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Reliability and MaxBoost

In the beginning of this review, we had some concerns about reliability / looming data corruption in the context of MaxBoost, that is, any memory errors could theoretically be propagated to the drive, likewise, any power outage or else program freezes could corrupt the data on a drive.

On the basis of a single drive, it is not possible to make any statements about the reliability of any drive, however, there are a few observations. In the case that MaxBoost was enabled and the DiamondMax Plus 9 was used as a boot drive, running any synthetic benchmarks almost inevitably drew corruption of the operating system in its wake. Without MaxBoost, the corruption did not occur. This is based on three consecutive installations of WindowsXP Professional on the same drive on three consecutive attempts. Admittedly, any benchmark will stress any drive way beyond the average daily wear and tear, in addition, the overall system configuration (in this case an Athlon64 system using the VIA K8T800) will certainly play a role in the general picture not only of reliability but also of the actual gains achievable with MaxBoost.

MaxBoost and System Memory

One thing that is striking about MaxBoost is that there are no hard numbers regarding its benefits published anywhere so far. There is a very good reason for that: Looking at the performance numbers it is clear that one cannot expect the same transfer or general performance boosts across all systems and platforms, keep in mind that the cached write performance we found in SiSoft Sandra is already in excess of the memory bandwidth of a PC1600 memory subsystem. Therefore, any attempt to evaluate MaxBoost benefits using e.g. a PC100 or PC133 memory-based system would be doomed at the very beginning. In other words, MaxBoost mileage will vary from one system to another, this could make for an interesting case study .... volunteers please step forward! (because I am not going to do it).

Overall Verdict

Overall, the experience with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160 GB SATA has been very good. As long as non-random transfers are the main workload, the drive is very fast, which makes it an ideal solution for e.g. video editing / additional storage. MaxBoost is an interesting approach but we are a bit concerned about the inherent risk for data corruption. In addition, MaxBoost does not work in RAID configurations. In random I/O environments, the DiamondMax Plus 9 appears to fall behind e.g. the Barracuda 7200.7 and the performance lag is exacerbated when MaxBoost is enabled. Whether this is representative or not for the typical desktop environment is another question. Likewise, it is not clear whether any "typical" desktop environment even exists.

What is holding back the DiamondMax Plus 9 series is that as a parallel drive with an integrated SATA bridge, it will not be capable of doing Native Command Queuing, which is expected to boost random transfers and I/O performance by approximately 20-25 % over non-queued solutions and appears an ideal compliment to Intel's HyperThreading technology. Given the fact that the only controller currently supporting NCQ is the new SiliconImage controller, which is not yet on the shelves, it is almost safe to say that at this point, it does not matter too much. Another 2-3 months down the road, this may change, though.

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