Maxtor's drives are getting less appealing every day. For well-rounded performance and low acoustics, Western Digital's Caviars are the most attractive choice.

Three general comments:

1. Seaglet is actually just one letter off from Seagate, although a couple of the letters are reversed. </penatic_gripe>

2. Personally, I would prefer to see the graph scales cropped so that the relative differences are more visible. I like visual aids, but a dozen-odd horizontal lines that vary by fractions of a millimeter on my display are no more useful to me than a simple list of numbers. A single disclaimer at the beginning or end of each page -- "please note that graph scales have been cropped to emphasize relative differences" -- should suffice to fend off all but the most persistent "TR distoring results! SUX0Rz!" trolls.

3. A 0R1 resistor (I refer here to the methodology of the power consumption tests) is a tricky thing to use at low voltages unless you have access to a 6-1/2 digit multimeter (typically, this is a rather expensive device that lives in a small desktop chassis and plugs into the wall outlet). IMO even a good TrueRMS-style handheld multitester won't give enough precision to get around the tolerance of the resistor and the limitations of the meter, at least, not enough to start putting numbers after the decimal point. Does your multitester have an ameter function?

hopefully seagate will bring quality to these drives. I have to say that their reliability is among the lowest I have ever worked with, even worse than the deathstars.

What's that warranty void sticker covering? Seems more logical to put it on the seam of the top and side, or on the PCB, if someone tries to take it apart.

The three failures I've seen this year have been Maxtors. I know that my personal experience doesn't account for much, but I've seen more failures of this manufacturer than any other. it shows. Retail warranties: Maxtors have 1 year, Seagate 5.

There is no price difference that would cause me to switch from seagate to Maxtor.

Blah, 300MB/sec transfer rates... I wish manufacturers stopped quoting the interface speed and quoted the ACTUAL speed of the damn things.

Someone should make a program that constantly does random access operations on the hard drive, then you guys should try running it for a day and see how long a Maxtor lasts.

Don't know of any other way to test the reliability of hard drives, which is the real differentiating point between these drives.

Good review, but I must admit I'm not finding HDD's all that interesting now a days. I read the intro's and generally skip to the power consumption, noise levels and conclusion.
But for some reason, this made me think of that i-RAM thingamajig again. A 10MB HDD was SOO much faster then a FDD (360K), but other then sheer capacity those fractions of a percent don't matter all that much.

Most drives features an acoustics setting ("low noise"/"full speed"). Is there any review which shows the/a difference in both speed and noise from changing that setting? Are drives reviewed with their default setting throughout?

So this one doesn't exactly go to 11, eh?