I actually found it pretty interesting that just about all the drives in the review performed better on one test than any of the rest. The Maxtors, Seagates, Raptors, Caviars and Deskstars all had at least one benchmark generally in their favor.
I kind of wonder if those benchmarks would hold out over a larger sampling of drives - if for example the Maxtor was for example engineered for high STR vs. being more capable for real world applications, or if it was some tiny variance in the particular units they tested.
Give some credit to Samsung too, for being able to keep up with Raptors and Perpendicular recording. I wonder how much of the reliability I've seen with Samsung drives can be credited to Samsung's slower product development.