Each drive will have a capacity point up to 500GB, while 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 Diamond-Max 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.
The enterprise
But the biggest move from Maxtor is its entry into the enterprise space.
The company designed the Maxline Pro 500 specifically for use in multi-drive environments and storage arrays. The Maxline Pro 500 drive will take into account data integrity and ease of use in reference storage, data protection and cost-sensitive enterprise applications.
The drives, according to the company passed Maxtor’s 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.
They also include:
• 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; and
• Expanded drive self test — performs a series of tests to help eliminate false failures and validate good drives.
In the consumer space, the Maxtor QuickView 500 is optimized for high definition multi-stream digital video recorders (DVRs), set-top boxes (STBs) and DVD/HDD combo devices.
The Maxtor QuickView hard drives are aimed at global OEMs and system builders.
Maxtor QuickView drives include up to 500 hours of standard definition recording or 89 hours of high definition recording (500GB).
For the desktop, Maxtor offers system builders the DiamondMax 11, which is a 400 GB and 500GB series of hard drives. The DiamondMax 11 drives are designed for the home and office PC market. SATA II features allow users access to data and system performance for multi-threaded, dual drive/RAID applications.