BayReviews

As expected there were lots of items on sale the day after Christmas and one of them was this Maxtor 300GB hard drive.

The regular retail price for this hard drive is about 200 bucks, and yesterday I purchased it for about 80 dollars after rebates. If you go to CompUSA.com and type in "Maxtor 300" you will see this drive for $79.99. But just did not want to get another internal hard drive; in fact, I wanted an external for my backup needs. So I bought one of those internal to external converter kits by Acomdata for $50 and I was ready to go for half the price of retail external drivers.


THE INSTALLATION :
Internal
Internal installation is easy and the as any other 3.5 inch drive installation. Slide the drive in to the appropriate slot, tighten the screws properly, plug the IDE and power cables, and install drivers and software if it is needed. Once that is done, you will probably need to format the drive and partition it to make it faster. Oh yeah, if this is the only drive you have in your computer than do not forget to change the jumper setting to master; otherwise put it on slave or cable select as needed. I use slave if I only have two drives, but use cable select when I have three or more.

External
If buy an additional kit to convert this drive into an external drive, then just follow the steps described in the instruction manual that came with the kit to continue. You have to set the jumper setting to master when making the drive an external. So far I have two external hard drives that were converted from internal drives. I use firewire cables and connectors to connect the drives to my computer because I backup my music, pictures, documents, and videos to it; I have read somewhere that firewire is better than USB for video and music streaming.


SOME NOT SO PRO BENCHMARKS :
I will perform some more benchmarks and update these results later. This is just a result of one test only.

Random Access: 14.1 ms
CPU Utilization: 1%
Average Read Speed: 49.9 MB/sec