I got this hard drive because I wanted to use to t ...
Strengths:Dual SATA/4-pin power option. Good support from Maxtor.
Weaknesses:Slow...slow....slow....
Posted Apr 26, 2004 - I got this hard drive because I wanted to use to the SATA ports on my ASUS A7N8X motherboard. The Asus mobo includes the SATA data connectors, but my system only has the normal 4-pin power connectors, not the SATA power connectors. So the Maxtor seemed like a good deal because it included both types of connections. I installed Windows XP without burning-in the hard drive...bad move, I had hard drive errors. However I got a good set of utilities from the Maxtor website and fixed everything. In fact, the utilities even have a built in RMA system such that if the utility can't fix the problem, it walks you through the warranty return process.
Once I got it going, I noticed that there was no real performance increase compared to a regular ATA/IDE hard drive. In fact, it seems slower than some IDE drives I've seen. If you are getting a SATA hard drive, I'd recommend either investing in a 10,000rpm drive or getting 2 and building a RAID array. Or you could just save yourself some money and get a regular IDE hard drive. You won't see enough of a performance increase to justify spending the extra money on a SATA drive.
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