Conclusions
With the DiamondMax 11's street price dipping into the low $200s, the drive costs about as much as 500GB drives from other manufacturers. Unfortunately, the DiamondMax 11's strengths don't really play to a big segment of the market. The drive's slower sequential transfer rates, unimpressive WorldBench performance, and relatively high noise levels make it less suitable for desktop or home theater environments than several of its competitors. A couple of those competitors, most notably Western Digital's latest Caviars, also boast better performance under the kinds of multi-user workloads common in demanding enterprise environments.

Of course, the DiamondMax 11 isn't technically an enterprise-class hard drive, so it isn't entirely appropriate to expect it to run with enterprise drives like the Caviar RE2. Maxtor has a family of MaXLine drives that are more specifically tuned for enterprise workloads.

The DiamondMax 11's one saving grace is its exceptional performance in our iPEAK multitasking tests, where it consistently beats everything from 7,200-RPM desktop drives to 10K-RPM Raptors. That certainly makes the drive appealing for the kinds of single-user multitasking that's common among power users and PC enthusiasts. What's more, it gives Seagate a potential ace in the hole.

Seagate already has an impressive desktop product in the Barracuda 7200.10, but that drive's inconsistent multitasking and poor multi-user performance are a liability under more demanding workstation and server loads. Conveniently, the DiamondMax 11 is considerably more comfortable in those environments, likely due to superior command queuing logic. One can only imagine the kind of well-rounded performance that could be had from a drive that combined the Barracuda's perpendicular recording technology with the DiamondMax's command queuing—and one company now owns them both.