|
|
43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Your basic hard drive, July 19, 2003
There is nothing spectacular about this drive, but nothing particularly bad either. The software they provide does not work correctly with Windows XP, but aside from that it's a good drive to get if you need to upgrade your existing system.Speed - It's not going to set any records, but it's not slow either. It seems to fall in the middle of the pack for performance benchmarks according to the various websites that have evaluated this product. Noise - Again, it's not the quietest drive on the market. In fact I've seen other models of Maxtor drives that were practically noise-free. This one you can hear slight chattering as it accesses the data, but I can barely hear it above the noise of the various cooling fans in my PC. In short, you would need to have supersonic hearing to be upset by the noise this one makes, but there are quieter drives out there. Heat - Once again, it's in the middle of the road. Most of the drives out today are generating a lot more heat than the older drives. The reputable hardware testing sites I've checked put this in the middle of the pack. If you have a standard computer case and multiple hard drives, most likely there is very little space between them. I would recommend getting a quality ball bearing cooling fan for this and any drive if you want to extend its life, but if you're installing it in a cramped space with little airflow, then a cooling fan is a necessity due to the heat it generates. Quite frankly, most of today's drives are quick enough and quiet enough that, with the exception of a few performance models, it's hard to tell any difference between them unless you're a serious computer gearhead. The only areas left to compete are in reliability, customer service, and software. I haven't had to deal with their customer service, and obviously I can't rate the reliability of this new purchase, but I can comment on the software. The drive comes with Maxtor's MaxBlast hard drive cloning and utility software. This is the one area that they could've beat the competition and given me a reason to bump it up to four stars. Unfortunately, this software proved to be so much a disappointment that I'd recommend you do not use it. (In fact, it's so bad I should probably should bump this down to two stars.) Right off the bat I knew I was in trouble as I have a separate Promise UDMA controller built into my ASUS A7V motherboard. MaxBlast couldn't detect it and simply crashed every time I tried booting it in DOS mode. DOS mode is the preferred and generally less error prone method of cloning an existing hard drive, but since I couldn't get it to work that way I attempted cloning my drive running MaxBlast from Windows XP. First off, it took over two hours to copy a 40GB drive over to this one (why?) Secondly, MaxBlast gives you options to set your partitions when you're formatting from scratch, but it didn't give me any options to set my partitions when I cloned my existing drive. It forces you to accept one partition that's the same size as your old drive, then creates a second partition for the remaining space. Not what I wanted. Finally, I would've accepted the previous two annoyances if it would've copied XP correctly. It did copy XP and I can boot up, but since the transfer I have run into all kinds of problems with Explorer crashing frequently, the system restore function no longer working, and other annoyances. Add that I've had to reregister some of my existing programs and it's apparent this is definitely not a clone of my old drive. So there you go. Like the review title says, it's your basic hard drive with about the same specs as other drives out there. If the price is right and you just need extra storage space, it's worth buying. However, if you need to transfer data from an existing drive, plan on paying extra for some cloning software that actually works. Hope the review helped.
|
Saving...
