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For those who believe bigger is better—and biggest is best—Maxtor shattered the storage capacity barrier in the hard drive market last month by releasing a 160GB hard drive. The biggest drive in Maxtors DiamondMax D540X series, this 3.5-inch behemoth runs at 5,400 rpm, a little slower than the 7,400-rpm, 80GB D740X, but both drives support the Ultra ATA 133 interface for data transfer rates up to 133MB per second.
Although the D540X works with standard 100MB-per-second ATA 100 controllers, I wanted to take advantage of the faster ATA 133 interface, so I installed a $59 Ultra133 TX2 PCI controller card from Promise Technology to attain the higher data transfer rate.
The 160GB D540X is priced at $400, or about 2 cents per megabyte, not a bad investment for graphics workstations or file servers. The 160GB D540X will also be used in Maxtors latest MaxAttach NAS 6000 file servers.