Maxtor Ships Next-Gen DiamondMax Drives

Maxtor is shipping a new high-performance line of DiamondMax hard drives that feature Serial ATA connections and 16MB buffers.

Maxtor Corporation today announced that it is shipping its new Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives to OEMs and channel partners around the world. Based on an integrated, single-chip native SATAsolution, the new DiamondMax 10 drives feature native command queuing (NCQ), the company’s proprietary dual-processor technology, and a new 16MB buffer to deliver unparalleled speeds compared totraditional 7200 RPM drives in their class. This unique set of features, coupled with Maxtor’s latest firmware technology, allows the drive to self-balance system workloads for more efficient harddrive operations, which helps consumers run multiple applications at the same time, such as games and music, without overwhelming their PC systems.

“Intel is excited to be working with hard drive vendors such as Maxtor to bring native command queuing technology to the desktop market,” said Sunil Kumar, Intel’s director of chipset and softwaremarketing. “When our new Intel 915G/P or the 925X Express chipsets with Intel Matrix Storage Technology are combined with NCQ-enabled drives like Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10, users experience faster boottimes, file transfers and game level loads.”

Designed for multimedia PC users, graphic artists, system integrators and white-box builders, the new 7200 RPM DiamondMax 10 drives are offered in capacities of up to 300GB and are ideal for storinghigh-resolution images, multimedia content, and personal and business information. The drive also provides best-in-class performance for a 7200 RPM SATA drive, giving users quicker access to data andfaster system performance, especially for multi-threaded, RAID and streaming A/V applications.

“We continue to meet our customers’ needs with reliable and cost-effective storage solutions ─ whether it’s our new DiamondMax 10 drives for desktop use, or our recently announced new MaXLineIII drives for midline and nearline enterprise applications,” said Stacey Lund, executive director of marketing at Maxtor. “We have received positive responses from customers and channel partnersaround the world, which is a testament to their confidence in our ability to deliver products that blend value, innovative storage technology and reliability.”

Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 SATA drives are shipping today. DiamondMax 10 parallel ATA/133 drives are scheduled to begin shipping at the end of Q3 ‘04. DiamondMax 10 drives with a 16MB buffer are onlyoffered on capacities of 250GB and above. Please visit www.maxtor.com for more details.