Maxtor DiamondMax 54098U8

With so many ongoing changes in the hard disk market, it's good to see Maxtor producing such a wide variety of drives. Of course the company only produces EIDE drives so it needs a wide range of products.

The 54098U8 is the latest addition to the DiamondMax family, boasting an unformatted capacity of 40Gb. This makes it the largest EIDE drive on test this month, although it's only 2.5Mb larger than the IBM Deskstar DPTA-353750. This huge capacity is stored across eight platters that spin at 7,200rpm, the maximum EIDE speed this month. Much like the award-winning IBM Deskstar DPTA-353750, the DiamondMax 54098U8 also sports a large 2Mb PC100 SDRAM data buffer. This is used to store frequently accessed data to improve performance. Other features include support for UltraDMA/66, although this doesn't help performance over UltraDMA/33 in a single-drive environment.

Overall performance in our suite of real-world office application-based benchmarks was impressive, with a score of 1.108, even faster than some of the SCSI drives. Maxtor-specific innovations include the DualWave processor system for improved performance, and ShockBlock, which is supposed to increase resistance to physical damage.

Ultimately, it's a tough call between the 54098U8 and the IBM, but the latter won thanks to its superior build quality and reliability. However, if you can't find the IBM, the Maxtor makes a good second choice.