Best Overall High-Capacity Disk Drives

In the desktop group, holding 4 to 7 gigabytes, mostly EIDE or ATA drives, there's a big difference in what's available. Prices cover almost a 3:1 ratio. The Maxtor DiamondMax 1280, the least expensive drive in this report, got top marks in performance. Curiously, its brandmate, the DiamondMax 1750, was one of the poorest performers in our tests. The smallest drive we reviewed, the IBM Ultrastar 9ES, was the most expensive unit in this group, which helped move it toward the bottom of the ratings.

In the midsize, server-oriented group (8 to 11 GB), we found an even bigger price spread. T he Maxtor DiamondMax 2160 took top honors because of its price and good showing on the MPC benchmarks. It didn't perform nearly as well on the ThreadMark test, however, so it might not be your best choice for a server application. Here, the Seagate Medalist Pr o, an ATA drive, is an excellent choice. In our tests, it significantly outperformed its speed-racer brother, the 10,000-rpm Seagate Cheetah 9, which also costs twice as much.

The two IBM drives in this group are quite different from each other. The Deskstar 8 is really designed to be a workstation drive, even though its 8.4-GB capacity puts it in with the server drives in our tests. The Ultrastar 9ZX, a relatively new drive from IBM, uses MR-X (magnetoresistive-extended) heads and a SCSI connector. This Ultrastar and the Seagate Medalist Pro got the highest ThreadMark scores, by a significant margin, of all the drives we tested.

The two models in our behemoth group (18+ gigabytes) are as different as they ca n be. The IBM Ultrastar 18XP is brand new and uses MR-X heads for high-density recording. The Seagate Elite 23 is the only 5-1/4-inch drive in our report, so its larger capacity isn't as much of an accomplishment as it might first seem. (But see "Details" before dismissing Seagate.) For an overview of how all the tested drives performed, see the performance chart showing both the MPC benchmark results and the ThreadMark scores.

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Disk Drive Performance

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