Article

Maxtor 60GB Personal Storage 3000DV FireWire Hard Drive

Pictured here is Maxtor's FireWire enclosure containing a Maxtor 60GB Ultra ATA hard drive. Rising in popularity, these devices are outselling other storage solutions due to the inherent capabilities of today's modern hard drive technologies and the newfangled FireWire interface. The two combined offer large storage capacities of up to 200 Gigabytes in size and very fast data throughput speeds that outpace all of the other storage technologies listed above.

But are these devices safe for your data? Unfortunately, hard drives are not a reliable storage medium for data over a long period of time, which is a major factor in the consideration of storage devices. Also, hard drives are quite fragile, even inside sturdy enclosures, and are not built, at least not yet, to be truly portable and safe at the same time. The appeal of these drives is understandable, especially when hard drives are selling for less than one dollar per gigabyte in today's market.

What is FireWire?

FireWire is a high-speed serial bus that encompasses many advanced features including support for up to 63 devices, hot swapping, and variable speeds across the connector and bus. Perhaps the strongest feature of FireWire is its isochronous data transfer, which guarantees bandwidth for multimedia data types such as video streams where packets of video data require reliable and priority delivery.

But is FireWire fast enough for hard drives? Theoretically, yes. With a transfer rate of 400 megabits per second, which equates to 50 Megabytes per second, FireWire can handle large streams of data such as uncompressed digital video, which is the reason it has become the de facto connection standard in digital video cameras. But FireWire technology is somewhat new to PC users with only a small subset of video enthusiasts adopting the standard and realizing its benefits. Like SCSI technology, few PCs come built with FireWire connectivity, requiring consumers to purchase and install a separate FireWire host adapter. The reason for this is because Intel has its own USB 2.0 technology that offers many of the same features and equivalent speed but has the advantage of Intel backing and support, reason enough for its wider adoption and availability in new PCs. Support for FireWire continues to grow albeit slowly since the outlay of an additional $50 FireWire host adapter on top of the FireWire device itself puts the price outside the range that consumers expect or want to pay. After all, storage is supposed to be cheap, right?

FireWire, formerly referred by the numbered trade association technology standard of IEEE 1394 in the PC industry, was developed, trademarked, and solely licensed by Apple and Texas Instruments until Apple granted the 1394 Trade Association the right to use and sub-license the FireWire trademark, logo, and symbol for use on products, packaging and promotion on May 29, 2002. Since then, FireWire has been used as the brand identity for the technology and the term 1394 has gone to the wayside although Sony continues to use the name i.LINK, which is it's own name and brand it has attached to the FireWire standard for all Sony devices.

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus Hard Drive

Inside the Maxtor Personal Storage 3000DV is one of Maxtor's high-speed 3.5-inch Ultra ATA hard drives. Specifically, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 hard drive sporting an onboard 2 Megabyte cache buffer. The rotation spindle speed, which is the speed at which the data holding platters are spun, is cutting-edge for ATA based hard drives, clocking in at 7,200 RPM.

Maxtor also offers a larger capacity 80 Gigabyte drive as part of its Personal Storage 3000DV family of external FireWire hard drives. The 80 Gigabyte version, while offering a higher capacity drive, utilizes a slower 5,400 RPM spindle speed. To help you determine what is better for you, the 60GB Maxtor 3000DV is an excellent solution for data intensive applications including digital video files, high-quality digital music, and the storage of data and games that are accessed frequently. If you're shopping to buy a drive for storing your recorded CD quality songs (MP3s) or digital pictures, we recommend the aforementioned 80GB 3000DV model as it is perfectly fine to swap drive performance for more storage space for these types of files.

What is the magic behind the technology? Maxtor, and most FireWire enclosure manufacturers, use a Tailgate or FireWire bridge. This is the conversion layer that lets ATA devices such as hard drives and optical CD and DVD drives connect to the FireWire interface used inside the FireWire enclosure. Basically, the hard drive used inside the FireWire enclosure is actually an UltraATA hard drive connected to electronics that convert the UltraATA standard to FireWire for transmission to the computer.

Installation

The retail box comes replete with one 60GB Maxtor Personal Storage 3000DV FireWire external drive, one six-foot 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable, one external AC power adapter, the installation software on CD-ROM, and an installation guide including a one-year warranty statement.

Installation was simple - you plug the power cable into the drive and plug the FireWire adapter cable into the drive and the FireWire connection on your computer. That is all! Welcome to the beauty that is FireWire and the reason more and more users are jumping onto the bus, so to speak. Once the FireWire host adapter is installed, all devices that plug into it are automatically recognized and enabled. In the case of a FireWire hard drive, a drive letter is assigned and you go about using it like you would any other hard drive in your system, whether it be My Computer or Windows Explorer. An install CD is required for Mac users, something that made us snicker during the out of box experience.

Unfortunately, unlike USB devices such as keyboards and mice, large FireWire drives like this one are not powered via the FireWire cable, requiring a conventional power plug. And in the case of the Maxtor 3000DV, an external power transformer with a non-standard drive power plug is required, further mucking up the portability aspect of the drive. So don't forget to grab the transformer and a power cable when taking it on the go or you'll be carrying a very expensive brick.

If large enclosures and numerous cables muck up your portable needs, palm-sized portable FireWire enclosures using smaller notebook hard drives are available. Since smaller notebook drives draw less power, they do not require external power connectors, drawing their juice directly from the FireWire connector itself. Keep in mind that these smaller drives, while being smaller and convenient, will add to the power drain of a notebook's battery since power is supplied by the FireWire cable. Also, smaller FireWire drives like these lack the speed and sheer capacities of their bigger brothers although several manufacturers do make 40 Gigabyte notebook sized hard drives now although we aren't promising that they can be powered adequately via a FireWire cable. Expect to see a review of a smaller, sexy FireWire enclosure soon.

Benchmarks

Of course, we wanted to know how fast the FireWire drive and enclosure were as well as the performance of the drive itself, so we took it upon ourselves to remove the drive from the enclosure and test it independently using a standard UltraATA interface cable connected directly to the computer's motherboard. You will notice that the performance delta that separates the benchmarks between the two connection standards is quite noticeable and that the FireWire connector limits the overall performance ceiling of the drive.

We used three different benchmark suites to evaluate this unit including HD Tach, IOMeter, and WinBench 99. We converted all Kilobyte scores to Megabyte scores so that they can be easily compared between the different benchmarks and have abbreviated the scores as follows:

HD Tach Benchmarks

HD Tach is a good tool for measuring the sequential read and write speeds of the drive. We like it for its excellent interface that visually displays the drives read and write throughputs, random access time, read burst speed and CPU utilization in an easily readable chart. This is important as a chart like this provides a good insight into the drive's fastest and slowest areas, which is necessary information for digital video freaks for understanding the slowest transfer rate areas of the drive to minimize dropped frames when capturing video and for performance freaks that want to partition a drive for optimal speed and performance. The data used for this chart is also written into a convenient HD Tach text-based log file so that the raw data can be used for building customized charts.

  

Testing the Maxtor hard drive outside of the FireWire enclosure with a standard UltraATA ribbon cable shows the drive's true performance potential. First and foremost, an average read speed of 30MB/sec is quite good although the latest ATA hard drives are pushing closer to 36MB/sec. An average write speed of 17.6MB/sec is also quite good considering the latest drives are only pushing 20MB/sec. However, a random access time of 16.9 milliseconds is quite slow. Hard drives perform random reads more often than not, so each millisecond of data retrieval time counts. Newer ATA hard drives have times of 13.5ms while SCSI hard drives have been measured as low as 5ms.

  

Tested inside the enclosure using the FireWire interface, the Maxtor drive shows a maximum throughput of 21MB/sec, with an average speed of roughly the same. It is plain to see the throughput ceiling of the FireWire interface although we are surprised that this ceiling isn't higher since the theoretical limit is closer to 50MB/sec. We are guessing that Maxtor's FireWire Bridge implementation may have something to do with this which would also explain the lower write scores. Drive latencies are also increased with the FireWire interface which can be seen with the random access time. The CPU utilization is lower, which also makes sense since the movement of data between the hard drive and processor is handled with the intelligence built into the FireWire controller chip.

IOMeter Benchmarks

The IOMeter benchmark is very dynamic in that almost any type of real-world test can be simulated and recreated. As specified in the manual, Iometer is both a workload generator and a measurement tool.

  

The maximum read and write speeds using the IOMeter benchmark closely resembles those of HD Tach, but the other scores tell even more of the story. Inside the FireWire enclosure, the Maxtor hard drive is severely limited. The maximum I/O rate, a rating that indicates overall drive latency, is cut in half inside the enclosure. While this is not a problem for a storage device, it could well explain unforeseen problems with performance type data such as high-end digital video. The random access test is the time required to perform a read/write request and reply, which is a bit more than the HD Tach benchmark tests. The result is about the same although the margin difference in scores further shows latency issues. However, the CPU utilization is much lower under heavy stress, a testament to the advantages of external controller hardware that utilize more intelligent connectivity technologies such as FireWire and SCSI.

WinBench 99 Benchmarks

The Business Disk and High-End Disk WinMark 99 benchmarks are an old staple of hard drive aficionados as their scores comprise an amalgam of smaller tests designed to test hard drive performance under real-world situations.

  

These WinMark benchmarks are disk access pattern tests using real-world applications that have been isolated for playback. Scores are reported in kilobytes per second and the scores given here, at least for the High-End Disk WinMark 99 benchmark, fall into line with what we've seen on the other benchmarks. Of course, this benchmark is very different than the other mechanical benchmarks employed here but the scores shown above help further reinforce the performances differences between the two interfaces.

We have also included the throughput chart of the WinBench 99 Disk Inspection Test as another real-world source of information that will help validate the other benchmark scores. A large portion of the industry considers this benchmark reliable and trustworthy although results can often leave you scratching your head.

WinBench 99's Transfer Rate Test displays a graph of the results as it tests read speeds across the entire drive. A full report of the average read speed at the beginning and end portions of the drive is given upon completion. The score is reported in megabytes per second with a higher score being better.

  

The throughput score given by WinBench 99 using the drive's native ATA connector yielded a beginning transfer rate of 36.5 MB/sec per second and an ending transfer rate of 22.9 MB/sec, for an overall rate of 30.9 MB/sec. These scores are in line with the other benchmarks with the drive throughput line falling off almost identically to that of the HD Tach benchmark.

  

Benchmarking using the external FireWire connector shows the latency and overall throughput limits of the technology. The beginning transfer rate is 25.9 MB/sec and the ending transfer rate is 22.9 MB/sec, for an overall rate of 25.5 MB/sec.

Summary

We found the Maxtor 60GB Personal Storage 3000DV FireWire Hard Drive to be quite the workhorse although we were a bit dismayed by the FireWire performance when compared to the performance of the drive outside of the enclosure. While there is bound to be latency and speed issues due to the overhead of the external bus, it is more than adequate for most consumer's needs. However, if the specific purpose of the drive is to be used for digital video production, we recommend purchasing a bare drive that is larger and faster and we recommend connecting it internally directly to the Ultra ATA cable for the drive's maximum throughput potential.

Lastly, you may be asking yourself just what the upgrade path for an external hard drive enclosure is. We did. Fortunately, Maxtor's external enclosure is easy to open. To see if we could upgrade the 60GB drive, we purchased a Maxtor DiamondMax 120GB hard drive (or rather, Lyle purchased it for my birthday), and we proceeded to put it in the Maxtor FireWire enclosure to see how it fared. After a full three months of testing with the drive powered on 24/7, we can say that the Maxtor's larger hard drives seem to work just fine within these thermally challenging environments. We say "seems" since the drive continues to work and the heat dissipated is not too warm to the touch. Of course, Maxtor may handpick drives for these enclosures based on how they test off the product line. Like all highly complex mechanical drives, no two are exactly alike and some will run hotter than others. And like all mechanical devices, those that run cooler tend to last longer than those that run hotter. Of course, removing the drive automatically voids the warranty.

Of course, we would have preferred a standard power cable connector and could have done without the external transformer brick. Also, did we mention that the fan used inside the enclosure runs at a constant speed, is not regulated by heat, and is a bit noisy? In the end, we found Maxtor's drive proved to be an excellent high-speed data backup device that is actually quite portable.

Specifications