[NEWS] - Maxtor new boosting software : Maxboost

[CougTek]

MaxBoost is performance-boosting driver software which operates under Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP and which is designed to complement your Parallel ATA or Serial ATA hard disk drive by Maxtor. The MaxBoost driver intelligently caches data in the host system RAM before it is written to and read from the Maxtor disk drive, enhancing the effective storage speed of your system under a variety of system conditions and applications.

“Maxtor has released a new version of its MaxBoost Driver that is supposed to boost performances up to 60% on their hard disk drives,” a person, who tested the latest beta version of MaxBoost said.

We've discussed about this software before in the forum, but now that it's been released, we can test instead of speculating.

You can download Maxboost here.

News source

 

[Handruin]

Damn, only for SATA/PATA drives. I was about to download for my atlas drive to give it a test...oh well. There is no mention of any model limitations, so I assume it works with all their drives SATA/PATA?

 

[Tannin]

Some things never change, and one of them is the ridiculous pronouncements of PR departments which don't have anything new or valuable to offer the world, and are reduced to touting magic software.

It is always going to make a massive difference to your performance, and the claimed improvement is always preceeded by that key phrase "up to" (which is marketing-speak for "nothing like"). It is always a major technological breakthrough, and in a way it is, as it always turns out to be yet another different and inventive way to write deeply misleading and deceptive words on the cover of a floppy disc (or CD-ROM, or download site, as the case may be) which always contains nothing more than a grandly-titled disc cache, of varying stability and reliability characteristics and entirely unexceptional performance.

Remember the "100X CD-ROM drive"? (An ordinary 32x drive of no more than average build quality, with a black magic floppy disc. We always liked them as you could reformat the floppy disc and store something useful on it.)

Remember the "Intel Application Accellerator"? (An ordinary IDE driver of conspicuous instability and unexceptional performance. In general, Intel chipset systems work best if you leave it out.)

I'd rather spend my time and money on something that is more likely to produce measurable real-world results. Excuse me, I have to go now. I need to shoot off a couple of emails so I can get hold of some of that magic lubricant I read about which will make her Gasp and Beg for More. Oh, and the other one, mustn't forget that: it's stuff that will make your penis two inches longer in 30 days or your money back. Onj the whole, they seem like safer investments.

Gahhhh....

 

[Mercutio]

You know, I never get any spam for taking away the unwanted inches I already have...

I was all set and ready to try these and now I can't find a wintel machine with a maxtor drive in it.

 

[cquinn]

"We've discussed about this software before in the forum, but now that it's been released..."


Correction, this is still pre-release (beta) software.

 

[CougTek]

How about "made publicly available" then? IIRC, it was nowhere to be downloaded last time we talked about it.

 

[sechs]

Anyone get anything from this "utility?"

Looks to me like they're just inserting an L2 cache. As if Windows didn't know anything about disk caching....

 

[CougTek]

I don't own a recent Maxtor drive, so can't really test it. My latest Maxtor model is a D740X 40GB and it currently sits in an incomplete system that misses some important components before it can boot (like motherboard, RAM and CPU).

 

[blakerwry]

i installed the software on my girlfriend's computer (SS51G, 512MB PC2100, 2.0GHz Celerwood w/ 80GB DM+9, 2MB cache version)

She said it made it faster in photoshop (about all she does on it).


More RAM would be the next upgrade (to 1GB), then a real p4 CPU when prices come down.

 

[EdwardK]

I finally got a new hard drive (Maxtor) and tried this MaxBoost. I keep getting "Out of memory resource and MaxBoost is shutting down" when using memory intensive programs such as Photoshop and Battlefield1942. This maybe due to that I only have 512Mb of RAM and using WinXP SP1a. I guess, RAM upgrade will gave to be my next aim.

Cheers,
Edward

 

[blakerwry]

yeah, my gf kept getting the same error... basically made the software useless.

She got this error even though task manager said she had a decent amount of RAM free....

maybe with future versions this will improve.. personally I would have liked that to be a permanently assigned chunk of RAM that doesnt even need to be visible to windows.

 

[ddrueding]

You't think someone would have written a general drive caching app that could be used with any drive. I don't think it would be that big a deal, and I'd like the ability to specify which files stay permanently in how much RAM.

I know the OS does this to a certain extent, but I'm more anal retentive than that.

 

[Tea]

You't think someone would have written a general drive caching app that could be used with any drive.

They did. It's called SMARTDRIVE

There was an even better one (by the standards o f the day) which, despite the stupid name SuperPCKwik was outstanding.

 

[ddrueding]

You't think someone would have written a general drive caching app that could be used with any drive.

They did. It's called SMARTDRIVE

There was an even better one (by the standards o f the day) which, despite the stupid name SuperPCKwik was outstanding.

I assume by this you are pointing out that this kind of app is not for newer machines?

 

[sechs]

SMARTDrive and SuperPCK were fixed-memory caches. They sucked up a bit of RAM and cached to their heart's content. Windows NT uses a variable-sized disk and system combined cache, which gives you different performance. Both are generic disk caches, that work with any drive.

As I said before, it just seems like this software adds another layer of caching between the system cache and the harddrive's onboard cache.

 

[ddrueding]

As I said before, it just seems like this software adds another layer of caching between the system cache and the harddrive's onboard cache.

But do you feel that this cache could be of some use? Do you think it would increase performance in some applications? Do you think it's a good idea?

 

[blakerwry]

compare copy operations in DSO with and without smart drive and you'll see a wonder of difference.

However winNT and win9x have caches already. I'm sure these work great adn take care of 90% of users out there. But for those that do alot of hard drive I/O or just need more responsive hard drives for frequently used data I think it makes sense to add an extra layer of caching.

 

[sechs]

But do you feel that this cache could be of some use? Do you think it would increase performance in some applications? Do you think it's a good idea?

Of use, yes. Efficient? No.

It just seems like a kluge to me. A lot like the P4EE.