Maxtor Hard Disk

DiamondMax Plus 45 Ultra ATA 100 Hard Drive

This is about a Maxtor hard disk model 53073H4 with a 30 GB capacity.

April 4, 2004. I bought this drive a few years ago and installed it as a second hard disk in an old computer. Now that the old computer is being discarded, I removed the disk and tried to insert it into a new computer. In the old computer, it was a "master", in the new computer it was a "slave".

There are way too many diagrams from Maxtor on how to set the jumper settings and they don't agree with each other.

On top of that, the diagrams refer to different "styles" for the hard disk and nowhere is the meaning of a "style" explained.

The main install instructions (on paper) that come with the disk refer to Style A and Style B and the jumper settings differ in each. Which to use?
The disk also came with a paper "Addendum" that had diagrams for "Type A" and "Type B". Is a "type" the same as a "style"? Neither piece of paper explained the terms.
The jumper settings for Style A hard disks are different than the jumper settings for Type A hard disks. Add in the fact that it's not at all obvious what Type or Style my disk is, and I'm faced with four choices out of the box.
In Style A, when setting a slave, it shows one of the jumpers over a pin that does not exist. In the diagram for a "master" configuration, its obvious the pin does not exist. But you have to put the jumper over the missing pin to configure the disk as a slave. Help.

The documentation also referred to Cylinder Limitation Jumpers without a description of what they are. Fortunately I didn't need them.

Faced with this confusion, I went to the Maxtor web site and found the page for this disk.

In the installation section, there is a pop-up diagram for jumper settings. Take a guess. Were the diagrams there for Type A, Type B, Style A or Style B. WRONG. It was for Style A1, a fifth style. You can't make this stuff up.
Under technical specs there was also a jumper guide. Why are there two jumper guides on the same web page? This jumper guide took you to a new page which has four new diagrams. Of which styles might you wonder? Don't ask. It has Style A1, which I'd already seen. But to the existing five styles and types it added three new ones: Style A2, Style B and Style C. Needless to say, the different styles have different jumper settings. I think most people would be brought to tears by now.

To determine how to configure my hard disk for "master" or "slave" operation, I had to first decide if it was Style A, Style B, Type A, Type B, Style A1, Style A2, Style B or Style C.

Long story short, my disk turned out to be an A1 and needed no jumpers at all to be a slave.

And of course, the mounting brackets did not fit well in the new computer (they fit fine in the old computer). Four screws on the left side lined up perfectly. On the right side however, none of the screws lined up with the case at all and I forced a single screw into an opening not designed for a screw.

Created: April 4, 2004

Last updated: April 4, 2004