Maxtor Hard Drives.
I have just installed two Maxtor DiamonMax 80GB SATA (150MBps) hard drives onto my computer. I have set them up in RAID-0 (striping) on my Intel 875P south bridge's onboard RAID controller.
This was because my Abit IC7 doesn't support RAID on IDE drives, and I had Western Digital Caviar drives.
I've had them in for a day now, reinstalled my system, and so on and so forth. The result, well less than pleasing. Sure they are a lot faster than before, but only places. When doing a direct memory to drive transfer like hibernation it takes longer than a single UDMA100 drive, a lot longer.
Then there is the fact that it chuggs on accessing. You know the 'kergerk' noise hard drives make all the time when they are busy. Something which I haven't had on my PC for about 4 years. I thought that was something of the past, but apparently not. I can live with that though. The most annoying thing is the whistling.
Yes, the whistling. The drive emits an insanely high-pitch whistle when it's not working. So as long as it's accessing I'm fine, but unfortuently it's not happening all the time. Even with my case bolted on I can still hear it, even when playing games or listening to music I can hear it, because it's so high-pitch. It's driving me nuts! I've had to shell out on sound absorbant material to put inside my computer, which will only increase the temperature inside it.
It won't matter in a decade or so, my hearing will have degraded to the level of the old men who made this drive. Argh! Bunch of deaf 35+'s. It is a problem I had with our last family TV set. It whistled really loudly, but because my parents couldn't hear it and the engineer who installed it (ha, engineer to install a TV) couldn't hear it, nothing was ever done about it.
So, if you are thinking of buying SATA drives DO NOT BUY MAXTOR.