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Being in need of a new HDD I settled on the Maxtor D740X , being the only readily available ATA 133 7200rpm HDD at the moment . I chose the 40gig model and I must say that on installing the drive that it is the most quiet HDD used by me to date . To benchmark the drive ive used Winbench 99 ver 2 . and Sisoft sandra 2002. And i'll be running it against my old main drive , the Seagate Barracuda 3 ATA100 7200rpm which has a good rep for being a fast drive .

BENCHMARKING:

My system consists of : Epox 8k3a MB KT333 , 256mb pc2700 , GF2ti , Soundblaster live value , Maxtor 40gig ATA133 7200rpm C drive , Seagate 20gig ATA 100 7200rpm  D drive . 50x cdrom , 32x8x4 burner .

Winbench 99 ver 2.

My Seagate 1st : Seagate 20gig ATA 100 7200rpm

WEIGHTED SUITE    SCORE       UNITS

Business Disk WinMark 99      7420 [2,3]     Thousand Bytes/Sec
High-End Disk WinMark 99   15400 [2,3]     Thousand Bytes/Sec

TEST SCORE UNITS

Disk Playback/Bus [1,2,3] 
Overall 7420 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE [1,2,3] 
Overall 15400 Thousand Bytes/Sec
AVS/Express  3.4 13800 Thousand Bytes/Sec
FrontPage 98  55000 Thousand Bytes/Sec
MicroStation SE  19900 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Photoshop 4.0  11200 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Premiere 4.2  22200 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Sound Forge 4.0  34600 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Visual C++ 5.0  6700 Thousand Bytes/Sec

Maxtor D740X-6L: Maxtor 40gig ATA 133 7200rpm

Business Disk WinMark 99      9530 [2,3]    Thousand Bytes/Sec
High-End Disk WinMark 99   20300 [2,3]    Thousand Bytes/Sec

TEST SCORE UNITS

Disk Playback/Bus [1,2,3] 
Overall 9530 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Disk Playback/HE [1,2,3] 
Overall 20300 Thousand Bytes/Sec
AVS/Express 3.4 18100 Thousand Bytes/Sec
FrontPage 98 28400 Thousand Bytes/Sec
MicroStation SE 24900 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Photoshop 4.0 12600 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Premiere 4.2 26500 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Sound Forge 4.0 35200 Thousand Bytes/Sec
Visual C++ 5.0 14600 Thousand Bytes/Sec

SisoftSandra 2002

The Maxtor gave a result of 27145 and the Seagate returned a result of 24207 .

CONCLUSION:

Well there certainly is a improved performance level when moving to ATA133 , and the results would most likely be more dramatic in RAID . Personally Im very happy with the results , and my purchase , the other thing is the lack of noise from the Maxtor Drive , its so quiet that at first I wasnt sure it was still working , only time will tell if it remains so quiet , as with many things , the older they get , the more noise they make , but as tested , I have nothing negative to say about the Maxtor , Its fast , its quiet , and its available NOW, so if your looking for a new HDD give the new Maxtor D740X-6L range a good look .