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Drive-ing hard

Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2003 6:56 am
by Deep Sea
Interesting report to those considfering purchasing the new 200G 8-meg buffer drive on the market, They are CHEAP -- my new one cost me $100 after rebates and other considerations.

There is a catch. Miost computers will not recognize the size above 135GB. That's probsbly why Maxtor supplies a free ATA-133 card with the drive. Mtor also provides software to much with drive tables, etc. so the PC will recognize the full size of the drive. I abhor those gifts because they amount to nothing more than bandaids which can spell trouble later.

I have a portable firewire holder, so I plugged the frive in and plugged the other end of the firewire cable into the PC, and the drive just worked. Besides, firewire is so much faster than anything else except SCSI right now.

Not only that firewire requires absilutely NO drivers. This means it is a "hot swap" device, which in turn means I can plug it into any computer and it just works.

Just a little tip.

Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2003 10:41 am
by Guest
that's alot of space... 200G.

Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2003 9:20 pm
by Gene DeMambro
:multi: What model of drive is it, where did you get it, do they have more and are the rebates still being offered? :D

Is it an internal drive, that you put into an external enclosure and then plugged it into a firewire port? I don't have Firewire, but I have USB 2.0. Can I use that instead? DO I need to do this if I already have ATA-133?

Please tell us more, Allen. For $100, I'll probably do it!

200 Gb? WOW! :crazyeyes:

Way cool... 8)

Gene

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 2:02 am
by Deep Sea
Sorry I almost missed this post because I was having so much fun with that 200G Monster I lasooed for ...

Other considerations. Really I got 100 in-store credit for a returned item to apply to the 349 drive that also had an instant rebate of 50 bux as well as a mail-in rebate of 100 dollars. That's how I got the price down to 100. I wouldn't have been able to get my full cash back if I didn't offer to spend more than they were going to give me. Kinda like a swap-meet trick.

I didn't mean to mislead youse but I was in a hurry when I wrote that and didn't finish in time, so I quickly put up "other considerations" as a catch-all for the imagination to work on.

I can stick my tail between my legs and run now, I guess.

Your ATA-133 will run it, Gene, because it is an ATA133 drive. In fact, they package the FREE ATA-133 card for those not fortunate enough to own a BIOS that'll do the trick. Firewire still beats the pants off USB, and ATA limits your speed as well. However, Firewire opens the drive full-bore. Something about the chipset on the motherboard that does the Firewire.

All that stuff even with RAID striping, SCSI is still 3x as fast as the fastest ATA (3.3ms vs 9ms access time).


It took a little time to compress the drive, though -- yup, sure did -- but I will tell you that little sucker is still fast, though, fast enough to do video work on, and probably large enough to hold more than a few AVI files. When I attach the firewire from the camcorder and let the tape roll, the drive says "I'm waiting.."

Repeat after me, Gene, Maxtor, Maxtor, maxt... Ma..

When I say "CompUSA" you will wake right up.