With a home theater PC in the works, I’ve been on the lookout for a serious hard drive upgrade. As a saved TV stream (and we’re talking good ol’ analog, and not the more resource intensive HDTV) requires between 1 to 2 Gigabytes per hour of content, for serious timeshifting enough storage is never really enough. When I spotted a Maxtor drive ($69 after rebate), with 300 gig’s of space available, I simply had to go and get it.

The rest of the specs were equally impressive. The spindle speed is 7200 rpm, but what really caught my eye was the 16 megs of onboard cache which is more generous than most. I also know that Maxtor drives are generally quiet. The Maxtor uses the ol’ fashioned IDE interface, and not the faster SATA one. However, no hard drive out there really exceeds the IDE speeds anyway, so I figured this would be adequate. It’s the fastest of the IDE, the so called “Ultra ATA/133″ interface.

The Maxtor 300 GB drive installs in the usual fashion. There is an 80 pin IDE cable included, as well as mounting screws. A paper manual, and the MaxBlast software complete the package. The included software is designed to format and partition the drive.

The first thing I noticed about the Maxtor is that it gets warm. No, make that hot. I was quite surprised to feel how hot it go under load when transferring files. It easily got up over 120 degrees Farenheit. This is not good for a cramped case, and even worse for drive longevity.

The other thing that disappointed me about this Maxtor is the slow read speeds. Clocking in at barely just over 19 MB/s just seemed too slow to me. I’m not sure if it is the IDE interface, the drive itself, or I just got a slow one, but this seemed too turtle like, considering that this Maxtor is for video recording, a particularly demanding task. The extra cache doesn’t look like it’s making any difference. I will say that the Maxtor DiamondMax is a quiet drive, although not as nearly silent as the Samsung.

So, in summary this Maxtor has high points of large storage capacity, and quiet operation. The cons are slow speeds, the older IDE interface, and thermal issues. For the record, I did never figure out what “MHX Acceleration” is, but it appears to limited to SATA versions of the drive, so I’m really not sure why it’s on this box. All in all, a rather unsatisfying purchase.

–Jonas