Testing hard disk speed and reliability

Sooner or later every digital photographer either fills up the hard drive and/or finds that performance is just becoming too slow.  That’s when it’s time to consider a higher-performance solution, such as a striped RAID system.  If you’re in the market for such a system, take a look at the disktester page which lists a number of recent reviews on this topic, all of which utilize diglloyd disktester.  Disktester also has a feature which can test for hard drive reliability, in case you suspect sporadic errors.

While we’re on the subject of hard drive speed, AMUG reports (scroll to the middle of the article) that the latest Maxtor Maxline III 7V300F0 SATA drive is exceptionally fast—and at at bargain price too.  The Maxline III is designed for a longer duty cycle than regular consumer drives and in theory should be a very reliable drive.  I have four of them (slightly older model) as well as two Diamond Max 10 drives and have never had a problem.