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MAXTOR Leading The Pack Of Hard Disk Manufacturers

MAXTOR is currently leading the pack of hard disk manufacturers in making the largest integrated drive electronics (IDE) drives for the consumer market. While other manufacturers are pushing faster drives, Maxtor's strategy is highlighting two important factors - speed and portability.

The Personal Storage 3000 series external hard disk drives fulfil both requirements. Of course to attain this, Maxtor has to sacrifice the other important factor in a hard disk drive's specification - speed. Maxtor is still using the older 5,400 rotations per minute (rpm) technology with the 3000 series drives. By having the platters spin at a lower speed, Maxtor can squeeze as much data as possible into the surface of the discs.

The 3000 series comes in two different flavours - the XT and the LE. The former, which uses FireWire or IEEE 1394 interface, offers a maximum capacity of 160 gigabytes (GB) of data. The latter, which is a cheaper USB 2.0 version and is reviewed here, offers a smaller maximum capacity of 120GB of data.

Basically, the 3000 series external drives are actually Maxtor's internal IDE drives with a nice clothing. The outer shell is actually an external casing for 3.5-inch IDE drives, with a built-in interface card to accept the drive's IDE interface and then convert it to either IEEE 1394 (in the case of XT versions) or USB 2.0 (in the case of LE versions). The power supply needed for the IDE drive is obtained from the casing's AC/DC converter, which receives its supply of electrical juice from the normal power outlet.

The funny thing is that, Maxtor charges you extra to get the whole thing assembled. That's right, if you shop for a 120GB drive, plus an external 3.5- inch casing with USB 2.0 interface, the amount you spend will definitely be less than the 3000LE's price tag.

• Performance:

Although space and portability are already there, the 3000LE falls short when it comes to performance.

We tested the 3000LE by attaching it to a Digital8 camcorder to see how it performs in capturing raw digital video (DV) data. The 3000LE is hooked up using USB 2.0 to our test machine: a Pentium 4 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) with a Fujitsu 36GB 10,000 rpm SCSI-III hard disk drive. The central processing unit (CPU), on the other hand, is hooked up to a Sony TRV240E Digital8 camcorder via IEEE1394. The software running is Ulead VideoStudio DV on Windows 2000 Professional.

First, the test was to download a full one-hour DV footage off a Hi-8 tape to the Fujitsu drive. The test was smooth with no frames dropped and a large 13GB AVI file is securely saved on the hard disk drive. Then we repeated the test again, this time, we instructed VideoStudio DV to download the DV footage directly into the external 3000LE. The result? Almost a 50% frame-drop rate, which makes the end result AVI file close to useless.

We were rather disappointed with this result really because we had hoped that the massive 120GB of space would be ideal for storing DV footage (a 120GB will hold approximately nine hours of uncompressed DV footage). Since it has failed to do that, then we can only conclude that the 3000LE is good for archiving purposes, or for storing multimedia clips that are more bandwidth-friendly, like MPEG-1, 2, or 4 for video, and WAV and MP3 for audio.

• Capacity:

When it comes to that, 120GB is a massive size by proportion. With that much capacity, you can store 2,000 hours of MPEG-1 (VCD quality) video, or 250 hours of MPEG-2 (DVD quality) video. If you want to store your video in MPEG- 4, then the higher compression will buy you approximately 4,000 hours of video. As for music, the same amount of space can buy you storage for 190 CDs, or if you prefer to compress your music to MP3, you'll get a massive 14,000 hours of music. If you are into digital photography, the 3000LE will generously fill up 123,000 two-megapixel pictures with good JPEG compression.

And of course, apart from multimedia files, you can also store your data files here. All your downloads, installers, demos, and of course documents will be tucked in nicely under the blankets of the 3000LE. I have tried dumping all my apps and data in there, but still could not get it full. One other thing, to get the best and optimal performance out of the 3000LE, it is advisable that you format the drive using the NTFS filesystem and not using the FAT32. This means that you need to use either NT, Windows 2000 Professional, or Windows XP as the operating system. FAT32 tends to get a little bit messy when the file system gets this large, which could hold up performance once the disk is half full. Also, the cluster size of such large partition can be extremely large and ultimately result in wastage of unused space. If you still need to use FAT32 (probably because you are still stuck with the older Windows), we recommend that you format the 3000LE into smaller, more manageable partitions.