Maxtor used to have quite a reputation for spotty and poor-performing hard disks. Their CrystalMax line of drives have proven time and time again to be both slow and rather unreliable by contemporary standards. I'm sure those of you who have had the dubious pleasure of using one of those drives can attest to that fact.

However, in the recent years, Maxtor seemed to have picked themselves up by their bootstraps and turned out some pretty nice drives. Thanks to their DualWave dual-processor architecture and much better quality control, their latest DiamondMax Plus line of drives have garnered numerous speed records as well as noted for their reliability. 

Personally, I have had many bad experiences with Maxtor CrystalMax drives. That's why I never bought another Maxtor for years after that. However, when Maxtor launched their DiamondMax Plus 40 drive, I just couldn't resist buying one. Why?

Well, for one thing, it was the speed king then. True, Seagate and IBM had their 7200 rpm drives out as well. But the DiamondMax Plus 40's specs looked better on paper, had a larger capacity and best of all, costs less than competing drives. So, with some trepidation (but to the relief of my emaciated wallet), I bought one.

How did it fare? Heheh... somewhat to my surprise and relief, it was everything Maxtor said it would be. It was fast, quiet, spacious and reliable. No sign of the "CrystalMax syndrome" till today. I guess Maxtor finally decided that playing the part of an el cheapo hard disk manufacturer was no longer fun and cleaned their act up. Good for them and good for us, I'd say! :)

Back to the topic... Now, while Maxtor's DualWave technology improves their hard disks' performance and reliability, Maxtor also has incorporated other technologies like ShockBlock and MaxSafe into the DiamondMax Plus hard disks. Recently however, I discovered that Maxtor added a new technological feature to a selected range of their hard disks. This new Silent Store technology, as was revealed to me, enables the PC manufacturers (as well as the end-user) to configure these hard disks to run silently or to improve their seek performance by a rather substantial amount. Before we discuss that, we will have to take a look at what acoustic management is all about.

Acoustic Management

As hard disk manufacturers try to rack up the high speed scores, it's inevitable that their noise level would go up. Barring any improvements in acoustic damping, hard disks will become noisier as manufacturers make them run faster. Increasing the spindle speed from the usual 5400 rpm to the faster 7200 rpm spindle speed not only means increased heat production but also a higher noise level from the faster motor used.

However, while spinning the platters at a higher speed increases the noise level, this is not as evident as the sound produced by a seeking hard disk head. As seek times are reduced from 10.5 ms to less than 9.0 ms, the hard disk heads have to seek faster. This manifests as clicks and other annoying noises. To reduce these clicking sounds, Maxtor decided to rely on more than just passive acoustic damping measures.

They came up with an active acoustic management technology, simply named, "Acoustic Management". Built into only a few selected drive models, this technology specifically targets the sounds produced by increased seeking. How do they do this?