Review: Ultra-ATA/133
Maxtor DiamondMax D540X
With DiamondMax D540X and D740X Maxtor launches the very first hard disks with Ultra-ATA/133 interface available.
DiamondMax D540X turns with 5400 RPM and is available with 120 and 160 GBytes capacity. In this drive Maxtor uses platters of 40 GBytes size. A data puffer of 2048 KBytes size comes along with the Ultra-ATA/133 interface.
Maxtor offers DiamondMax D540X as well in a Ultra-ATA/100 version. The capacities here are limited to 20, 40, 60, and 80 GBytes. Fortunately, no additional charge has to be payed for these Ultra-ATA/133 versions with the new interface.
To address the 160 GBytes model with full capacity controllers with a 48 Bit addressing are necessary. According to the ATA specifications 128 GBytes maximum are to be addressed over the - until now usually - 28 Bit wide address room. Maxtor enlarges the address room to 48 Bit. At this very moment the T13-Committee is including the 48 Bit addressing into the ATA/ATAPI-6 specifications. So now up to 128 Petabytes can be addressed. In the BIOS of the Ultra-ATA/133 controllers the 48 Bit addressing is already integrated. This article separately deals with the problems the hard disks nevertheless still show.
In the benchmarks DiamondMax D540X reaches a maximum sequential data transfer rate of 35.3 MBytes/s, what's a really good result for a hard disk with 5400R/min. And even in the practice test the drive showed a convincing performance.
Interface | Ultra-ATA/133 |
|---|---|
| |
Revolutions | 5400 RPM |
Cache | 2048 KBytes |
Platter Capacity | 40 GBytes |
Available Capacities | 120 / 160 GBytes |
Price | 300 / 380 Euro |