Introduction

Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 9 series has been one of the hot favorites when it was first launched sometime ago. Then, it was one of the very first hard drives that boasts using high capacity 80GB platter technology. The drive was largely marketed as Ultra ATA-133 drives with either 2MB or 8MB cache buffer. Users preferred to go for the 8MB buffer version simply because it offered them more performance as compared to most of yesterday's drives that comes with only 2MB of cache.

Since the product has already been introduced, it's only a matter of just implementing a controller board with Serial ATA interface. In the past, users who wanted a Serial ATA interface actually made use of ATA-133 to SATA converters to get these drives running on their SATA-supported motherboards. So, it's not a difficult task to convert their current crop of ATA-133 drives to support the latest SATA standard. In fact, the conversion is so simple and fast that it's just a matter of redesigning the PCB to accomodate an extra chip to convert the natively parallel interface. The chip used here is the same as what was uilized in Western Digital's Raptor and it's based on Marvell's SERDES (serializer-deserializer) solution.

The Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 comes in the regular form factor with an interface supporting both SATA and legacy power connectors. The connector layout are plain and simple - nothing too exciting to describe actually. The specifications of the drive are listed in the table below.

The Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 uses a Hynix memory chip for its 8MB buffer cache.

The connectors at the rear end of the drive. The drive comes with both legacy and SATA power connectors.

Similar to the Western Digital Raptor, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 also employed the similar Marvell SERDES solution.