While this is not a Knoop related post, I recently experienced some grief in building a new PC and thought I’d give back by sharing the details.
In building a new PC, I wanted a higher level of disk redundancy so I purchased 2 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10’s with an Asus A8R-MVP motherboard which features onboard RAID. My plan was to mirror the two. Both the motherboard and drives were labeled as “SATA-II” (also referred to as SATA/300) compatible.
After assembling the parts, I enabled the RAID BIOS and proceeded to configure my RAID array – upon committing to the creation of the array, my PC hung and the settings were not saved when rebooting. The other interesting side effect was that when booting, the PC would spend 3-5 minutes “Detecting IDE Drives…” before trying to boot an OS. I tried changing cables and tried different SATA ports on the A8R-MVP. Same problem.
Frustated, I decided to disable the RAID BIOS to see if the drives worked as regular standalone drives and they worked well. Windoze XP installed without issues and the 3-5 minute boot delay disappeared. Feeling confident that the problem was with the motherboard, I proceeded to upgrade the BIOS to the most current version and tried enabling RAID again – no dice.
Several websites pointed out that Maxtor SATA II drives had compatibility issues with motherboards that used the Nvidia chipsets – my Asus used a Crossfire chipset. I then came across an interesting post on dfi-street.com . People with Nvidia powered motherboards were reporting freezing and disappearing Maxtor DiamondMax drives. One fellow quoted some interesting information:
"the problem you are having has nothing to do with drivers or the board, you, as well as MANY others, fell for Maxtor's false advertising. Maxtor claims that because the DM10/Maxline3 drives are native SATA and support NCQ, that they are somehow SATA2 drives. None of the Maxtor drives support the SATA300 speed, they are the only company that doesn't support it right now, yet they still claim that their drives are SATA2. I guess the only way they can get away with saying that is because they support the NCQ feature, but it is not mandatory in the SATA2 spec, just like the SATA1 spec, so I have no clue what part of the drive is SATA2. I think that currently, the worst hard drives you can get are the Maxtor DM10/Maxline3 drives because they have massive incompatibilities with all drive controllers (firmware updates are required most of the time to get the drive working at all, trust me, I've had to deal with this problem WAY too much) and because they falsely advertise SATA2, which confuses people."
With both Maxtor DiamondMax 10’s in hand, I drove to the store and exchanged them for a pair of Seagate Barracudas. It had the same specifications as the DiamondMax’s, but came at a C$50 premium. In to my PC they went with RAID BIOS enabled and the Barracudas worked flawlessly as a mirrored array! The PC booted up within seconds and performance was great.
The Maxtors were DiamondMax 10’s – 6V300F0. 300GB drives, 7200rpm, 16MB cache.
I hope this post helps someone, somewhere! Maxtor drives are now with Western Digital on my “do not buy list”.
Marc Knoop