Taking the baton from the DiamondMax 10, the DiamondMax 11 is aimed primarily at those wanting vast capacities. The DiamondMax 10’s largest capacity is 300GB, but the new model is offered in 400GB and 500GB versions.

We reviewed the 500GB model, and at $1.01 per gigabyte it’s better value than the Hitachi but not the Seagate – both of which are the only other disks here that match the capacity. The Maxtor is a better performer overall though.

The DiamondMax 11 sports a 16MB buffer and four 125GB platters, which is one reason why it beats the five-platter Hitachi. However, the Seagate has a similar specification and still lags behind, despite boasting a quicker seek time. Using HD Tach RW, we found the Maxtor had an average seek time of 11.33ms, while the Seagate averaged 9.93ms but had an average STR over the whole disk of 52MB/s. At 58MB/s on average, the DiamondMax 11 leads comfortably. However, when reading and writing large files, it really has the edge with 62MB/s and 59MB/s respectively.

While these are slightly ahead of the Caviar SE16, when reading or writing small files the Maxtor couldn’t match either the Seagate or the Caviar SE16. With rates of 15.4MB/s for reading and 5.6MB/s for writing, it was actually the slowest on test for very small files. When seeking, the Maxtor measured 44dBA, which was louder than the Caviar.

It’s a big drive, but it’s relatively high price per GB and slower overall performance means it misses an award.