1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. Reviews

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M0 Review

By
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M0
MSRP $219.95
Score Details
DT Editors' Choice
“If you are looking for a fast and reliable storage solution, the Maxtor 6Y160M0 offers the best solution currently on the market.”
Pros
  • Very fast
Cons
  • Gets hot

Summary

If you are looking for a high-capacity hard drive with the best performance around, Maxtor’s Diamond Plus 9 160GB SATA drive is your final destination. With its Serial ATA interface that offers 150 MB/sec transfer speeds and a large 8MB buffer, this drive easily stands above the rest earning our coveted Editors Choice Award with a perfect 10 score.

If you are looking for a high-capacity hard drive with the best performance around, Maxtor’s Diamond Plus 9 160GB SATA drive is your final destination. With its Serial ATA interface that offers 150 MB/sec transfer speeds and a large 8MB buffer, this drive easily stands above the rest earning our coveted Editors Choice Award with a perfect 10 score.

 

True SATA performance

If you have been following reviews which cover various SATA hard drives, then you know that there are plenty of drives on the market which are not living up to the performance which Serial ATA 150 is promising. Maxtor’s 6Y160M0 on the other hand proves that speeds of 150 MB/sec can be reached and thus gives us faith that the SATA spec was created in the name of better performance.

The 6Y160M0 Diamond Max Plus 9 drive we received from Maxtor was not in the retail packaging which consumers would be familiar with from retailers, rather is packaged in white box OEM fashion. This means that no documentation, cables or drivers where included. So this review will be focusing strictly on the drives reliability and performance.

 

If you are buying this drive as a white box product make sure to download Maxtor’s Maxblast program for formatting and partitioning the drive. Those buying the retail version of this drive will get a copy included on a bootable CD. If you have an operating system older than Windows XP with service pack 1 or Windows 2000 with the latest service pack, then you will most likely have to partition this drive into separate partitions. This is because Windows operating systems other than what were mentioned will not support drives larger than 137GB (or smaller depending on which operating system you have).

 

Our test system consists of the following:

  • AMD AthlonXP 1700+ with stock heat sink/fan
  • Abit AT7MAX2 motherboard
  • 512mb of PC2700 Crucial DDR Memory
  • Leadtek Geforce 4 MX video card
  • Plextor 504A DVD Writer
  • Enermax 350W whisper power supply

 

The Maxtor 6Y160M0 drive proved to be incredibly fast in our tests.  In our Winbench99 tests the 6Y160M0 showed very fast sustained transfer rates making this an excellent drive for audio and video storage, where you need to maintain consistant substantial transfer rates. Another good sign was that our HD Tach  2.61 tests rated this Maxtor drive better than any other drive we have tested making this an excellent choice for everyday computing tasks, no doubt due to the massive 8MB buffer. The 6Y160M0 tested 11.4ms access time in Winbench99 which is very impressive. CPU utilization is about 9.5% which is average.

 

Hitting it hard

The Maxtor 6Y160M0 promises to be reliable and is shock rated to a hefty 60G while operating and an outstanding 300G while turned off. The 6Y160MO is also very quiet although not as quiet as Seagate’s Serial ATA drives, but performance is what matters to most and that is what the Maxtor Diamond Plus series is all about. Overclockers will want to watch out for the amount of heat put off by the 6Y160M0 as it puts off more heat than most drives.

Maxtors warranty includes replacement in 2 business days, 24-hour online and e-mail support and phone support Monday through Friday.

 

Conclusion

The 6Y160M0 currently offers the fastest sustained throughput of any 160GB drive we have tested with good seek times. If you are looking for a fast and reliable storage solution, the Maxtor 6Y160M0 offers the best solution currently on the market.

 

 

Performance

Measured in kilobytes per second; longer bars indicate better performance

Measured in megabytes per second; longer bars indicate better performance

You can see how much of a performance increase the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M) drive holds over the Maxtor DiamondMax D540X 160Gb drive. Keep in mind that the D540X drive has a speed of 5400RPM compared to the 7200RPM speed of the 6Y160M0 Drive. The D540X also has a 2mb buffer and ATA 100 transfer speeds. Both the D540X and 6Y160M0 drives had read burst speeds off the chart, over 80 megabytes per second. The 6Y160M0 tested 11.4ms access time in Winbench99 which is very impressive. CPU utilization is about 9.5% which is average.

Topics
Ian Bell
Publisher
I work with the best people in the world and get paid to play with gadgets. What's not to like?
Best 2-in-1 laptop deals: Turn your laptop into a tablet for $349

If you find that your traditional laptop isn't quite doing it for you in terms of workflow, then you might want to consider taking some of what the best tablets and the best laptops have and combining them together in the form of 2-in-1 laptops. These can offer a ton of versatility to your workflow, such as being able to use them in handheld mode for drawing or presenting, as well as the fact that most, if not all, are touch-enabled, so you don't even have to use a mouse if you don't want to.
There are, of course, a ton of great choices out there, but some of the best 2-in-1 laptops can get quite expensive, especially when you're buying them from some of the best laptop brands out there. That's why we've gone out and looked for our favorite 2-in-1 laptop deals to help save you some effort. Be sure to check all our picks below.

Asus Chromebook Plus 2-in-1 -- $349, was $499

Read more
Best Apple Studio Display deals: Save $299 on 5K monitors

If you're working on things that require a high-end monitor with excellent resolution and image fidelity, then the Apple Studio Display is what you're looking for, especially if you're in the Apple ecosystem and using things like the Apple MacBook Pro and the Apple MacBook Air. As a 5k monitor, it blows a lot of other monitors out of the water, although it does come with a deep price tag, so if you're the sort of creative pro that's looking to up their game, you'll likely want to grab yourself a good monitor deal. Lukcily, you can get some good discounts on the Apple Studio Display, depending on which model your looking for, and if you're thinking of pairing this with a new Apple computer, check out some of these Apple deals as well.
Apple Studio Display — $1,300, was $1,599

The Apple Studio Display is one of the more premium monitors on the market. It’s not to be confused with the Apple Pro Display XDR, which is Apple’s professional, high end monitor. And while the Apple Studio Display and Pro Display XDR have some similarities, the Studio Display comes in at a much lower price tag. It has a 27-inch screen that comes with 5K resolution and 600 nits of brightness, as well as support for one billion colors and the P3 wide color gamut. It also has a six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio, which makes it a great place to sit down and watch movie.

Read more
Best Dell laptop deals: Cheap laptops starting at $280

If you're looking to pick up a new laptop, then Dell is one of the best laptop brands out there and has a multitiude of optoins for you to pick from depending on your needs. For example, Dell has both Alienware and G-Series which are some of the best gaming laptops on the market, and the Dell XPS lineup are some of the best laptops on the market and are made to compete with the MacBook. But that doesn't mean that Dell only has high-end gear for you to pick, and there are absolutely some great budget laptops and starter options.
Of course, having so many options can be a bit overwhelming for somebody who isn't familiar with Dell or the laptop market, which is why we scoured the Dell website for our favorite picks and listed them below. So, be sure to see if there's anything in here that tickles your fancy, and if not, check out some of these other great laptop deals as well.

Dell Inspiron 15 -- $280, was $330

Read more