• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Maxtor MaXline III

4

40ozGamer

n00b
Joined
Sep 18, 2005
Messages
4
I'm interested in purchasing a couple of the MaXline III 300GB SATA drives to use on a 3ware SATA RAID controller. Would like to use them in a couple of my 2U rack mounted game servers. Anyone here had any issues with these drives such as heat or failure. I'm not a big Maxtor fan but performance specs look decent and the NCQ is nice since my controller supports it. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Also considering the new WD RE2 400GB over the Maxtor.
 
The Maxtor drives deliver awesome performance, and have been cheaper than competing 7200RPM drives in the capacity range, but they do run significantly hotter than Seagate and WD drives. Maxtor has by far the weakest FDB motor implementation of any of the major HDD makers at present, and above average heat output plagues Maxtor's product line, 15K SCSI all the way down to Value. With that said, most any cooling arrangement will keep even the MaxLine drives well within operational tolerances.

As long as they are not allowed to out-and-out roast, I have heard of no siginificant relaibility issues with MaxLine drives, and their marketing as Enterprise drives is justified.
 
DougLite, thanks for your input. I have owned previous Maxtor drives and all but a few did go south on me with bad blocks or simply would not spin up during boot. This was about 2 years ago and since then I have been purchasing the WD drives with 8MB cache in IDE and SATA flavors. I'll look around from some WD RE2 reviews and hopefully have my mind made up in a few days. Just hate to jump the wagon again and deal with data restores due to crappy drive components because the price on those Maxline's is very reasonable.
 
I got a MaxLine III.

When I installed it I created a 100gb partition for windows, but after waiting 45 min for it to format it came back saying it couldnt format it and the drive was possibly damaged and that I had to install XP on a different partition.

So I try and format the partition again, after another 45min its 100% formatted then comes back with the same error.

So not wanting to wait forever for another 100gb format, I create a 4gb partition and I no longer get the error, it can continue with the install. So I delete that partition and make another 100gb one, everything works fine. I don't know if I should trust this drive one bit.

on top of that, the drive does run really hot like doug said, too hot to even touch, everest reports 46c which doesnt seem too bad though.

Another thing that has happend to me with this drive is my computer 'froze' but only for about 4 seconds, while it sounded like something was messed up in the hard drive, like it couldnt spin, it made an awful sound and a few seconds later went away and the computer was fine, that 4 seconds of grinding seemed like a lifetime. This has only happened once.

and finally hdtach reports the same seektime on this drive as it did on my ata100 8mb cache hd, somewhere around 15ms, i think they advertise 9.2?


Sorry that was kind of long and drawn out, but overall I dont think im too happy with this drive.

I think I should surly RMA this drive, but should I get another one of the same, or whats the alternative to this one?
 
by the way is there some sort of diagnostics program/s i can run on this hd to find out whats wrong with it
 
I bought two maxline III 300gb last week, no issues so far at about 60% capacity on each.
 
I have one 250gb MaxLine III for storage, and it's fast and pretty quiet but it gets hot without airflow. It's really a nice HDD. :cool:
 
I'm also considering these same two drives. I have airflow covered, but the thing that I am most interested in is noise. How does the ML3 compare to the WD as far as noise profile goes? Relatively speaking, how loud does the drive actually sound in a running machine?

Thanks

 
Both drives are really good but for me it came down to cost per gb and the Maxline delivered. Newegg is selling them now for $129.99 now and thats an unbeatable bargain. The 400gb in one driove is a good draw but the price needs to come down. Keep checking Monarch as they seem to have better deals on WD drives than most people.
 
Uzor - I put a maxtor diamondback 250GB in my TiVo, and I can barely hear it when it writes (totally silent when not writing). It's definitely way below annoying levels. Unless you're looking for an absolutely silent HD, I don't think the noise from the Maxtor will be a problem.

-Nate
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top