Maxtor Hard Disks

Maxtor used to have quite a reputation for spotty and poor-performing hard disks. Their CrystalMax line of drives have proven time and time again to be both slow and rather unreliable by contemporary standards. I'm sure those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of using one of those drives can attest to that fact.

However, in the recent years, Maxtor seemed to have picked themselves up by their bootstraps and turned out some pretty solid drives. Thanks to their DualWave dual-processor architecture and much better quality control, their DiamondMax Plus line of drives have garnered numerous speed records as well as praises for their reliability.

Personally, I have had many bad experiences with Maxtor CrystalMax drives in the past. That's why I never bought another Maxtor drive for years after that. However, when Maxtor launched their DiamondMax Plus 40 drive, I just couldn't resist buying one. Why?

Well, for one thing, it was the speed king then. True, Seagate and IBM had their 7200 rpm drives out as well. But the DiamondMax Plus 40 has better specs, a larger capacity and best of all, costs less than all the other competing drives. So, with some trepidation (but to the relief of my emaciated wallet), I bought it.

How did it fare? Well, to my surprise and relief, it was everything Maxtor said it would be. It was fast, quiet, spacious and reliable. No sign of the "CrystalMax syndrome"! I guess Maxtor finally decided that playing the part of an el cheapo hard disk manufacturer was no longer fun and cleaned their act up. Good for them and good for us, I'd say! :)

Back to the topic... Now, while Maxtor's DualWave technology improved the performance and reliability of their hard disks, they have also incorporated other technologies like ShockBlock and MaxSafe into the DiamondMax Plus hard disks. By chance, I discovered that Maxtor also silently added a new feature to a selected range of their hard disks. This new Silent Store technology, as was revealed to me, enables the PC manufacturers (as well as the end-user) to configure the hard disk to run silently or at maximum performance. Before we discuss that, we should first take a look at what acoustic management is really all about.