Customer Reviews

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 80GB U133 Internal IDE Hard Drive

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have purchased and installed 2 WesternDigital and 3 Maxtor hard drives in the past 5 years. From my personal experience, both are good brand. The prices are very compatible for both drives and are all carried 3 years warranty. However I'd rather choose Maxtor in the future. The Maxtor drives have very good utility and are very user friendly, they are easy to install and come with software to help get them partitioned and formatted even you are a first time user. Ultra ATA/133 interface with 8MB Cache makes the drive 20% faster than the regular one (2MB Cache size). Have used Maxtor in many years and never had a failure. Great Drive!

The Maxtor L01P080 7200 RPM 80 GB Hard Drive does what it says it does. When you get the box and open it, there are clear instructions for whatever purpose you intend to use it as, i.e., primary or slave drive. It tells you all jumper settings and walks you through the installation. I use it as my primary drive, sending my Western Digital OEM to the slave position. A lot of people have a problem with the unit, whether this drive or any other, due to technical inexperience. However, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to install this since everything is mapped out for you. One thing, it helps to have your original PC manual handy for removing/replacing/adding a hard drive. But if not, you can always look up your machine on the Web or call your manufacturer. Maxtor has live tech support to answer your questions if you have any regarding its products and they will walk you through the entire process if necessary. Of course, they won't take responsibility for you voiding your warrenty by opening the case, but that's expected.

Now, for the drive itself. It's not overly priced and delivers a solid, quiet and fast file accessing performance. I installed it, used the Maxtor CD Install Kit (which is recommended over using Windows Partitioner or FDISK for good reason, the Maxtor disk formats the drive to the companies standards because using Windows to format the drive will decrease the overall speed and handling of the unit), and had it up in about 30 minutes because I had to switch the drive placement inside the PC.

Once installed, the CD Kit will show you how to (and you can also do a Flash tutorial on Maxtor's website) transfer your data from your old disk drive, format new, make it a slave, et al.

Upgrading from a 2001 Western Digital drive I found the 8MB cache to be quick and I didn't have to wait but a mere few milliseconds when clicking on files, opening projects and loading programs. There's plenty of space to do your favorite video editing, storing video files, music or whatever you have to put on it. Of course, with this drive you'll get faster and noticeably so, however, please keep in mind that the hard drive is what it is -a hard drive - not a CPU, so if you are running a PII or PIII 1Ghz and below, any lag will generally be the processors fault, not the drive.

For the money, you can't beat the reliability and speed of this HD.

Note: Jumper settings. If, or when you remove your old hard drive, please look on that drive for specific jumper settings as they are not universal. Almost all drives list the specific settings to make it a slave or whatever you use it for, right on the top. If not, remove the drive, or find out what drive it is and contact either the manufacturers website and/or call them.

The item description for this drive should read :
- 80 GB Capacity
- 8 MB Buffer

Not sure how you could be confused about where the jumpers go. A diagram is right on the drive, and the directions tell you exactly where and what to do. The MaxBlast software it comes with copied my original drive to the new one and the new drive is now my primary drive. All this with less then 15 minutes of actual work. The rest of the time was it copying all the files....

I recently bought this drive, and it's working great for me. What I really like about his drive is that it's really quiet compare to my old Quantum SCSI drive. I've had another Maxtor 20GB for two years and it's also working fine and very quiet.

Another thing I like about the maxtor drives is the software included. Installation was made really easy, just had to hook it up, fired up the machine, run the software, restart, and the drive is ready for use. The jumper setting is clearly illustrated in the instruction booklet. The whole installation is done in 30 mintues. Overall I am very satisfied.

I purchased 2 of these drives for my ATA 133 array. They were speedy, I will grant Maxtor that, but crashed several times resulting in data lost, system rebuilds and so on. Anyway after the 2nd crash I got smart and moved my important files over to an old Western Digital drive I've had for almost 4 years now. Good thing too because not long after one of the two disks in the array (stripped not mirrored) completely died with no chance at recovery (would not even register with Maxtor's disk utilities). Thank god all a lost were some unimportant mp3s and the such. Anyway, you would expect more than 10 months on a Home PC disk drive. ATA 133 is nice, but reliabilty outwieghs the (small) bump in speed anytime.

I got a brand new one of these the other day. I was pleased with how quiet and how fast it was. I was just about done transferring my system to this drive, when it came to a grinding halt. It made a series of awful scraping noises, and now the system can't even detect that it's there. What a crock.

I picked up this hard drive to replace an aging smaller hard drive. I have in the past purchased Maxtor drives and used the Max-Blast software to transfer my files to the new drive and never experienced a problem. This time the software seemed to be lacking. Windows XP would not boot to the new drive once the swap was made. I needed to replace the old drive and download a third-party program to do what the Max-Blast software was supposed to do. The transfer of system files to a new computer is integral to the easy use of a new hard drive. I can't recommend something that requires the user to purchase additional items for use.

I'm running this drive as my primary master and a comparable Western Digital (old boot drive) as my primary slave. Although the documentation is skimpy, it is adequate and it describes scenarios for replacing your boot disk or just adding another drive.

The included installation software is easy to use It provides for partitioning, allocating volumes and copying files between drives. Very nice and fast.

Jumper settings are clearly indicated in the documentation. I had no trouble by setting both drives to for "Cable Select" and using the cable that came with this drive. My computer is niticeable faster now.

Good show!

I have now purchased my second Maxtor 80GB drive. The first was about 8 months ago. Both drives have been running perfect. Setup was a breeze and jumpers were easy to configure. There is a diagram right on the drive. both drives are fast and very quiet.