Maxtor 160

[drdan]

My daughters HP computer was having problems and I think I determined it was the hard drive. I put an old 2GB HDD I had in the computer and it started working fine agian so hopefully that was the problem. We went shopping and I found a Maxtor 160GB ATA 133 drive with the 8MB cache for $99 at Office Depot. I thought that was an excellent deal and decided to buy it for my self and give my daughter my WDC 80GB 8MB cache special edition drive that I love.

Anyone have any experience or heard any reviews of this drive?

[iisbob]

Well, i can tell you the brand is good. :)

You should also be aware that unless you're running sp1 on XP; you'll have to get a 48 bit LBA update to allow windows to recognize the full 160GB's, since windows has a native 137 GB limitation.

You may also want to verify that your system's BIOS recognizes the drive properly; tho i shouldn't think would be a problem with most modern boards.

[Budfred]

Maxtor makes decent drives and that is a good price...:)

80gigs is quite an upgrade from 2gigs!!:) :p

[drdan]

I just put the 2 GB in to test the computer. It came with a 40 GB drive. I've been using the Maxtor 160, 133 ATA for a few hours and it is noticeably faster than the WDC 80GB 8MB cache 100 ATA drive. It is much louder though. The sound of it seeking sounds kind of like fabric tearing and is annoying after the almost inaudible rumble of the WDC Special Edition. Oh well, I told my daughter not to get rid of the hard drive without letting me know, I may get it back yet. I think the Special Edition series of WDC is considerably better made which is why they still have a three year warranty when everyone else has gone to one.

[drdan]

I do have all the XP upgrades except one small one that was causing problems. I kept the largest partion to 125 GB to avoid any problems with the 137 GB limit though.

[Budfred]

You might want to run the diagnostics from Maxtor before you get that drive too set up. I have a Maxtor in my box here and it is very quiet...

[Beta Geek]

I have that exact Maxtor 160GB ATA133 drive and it works great! I also got a really good deal with it (about $100 after rebates), and it came with a nifty Promise ATA133 PCI controller card to boot! So far it has worked great. I wouldn't worry too much about the noise because the stepper motor in mine is also quite loud. I also have a Maxtor 40GB ATA100 and a 30GB ATA133 and both of those are quieter the 160GB.

Beta Geek

[drdan]

Thanks, I'm getting used to it, I was concerned that it shouldn't be that loud and there was something wrong. The WDC 80GB "Special Edition" was the best hard drive I've had and was almost inaudible, even when having to do some heavy work. I may even trade my daughter back for it.

When I got the WDC 80GB I noticed a great increase in speed. This was espcially true working with big files like high resolution pictures. The speed bringing up those up to view was at least doubled, maybe tripled. The Maxtor 160 is even faster. I rarely hear about hard drives being critical to speed and performance though, why is that? It's obviously known and the reviews about speed increases with the 8MB cache drives were glowing. Most people though, including a lot of overclockers, seem to largely ignore hard drive speed.

[Beta Geek]

Every once in a while you'll hear someone raving about HD speeds, but not very often, as you pointed out. I believe this is because the hard drive is one on the worst speed bottlenecks in a modern computer. Magnetic media just can't keep up with modern semiconductor technologies, but semiconductor technology is still way too expensive for the mass storage that magnetic media can offer. Only recently has flash media become affordable to the average consumer.

Speed was the one of the first things I noticed when I installed the Maxtor 160 with the ATA133 controller. Up until that drive, I had only used drives that were ATA 100, 5400RPM and lower.

Beta Geek