Maxtor Ships Next-Generation 300GB Hard Drives

This unique set of features, coupled with Maxtor's latest firmware technology, allows the drive to self-balance system workloads for more efficient hard drive 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 software marketing. "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 boot times, 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 storing high-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 and faster 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 MaXLine™ III 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 partners around 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 only offered on capacities of 250GB and above.

Please visit http://www.maxtor.com for more details.

About SATA
Serial ATA is a drop-in solution in that it is compatible with today's software, which will run on the new architecture without modification. It will provide for systems which are easier to design, with cables that are simple to route and install, smaller cable connectors, improve silicon design, and lower voltages which alleviate current design requirements in Parallel ATA.

The Serial ATA promoters group includes APT Technologies Inc, Dell Computer Corporation, International Business Machines, Intel Corporation, Maxtor Corporation, Quantum Corporation, and Seagate Technology.