When originally gathering drives for this comparison, I was surprised to learn that Maxtor had its Serial ATA drive ready to go. In fact, many of my local shops expect to have drives in their hands from Maxtor before any other manufacturer, including Seagate, whose Serial ATA Barracuda V drives are already available from a small number of retailers.

Both of the Maxtor drives we'll be looking at today are from the DiamondMax Plus 9 family, but we could only get our hands on a 120GB version of the Serial ATA drive to match the rest of the drives in the comparison. Although it throws things off a little, the parallel ATA DiamondMax Plus 9 used in this review is a 160GB model. All the other drives in this comparison are 120GB models.

As you can see, there's not a lot of aesthetic variety within Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 9 line. Both the parallel and Serial ATA drives feature exposed chips and circuit boards on their undersides, but other than the different power connectors and an extra chip on the Serial ATA drive, the two look virtually identical.

Like the other drives in this comparison, both of the DiamondMax Plus 9 models run at 7,200RPM and feature 8MB of cache. The ATA/133 drive is theoretically capable of 133MB/sec transfer rates, but we won't be coming close to those speeds today.

ATA/133 versions of Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 9 with 8MB are available from 80 to 200GB in 40GB increments, while the Serial ATA version of the drive comes in a 60GB size, as well.

Although it's only a minor detail, it's worth mentioning that Maxtor's ATA/133 DiamondMax Plus 9 doesn't require a Serial ATA power adapter. Maxtor has thrown on a standard Molex connector to make life easier for those purchasing OEM drives that don't come with any cables or adapters.

Serial ATA data cables are cool, but Molex power is practical

Sadly, despite Maxtor's claim that its drives are the ideal choice for reliability, the DiamondMax Plus 9 models are only available with one-year warranties. The DiamondMax Plus 9 family includes drive models with either 2MB or 8MB of cache, but no distinction is made between the two as far as warranty coverage goes. Really, how useful is 200GB of storage when it's only guaranteed for a year? Some users might take a year just to fill a drive that large.