrated SATA interface thus bumping the speed up. Seagate touts their drives as being "real" SATA drives built from the ground up, but in all honesty are slower due to the 60GB platter size versus the 80GB platter size on the Maxtor SATA hard drives.

I can tell you now that the native SATA Maxtor drive WILL be faster than a non-native drive using a serial converter. The speed probably will not be a huge difference, but it theoretically should be faster.

[[BM]Crusher]

I have two old 40GB hard drives in striped RAID for my Windows partition...... they are WD400BB 7200rpm 2MB cache and are about 2 years old now....

I have migrated this RAID array across 4 different mainboards now (using 3 different RAID controller chips) and this drive combination is currently running on my Silicon Serial ATA raid controller using 2x ABIT Serillel2 adaptors..... I have an ABIT IS7-G mainboard.....

I can confidently say that the performance of my array has improved now that it is on the Serial ATA RAID controller.... Using PCMark2002 my array used to score around the 1100 to 1200 point mark.... now on the SATA RAID controller it scores around 1500-1600 marks.... Sandra scores have also improved, as have HDTach overall throughput figures.... seek times are still the same though obviously....

I own a computer shop and I am the head technician... we have built heaps of PC's based on the ABIT NF7-S v2.0 mainboard and I love it! It is my favorite of all the NForce2 boards that I have worked with.... We just about always use IDE drives on the SATA controller using the Serillel2 adaptor provided with the board (unless customer buys SATA drive obviously)...... There is a definite performance benefit over using the IDE controller (mainly due to lower CPU utilisation, however SATA has a lower latency controller compared to parallel IDE controllers)

Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 SATA drives are definitely the fastest available so far at 7200rpm high capacity (the WD Raptor 36GB 10000rpm smashes it, but you pay through the nose for it and its a small drive).... Forget about Seagate serial ata drives as they are slower than the Maxtors and cost more (in Australia they do anyway).....

The only other mainboards I would even consider (apart from the ABIT NF7-S v2.0) are the pair of kick ass boards from Gigabyte.... however both the Gigabyte boards are more expensive than the ABIT....
GA-7N400-Pro2 w/ Gigabit LAN, SATA RAID, IDE RAID, Optical
GA-7NNXP Ultra w/ Gigabit LAN, 10/100 LAN, SATA RAID, IDE RAID, DPS (6-phase power circuit), Optical

As far as using PCI SATA controllers go, versus onboard controllers, I cannot see any difference? You say that the onboard controllers would "obviously" be faster... but why? The onboard SATA controllers still uses the PCI BUS (such as the Silicon Image controller on the ABIT)... ON-CHIP CONTROLLERS are a different story though, as they are built into the South Bridge of the mainboard chipset (such as the Intel RAID controller on my board built into the ICH5-R chipset)

One thing I do need some help with though :)
I just brought home another Serillel2 adaptor to hook up my dvd drive on the SATA controller.... my sony 16x dvd is being detected by the controller and shows up in my BIOS but windows doesnt see ****! :) help!

[Cloud]

Originally posted by [BM]Crusher
One thing I do need some help with though :)
I just brought home another Serillel2 adaptor to hook up my dvd drive on the SATA controller.... my sony 16x dvd is being detected by the controller and shows up in my BIOS but windows doesnt see ****! :) help!

I would not use it on your DVD drive if you have some free IDE controllers to use. I have heard of this problem happening a lot.

[reparent]

[BM]Crusher: I'v just read your post and wanted to thank you for posting it as it was very informative.
I just got my Abit NF7-S Board which I haven't setup yet but plan to do today.
Makes me even more happy to hear such good comments on this board.
I will be using an Athlon XP1800+ with OCZ 3200 512 DDR with this board along with an average video card (Saphire ATI 9100) which I believe is the equivalent to a 8500VE. Still good enough to play any games out there right now at good resolution.

I currently have an Asus A7V KT133a board running a Duron 1.2 with PC133 RAM (512MB).

I am getting a score of 5600 in 3D Mark 2001SE.
I think I should get it up to around 7000 when my new stuff.
The upgrades will be
1. An increase in FSB speed from 100 to 266
- CPU at 266
- RAM at 266
- FSB at 266

chipset from VIA to Nforce2
CPU Speed from 1.2 Ghz to 1.5 Ghz

When I get everything working stable I will start to O'clock a bit, I have good cooling and will also be using a good Vantec HSF for my CPU.