Maxtor Corporation, a worldwide leader in hard disk drives and consumer storage products, announced that the company is shipping its next-generation SATA II and ATA/133 MaXLine (enterprise applications), QuickView (consumer electronics — DVRs and PVRs) and DiamondMax (desktop) brand hard drives with a capacity point up to 500GB this quarter. Each brand leverages a core platform, advanced technologies and design and is optimized with value-added feature sets for its specific market environments.
“Users and system OEMs continue to define new areas of opportunities for high capacity disk drives,” said Dave Reinsel, director of storage research at IDC. “Maxtor’s new 500GB hard drive reflects the company’s continued commitment to deliver advanced, market-specific storage products and technologies, with solutions to serve new opportunities in both traditional and emerging market segments.”
The new 7200 RPM MaXLine Pro 500, QuickView 500 and DiamondMax 11 drives provide up to a half-terabyte capacity and a 16MB buffer and are available with 3.0Gb SATA II features including native command queuing (NCQ), staggered spin up, hot-plug and asynchronous signal recovery.
For the enterprise:
MaXLine Pro 500
Designed specifically for use in multi-drive environments and storage arrays, the MaXLine Pro 500 drive brings together a host of new advanced features and technology to help system designers, integrators and IT managers build and maintain their storage systems. The features are designed to maximize performance and improve data integrity and ease of use in reference storage, data protection and cost-sensitive enterprise applications. MaXLine Pro 500 drives must pass Maxtor’s premium test process and are designed to the enterprise standard of 1 million hour mean time to failure (MTTF) at a medium I/O duty cycle.
Maxtor MaXLine Pro 500 drives include the following:
- — Rotational Vibration Compensation — enables the drive to withstand higher rotational vibration (25 rads/sec2) from adjacent drives, minimizing performance degradation caused by excessive vibration in multi-drive environments.
- — Accelerated Error Recovery — completes commands within 15 seconds, without reduced data integrity, making it ideal for RAID applications.
- — Expanded Drive Self Test — performs a series of tests to help eliminate false failures and validate good drives.
Interoperability between Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and SATA makes the MaXLine family the ideal complement to Maxtor Atlas SAS drives, providing customers the broadest range of capacity and performance for their enterprise storage needs. The SAS interface allows SAS and SATA disk drives to be configured in the same enclosure, enabling customers to mix and match high-performance Atlas drives with high-capacity MaXLine SATA drives to meet a broad range of price, performance and capacity requirements.
For Consumer Electronics:
Maxtor QuickView 500
Optimized for high definition multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs), set-top boxes (STBs) and DVD/HDD combo devices, the Maxtor QuickView hard drives marry high-performance and advanced features that result in robust, industry-leading consumer hard drives for global OEMs and partners. Joining the Maxtor QuickView 300GB offering, the 400GB and 500GB models bring convenience, ease of use and an array of AV options to manufacturers looking to maximize the consumer’s digital experience. As part of Maxtor’s drive testing process, QuickView hard drives complete an advanced reliability test (RDT) to simulate operating environments — including temperature and duty cycle profiling.
Maxtor QuickView drives include the following:
- — Highest capacity storage — up to 500 hours of standard definition recording or 89 hours of high definition recording (500GB).
- — Latest ATA 7 Streaming Commands — adds powerful capability to manage multi video streams and enhance AV performance for the best viewing experience.
“Maxtor QuickView hard disk drives offer the most integrated technology for audio servers and DVRs,” said Bernie Sepaniak, president of Escient. “As Escient continues to create innovative new products, like our FireBall E2-400 with Maxtor QuickView high capacity hard drive, performance, reliability, A/V streaming and Quiet Drive technology packaged under the QuickView brand will continue to be of great benefit to our customers. We began working with Maxtor in 2003 and are delighted to count the company as a valued business partner.”
“We are pleased to expand our relationship with Escient to include Maxtor’s high capacity drives in their next generation products,” said Gary Gentry, senior vice president, worldwide marketing at Maxtor. “With Maxtor’s leadership, the strength of MaxLabs integration services and the solid relationship between our companies, we are able to provide the highest value and quality.”
For the desktop:
DiamondMax 11
In capacities of 400GB and 500GB, DiamondMax 11 drives are designed for today’s home and office PCs and are ideal for applications such as desktop business computing, publishing systems, and multimedia and gaming systems. SATA II features allow users quicker access to data and faster system performance, especially for multi-threaded, dual drive/RAID PC applications.
Maxtor DiamondMax 11 drives include the following:
- — Leading capacity — provides ample capacity for power-user enthusiasts to store high volumes of data including music, video, high-resolution images, and personal and business information.
- — Native Command Queuing — intelligently reorders read and write commands to improve performance.
Availability
Maxtor MaXLine Pro 500, Maxtor QuickView 500 and Maxtor DiamondMax 11 are shipping this quarter. Maxtor’s 500GB hard drive will also be shipping in Ultra16 retail kits this quarter for consumers who want to upgrade their PCs for an improved multimedia or gaming experience. Maxtor’s easy-to-install Ultra16 Hard Drive Kit includes an installation guide with step-by-step instructions, a SATA or PATA cable and mounting screws. The kit also includes Maxtor’s popular MaxBlast(R) installation software, which partitions and formats the drive for use, and helps copy files from the old hard drive to the new Maxtor drive. Manufacturer’s suggested retail price for Maxtor 500GB Ultra16 kit is $349.95.
Maxtor’s complete line of next-generation hard drives is RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Materials) compliant.
