Silent Store Reduces Performance?

That's right! Silent Store isn't really a performance enhancing technology. It does not, in any way, improve the performance of Maxtor drives. It was designed to allow Maxtor drives to be used in certain noise-sensitive applications. To this end, Maxtor's Silent Store reduces the seek speed so that the noise level would be barely above that of an idle drive.

Unfortunately, for the average user who probably won't be too bothered by the seek noises, Maxtor has unnecessarily crippled the drives by enabling Silent Store by default in all their shipping drives. So, just how crippled are the drives?

Fortunately, only the seek performance is affected. The disk transfer rate remains unchanged and so is the amount of CPU time consumed. However, the deterioration in seek performance was estimated by Maxtor to be in the region of 8%. While 8% in CPU terms is rather insignificant (i.e. going from 1GHz to 1.08GHz), things are different with seek speeds.

7,200 rpm IDE hard disks have an average seek time of, at most, 9ms. If Silent Store reduces seek performance by 8%, you can expect an 8% increase in seek time. This translates to a seek time of 9.72ms! That's close to what 5,400 rpm drives are capable of. In short, the speed demon you thought you had in your system might actually be performing like a 5,400 rpm drive with 7,200 rpm transfer rates.

As seek latencies has a major effect on the overall performance of the hard disk, it is reasonable to be more than a little concerned about this drop in seek performance. Although Maxtor did provide an estimate of the performance deterioration, it's always best to get independent benchmark results.

Since my own DiamondMax Plus 40 UDMA/66 hard disk does not support Silent Store, I was not able to benchmark the performance difference between the different Silent Store levels. Fortunately, I was very lucky to be able obtain some benchmark results from several helpful ARP visitors. Let's check them out!