Maxtor Ultra 16 SATA 300GB

The Maxtor Ultra 16 series of Serial ATA drives offer a high level of performance and storage for a hard drive, but the short one year warranty could be improved.

8/16/05 – Maxtor has been getting a large amount of press for the performance for their latest series of hard drives. In particular, the DiamondMax 10 line of drives featuring the 16MB cache have scored performance numbers not that far off of the enterprise class Raptor drives. The Ultra 16 series of drives is essentially a retail packaging of these drives.

The major feature of the Ultra 16 series of hard drives is the larger 16MB of cache built onto the drive. This helps the drive to improve the overall speed of reading and writing to the drive. While the drive is still based on the original Serial ATA interface of 150MB/s, it also includes the Native Command Queuing support for improved performance during multiple commands.

During testing of the drive, the Ultra 16 performance was extremely strong in both synthetic and real world benchmarks. It is currently one of the fastest drives available and also has a large drive capacity. The drive is not very noisy during operation, but it does tend to run hotter than many other drives while idle or during heavy use.

The big disappointment with the Ultra 16 hard drives is the warranty. Most manufacturers have been increasing their drive warranty lengths. In fact, the DiamondMax 10 drive that is essentially identical to the Ultra 16 in every way but sold as an OEM bare drive carries a three year warranty compared to the Ultra 16's one year warranty.