I'm surprise nobody brought this up yet. StorageReview had their review up for a week already and Anandtech got theirs up today. Maxtor's the 1st to bring out 16MB buffer desktop HD. Interesting reads.

I think it will take a while for us to notice a jump from 8mb to 16mb. The PATA drive has low spec figures but the SATA version is impressive.

I think nobody brought it up because most just follow WD and their line of Raptors since they started the leap forward first. People forgot about everyone else I suppose.

This new harddisk is indeed a good step forward, though it's not an adult product yet (although, that is my opinion). If you compare the different benchmarks, you'll notice that the disk is quite fast for desktop applications, but not for server use (high data transfer rates, but high seek times as well). The implementation of SCSI commands into IDE disks is a very good idea, as WD already showed with their raptors. And of course, bigger buffers are always better (as long as they are fast). SATA-II support is a good thing to have, but it would of course be nice to have SATA-II controllers as well.

Anyhow, as various manufacturers already announced their 16mb cache harddisk series, I guess that this class of haddrives will mature quickly and so the performance will get better and better...

Dont' miss the fact that the Maxtor will require a new MB, Intel chipset, to have the new CQ function working. All HD's will soon have 16MB cache too.

I noticed the news and reviews days ago but I was not much impressed with Maxtor's newly announced drives.

I'm waiting for Hitachi's 400GB SATA drives and Seagate's 10K.7 300GB to become available to end users.