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A
Closer Look
Maxtor
offer five drives currently in their 5000xx range,
the smallest being an 80GB unit and the largest currently
a 250GB. The 5000DV is itself available as a 120GB,
160GB or 200GB variety. The 160GB and 200GB units
also come equipped with an 8MB cache.
As
you can see below, the 5000DV boasts a simple, sleek
design. The case is a metallic blue plastic material
with dark blue plastic corner pieces. I mention these
because in the picture they look like rubber corner
protectors which they're not, they're hard plastic
and I presume purely cosmetic. The only features evident
on the front face other than the small vent are the
power and activity LED and "OneTouch" activation
button.
On
the rear are a pair of FireWire, or IEEE1394 connectors
that allow for daisy-chaining of additional units,
so why not a second USB port? I asked Maxtor about
this and they told me that "USB
is a Star Topology. Multiple USB devices, up to
127 can be connected to one PC through a USB hub.
You cannot "daisy chain" USB as you
can Firewire, hence the single USB port".
What they mean by a "star topology"
is that devices connect to a single, central hub
in a star-like fashion which is a valid point
but what I perhaps didn't make clear was that
I think an additional Type A downstream USB port
accompanying the Type B port already there would
have been welcome and negated the need for users
to get themselves a hub in order to connect additional
drives. So although you can't daisy-chain the
drives, each units would basically contain it's
own single port hub to allow the next drive to
connect to it. Hubs are cheap to buy so I wouldn't
let this cloud your buying decision, it's more
a point of convenience than necessity.
To
the right of this is the power connector and lastly
is the hole labelled "Lock" which I'm
told by Maxtor takes a fairly standard "T"
headed anti-theft cable.
For
a 7200RPM drive which runs pretty hot, I was surprised
by how few vents are actually built in to the
5000DV's casing. There's probably even room in
there for a small fan or two but keeping noise
levels down is better option if fans really aren't
needed.
And
for those of you with limited desktop real estate
Baxter supply a neat little stand that lets you
mount the drive on its side without blocking the
small side vents. Historically it was accepted
that if you operate a hard drive on its side you
should never then go on to use it horizontally
and vice versa due to the tiny amounts of play
in the arm that would cause the head to mis-align
with the data track. I'm not sure if that's still
the case with modern drives, in fact even a couple
of years ago this phenomenon was only a significant
problem on older drives that had wear in their
internal mechanics but it might be worth thinking
about before you decide which way up you want
to mount it.
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