The first-generation Maxtor DiamondMax 10 is quite a surprise. We haven’t yet seen such an unprecedented efficiency of deferred writing at a non-zero request queue and such a high growth of performance as the queue depth is increasing. Although being slower than Hitachi’s HDDs at 100% reads and 100% writes, the Maxtor is head above them in all the intermediary modes! Write operations are obviously reordered to achieve highest performance and do not conflict with read operations accumulated in the queue. That’s an example of how Native Command Queuing should be implemented!

This drive from the same series is not that brilliant without NCQ. At a load of one request its graph is identical to the previous model’s, but it shows poor scalability of performance depending on load.

The second-generation DiamondMax 10 lost its unique capabilities for some reason. NCQ shows itself at sky-high loads only.

And the third generation demonstrates minimum differences from the second: NCQ is a little more efficient in case of small queue, but it is still not affecting the performance that much. Let’s see how this Maxtor’s metamorphosis will affect further benchmark results.

Even the previous generation – DiamondMax Plus 9 – turns out faster in most cases even with random requests. They seem to have different lazy write algorithms that do not conflict with reading: in the multi-threaded tests they didn’t yield even a little bit to their younger fellows. I would like to remind you that this brand now belongs to Seagate Technology, all Maxtor solutions have been discontinued and replaced with Barracuda 7200 clones.