Digital Trends

Maxtor 6Y200M0 200GB

June 14th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Features and Design (continued)

If you were to physically compare the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y160M0 160GB drive we reviewed last year to the newer 6Y200M0 we are reviewing now, you would not be able to tell the difference. We had to e-mail Maxtor to see if the 6Y200M0 features the larger platters and updated firmware. And if you look on their website or in their manual there is no mention of the size of the platters used, so if this matters to you, get ready to do your homework.

Our 6Y200M0 drive features an 8MB cache and the newer SATA (serial ATA) interface, theoretically capable of up to 150 MB/sec data transfer speeds. If you have an older computer you probably do not have a SATA compatible controller on your systems motherboard. There are add-in PCI cards which you can purchase so you can add this drive to your system. Since the 6Y200M0 also features a 7200RPM rotational speed and sub 9.3 ms (milliseconds) seek time, when you combine that with the cache and the SATA interface you should have one smoking drive on your hands.

With drives running this fast, you typically would expect a high level of noise to be associated with the faster speed. For example, when some CD and DVD burners spin up, it sounds like a rocket taking off. Luckily the 6Y200M0 features a 100% FDB (fluid dynamic bearing) motor system (branded as Maxtor's Quiet Drive technology) to keep things quiet.

Setup and Installation

We set up the 6Y200M0 using the instructions provided with the drive. Our test system has Windows XP Professional installed on it with Microsoft's Service Pack1 (SP1). Because we have service pack 1 installed on our computer, the operating system had no trouble recognizing the full 200GB found on the drive. If you have an older version of Windows, or do not have SP1 installed, you will need to follow extra instructions and use the utility disk which comes with the drive in order to get a full 200GB out of a single partition since older versions of Windows will not recognize a drive this large.

If you are installing this drive as the primary master drive using Windows XP, you will need to follows Maxtor's instructions again to make sure you get the full 200GB from this drive. We installed the 6Y200M0 as a secondary drive and then formatted it using the NTFS file system through the administrative tools in our control panel. Using our method, there were no issues during the process of creating a partition and formatting it.

One thing to note is that if you are connecting a hard drive to your SATA controller and your onboard SATA controller also doubles as a RAID controller, you will most likely have to install the RAID controller drivers in Windows before it will recognize any drives connected to it. You may also have to turn on the SATA RAID controller in your motherboard BIOS as well. Most of the first motherboards to feature the SATA IDE standard integrated it into the onboard RAID controllers on their upper-end board.