Maxtor Quickview?

Ducky · Post by **Ducky** » Thu Feb 26, 2004 10:41 am

Since Weaknees.com's press release about using Maxtor QuickViews instead of Samsung Spinpoints, I've been wondering...

Is Maxtor Quickview really quieter than a Spinpoint?

Looking purely from the specs, it appears to be slower, but uses slightly less power and has a lower idle noise signature.

Just wondering.

aphonos · Post by **aphonos** » Thu Feb 26, 2004 11:43 am

Here's the link http://www.weaknees.com/maxtor_quickview.php.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Thu Feb 26, 2004 12:48 pm

Hmm, interesting. Probably won't be a speed champion at 5400rpm and 2MB cache.

MikeC should see if he can get a review sample.

Pauli · Post by **Pauli** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 9:07 am

Anybody get a chance to check out a Quickview drive yet?

mg1394 · Post by **mg1394** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 10:24 am

The Quickview drives are basically hype by Maxtor. The have not a single part different than the DiamondMax 16 drives as you can get here http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10331056&loc= .

That said, the 5400 Maxtor's do seem to generate a bit less heat than 7200 drives. I've used lots of the Maxtor's in TiVo's and they need acoustic management turned on (to low) and they work just fine. I have one TiVo with both a Maxtor 5400 80GB and a Samsung 7200 80GB and can't really detect a bit of difference in sound (or temperature, by feel) between the two.

Michael at Weaknees has carried out numerous long discussions (arguments?) on the TiVoCommunity forums about why these drives are superior. Note that TiVo doesn't use them, and is on public record as "drive doesn't matter" with regards to a TiVo.

The statement that most TiVo's have used Quickview drives is a marketing stretch - most (until 2 years ago) shipped with Quantum Fireball lct drives (I've got over a dozen if someone wants a few) and new TiVo's ship mostly with a 3/8" drive called a Maxtor Fireball 3. Note - no mention of "Quickview." It's also interesting to note that the new High Def DirecTiVo's have 250GB drives from (drum roll) WD, not Maxtor.

Don't take this wrong - Michael and his partner at Weaknees do a great job of TiVo upgrades and new systems for their customers and I highly recommend them. They just latched on this drive thing as a super selling item (and I'm sure they believe they have some advantage ?? ) and lead with it even though there isn't other PVR builders that support the story.

Try one and compare it with a "standard" drive and see if you can see any difference.

Pauli · Post by **Pauli** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 12:33 pm

Thanks for the very informative post, mg1394. Actually, I *am* looking for a drive to upgrade my DirecTiVo unit. Do the 7200RPM drives help speed up the TiVo functions (which, I hear, are significantly slower after a larger capacity HD is added)?

mg1394 · Post by **mg1394** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 5:52 pm

Unfortunately, no. A faster drive makes no different on any operation of any TiVo made to date. Adding storage capacity, in and of itself, has no bad effect on the speed of paging through menus, adding wishlists, etc., rather it's the effect of the databases getting much larger as you simply store more programs, and the TiVo's are really memory and algorithm limited (designed for 32MB ram, and 15-40GB disks in 1999) and neither the ram nor the design has been updated since - so slow with lots of programs stored.

(But I can provide you with a number of tricks to make a unit "SilentTiVo." They really are the same as seen here for PC's.)

ScrollLock · Post by **ScrollLock** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 8:10 pm

As far as I understand, Quickview is a marketing term for "AV optimized" hard disks. Mechanically they are indeed the same as normal products, but they have a special firmware that allows trade-off between data accuracy and guaranteed write speeds.

This is important for TIVO-like products which have very small memories and require therefore guaranteed write flush times of the HDDs (otherwise you loose video data), even when it encounters bad blocks etc. -- at the trade off that every now and then a bit may be wrong (which is less bad than a dropped frame).

As far as I know one needs to switch these AV features actually on with special ATA commands before they go into effect, so if you put such a drive in a PC it will most likely behave like any other desktop drive (and who can tolerate corrupted bits anyway in a PC...).

As mentioned, those drives have a small cache and are low RPM (and therefore lower power / less heat) -- why waste money/heat/power on something that is not needed when you are desiging a TIVO?

Bottom line: not much use for a PC, Quickview is aimed at PVR products.

sincerely, ScrollLock

PS: Seagate and others also make "AV products" for the consumer electronics industry